When he died last year, Gary Indiana was writing a novel called Remission. The title could refer to the cancer Gary was suffering from as he composed it, but as with most things Gary wrote, the word had multiple meanings and echoes. Gary intended Remission to be similar, on the surface, to the books in his great ‘American crime’ trilogy, at least in the sense that the story would revolve around a real, high-profile case.
The case had started in 2017. That summer, a man died of a meth overdose at an apartment in West Hollywood. The tenant of the apartment, Ed Buck, was a retired businessman turned political activist. The man who died, Gemmel Moore, was a twenty-six-year-old doing sex work. Buck was white, Moore black. The coroner ruled Moore’s death an accident, but a year later, a second man died of an overdose in Buck’s living room, and nine months after that, a third man called the police from a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard, saying Buck had just given him a too-high shot of meth. Finally, the police arrested Buck, charging him with the two prior deaths, and a judge gave him thirty years. For obvious reasons, this received significant coverage in the media.
Gary owed his interest in the Buck case to his friend Hedi El Kholti, co-editor of Semiotext(e) and a longtime Angeleno. After reading a newspaper article about Buck and Moore, El Kholti proposed to Gary that he fictionalize the material into a novel. For one thing, it was topical: this was a moment when ‘party and play’ culture – the prevalent use of meth and G by men who have sex with men – was capturing a lot of attention and arousing a lot of fear. But it also spoke to themes that appeared in Gary’s other work: sexual obsession, power relations, addiction, media, and killing.
As more information came out, the story – as if this were possible – got even darker. Buck had not only provided the meth to these men (a crime in itself) but had injected it into their veins during their paid encounters, a practice called ‘slamming’. This was a very dangerous thing to do, and an uncommon enough perversion that the term was unfamiliar to most people who followed the case. As one character says in Remission: ‘I never heard of the slamming thing until the article came out in the Times.’
The way I came to be involved in this whole situation is that the Times piece this character refers to was written by me. The piece came out in September 2020, and if it made any contribution, it was to dismantle the prevailing media narrative in which Buck figured as some kind of megadonor political operative, and that was why the cops had protected him. (My piece suggested the reason was that his victims were mostly homeless and black.) Since he was already following the story, Gary read the piece – and luckily, he found it passable.
I say luckily because, for years, I had been looking for an ‘in’ with Gary. We had a few overlapping friends, but I never really caught his interest as a journalist or a writer. I think he tolerated my company mainly because I admired his crime novels, and told him so, and because I was still young enough to be kind of puppyish and doting. At some point in our acquaintance, he greeted me by kissing me fully on the lips, and from then on, this was our ritual, a smooch. It was my way of conveying to him that even though I was a straight man who had been to college, I was not a square. In any event, he tolerated me.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2018, I started to learn the city partly through Gary’s writing. Gary saw LA as a glittering cesspool of secret lives, frustrated wishes (though not for everyone), and prurient real estate owners who tried to suck every possible dollar from a landscape their careless developments had rendered visually incoherent. It is perhaps unwise to admit the depths of what I didn’t yet know about the city, since I now write about it as a journalist, but here is one example: until I read Gary, I didn’t know the term for the square apartment buildings you see everywhere, which are set on stilts to make room for the carports. (‘Dingbats’, if you’re wondering.)
On the occasions when I saw Gary in LA, I found him quite intimidating. I wanted badly to impress him, but I lacked the capacity, or written material, to do so, and I could overcompensate embarrassingly. One night, a group of us were having dinner at Pacific Dining Car, a now-defunct steakhouse with an ominous dual character as a hangout for both writers and law-enforcement heavies. The conversation turned to a television show that was then very popular, about a female pimp in old-time England.
‘I like the contrast of the modern music with the Elizabethan setting,’ I heard myself saying.
Gary raised his head from his martini like a cobra. ‘Elizabethan?’
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘It’s Georgian. Have you ever been to college?’
‘You know I’ve been to college.’
‘You see, that’s the problem. You’re not an imbecile, Jesse. You’re an ignoramus. Which is worse!’
I had accepted that Gary would always be an acquaintance, albeit a warm and catty one, but in 2019 the situation changed. I began to work on the Buck piece. If the story gave me satisfaction as a reporter, it had an added and unexpected benefit for me as a person. It cemented a friendship between myself and one of my idols during the last years of his life. Rather than the usual ignoramus Gary was accustomed to, I was now a source of information on a project he cared about – a role which gratified me, because I relished any glimpse into Gary’s ‘process’ (a word he would, of course, have spat on).
Gary had an apartment on Berendo Street in Koreatown, furnished sparsely with a kitchen table and sofa, covered with notebooks filled with his tiny handwriting. Sometimes, landing from New York, he would call me to collect him, and we would get groceries for the week, then a rotisserie chicken for dinner.
Having mostly given up smoking and drinking, due to his cancer treatments, Gary would pour whiskey for me but limit himself to a vape. He would talk about whatever was on his mind – a friend’s art show; Jean-Patrick Manchette’s novel about the killing of Moroccan radical Mehdi Ben Barka – while I lapped up his comments and asides. Gradually, we would turn to Buck. He wanted to know the signifiers that placed Buck in his proper context in Los Angeles. What model of car did his drug dealer drive? (gray Mercedes S-Class.) Was I sure that his apartment was rent-stabilized? (I was; he paid $1,031.17 a month.)
The excerpt in this issue of Granta takes the raw material of the case and makes two main alterations. First, Remission moves the action from heavily-trafficked West Hollywood, where the bars stay open late, to the more suburban neighborhood of Los Feliz, where nights are silent. Gary’s Buck – called Evan Greene – lives in an isolated bungalow on the ‘Van Meergen Estate’. Those who know their LA geography will recognize Van Meergen as a stand-in for the real Van Pelt Estates, a group of fairy tale-style cottages from the 1930s and 40s that resemble the set of a live-action Snow White. This new location intensifies the economic distance between Buck and the young men he pays, while reminding the reader that all of the action is taking place, as it were, in one person’s dark twisted fantasy.
Gary’s second alteration is more significant. In 2019 and 2020, the coverage, including mine, focused on Buck and his victims. We couldn’t help it. Knowing little of Buck’s history, and less of Gemmel Moore’s, all journalists could do was investigate and try to furnish the facts. In our stories, the camera points into Buck’s living room, as well as into police cars, the courtroom, and the house in Inglewood where Moore had lived with his friends.
In Remission, Gary reverses the shot: he points the camera back out at the neighbors and writers, who have been staring with mute lasciviousness at the catastrophe unfolding within. The story is told through the voices of the neighbors. In this version, the conflict is no longer between Buck and Moore, or Buck and law-enforcement. It’s between the spectators’ fascination with Buck’s violent, sadistic compulsions, on the one hand, and their simultaneous desire to separate themselves from him, on the other. The material becomes a fable about Los Angeles, a city that is always watching itself watch itself.
One day, Gary called to say that his apartment on Berendo had caught fire, and would I stop by and take a look. I arrived to find the facade perfectly intact, but the inside was pretty charred. There was a sign on the door of Gary’s unit declaring it unfit for habitation. He wasn’t very worried about the possessions, most of his books were in New York anyway, but he was concerned for his neighbors. His understanding of LA real estate was deeply cynical, that is, empathic to anyone in a rent-stabilized unit.
I sent him a few pictures. A wall with all the studs exposed, blackened paint where the flames had licked. ‘It doesn’t seem like the end of the world, really,’ he said.
No, I agreed. It wasn’t the end of the world yet.
‘Any day now,’ Gary said.
Image© Bart Jaillet