Night of the Wolf

“I read the news today, oh boy ... the news was rather sad ... “

--From “A Day in the Life,” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

“It’s the full moon,” Scotty was saying. “Everyone goes crazy when the moon is full. Cops have known that for years.”

“We don’t need a full moon to go crazy anymore,” Hal said. “We go crazy with quarter moons or half moons or no moons at all.”

We were having breakfast at Solley’s in Woodland Hills and talking about the murder and suicides in L.A. the day before.

The killing of actress Rebecca Schaeffer especially bothered us. A bright, pretty young woman murdered in her doorway. Twenty-one years old. My daughter-in-law is 21.

“Everyone deserves more life than that,” Scotty said. “Everyone should live to at least 50.”

Scotty is a free-lance writer with an instinct for the bizarre. He writes for small magazines that specialize in the occult, and claims to possess psychic abilities.

Hal does odd jobs in Topanga Canyon. We hired him once to clean our high-beamed ceiling and he dripped cleaning solvent everywhere, ruining a table and almost killing his own dog, who sat under the ladder.

“If we ever hired him to paint,” my wife says, “he’d start with the windows.”

“Just look at today’s paper,” Scotty said. “I went through it this morning and there were seven major pieces of bad news.”

He reached into a shirt pocket for a notebook pad in which he had written the types of stories he was talking about.

“I don’t want to go through this again,” Hal said. “Today it’s the full moon, tomorrow the stars, Monday the shifting gravitational field. . . .”

“If you ever listened,” Scotty said churlishly, “you’d learn something! The Latins used to say, ‘Man is a wolf to man.’ That’s what it’s all about.”

Scotty read from his notebook.

Rebecca Schaeffer murdered in her Westside apartment. A young man killed as a result of gang violence in South-Central. A violent suicide at Lorimar Film Studios. Ex-Angels pitcher Donnie Moore shoots his wife, then kills himself. Lyme disease discovered in Laguna Beach.

“Lyme disease?” Hal said mockingly. “How can you count Lyme disease in the same category as murder and suicide?”

“It is potentially as deadly as AIDs,” Scotty argued.

I mostly just listen to their debates without comment. But this time I said, “It does seem something of a non sequitur . There ought to be a sub-category for something like Lyme disease.”

“And the gang shooting was last Wednesday, not yesterday,” Hal added. “You get a murder and a couple of suicides every day of the week in L.A. Yesterday was no different.”

Scotty ignored us both. “I just mentioned the local stories,” he said. “There are others. An editor’s daughter was killed in New York. A congressman is accused of sexually assaulting a Peace Corps worker in Zaire. It doesn’t matter when they happened. They were in today’s paper.”

“All right,” Hal said, becoming annoyed. “It’s a lousy world. You proved your point. Was there any good news in the paper?”

Scotty shrugged. “The Dodgers won.”

For a writer, Scotty is not the most articulate person I know. Maybe no writer is. Irving Wallace mumbles. Alex Haley swallows his words and looks down. David Westheimer whispers.

What made the news such a downer for Scotty is that we all knew Rebecca Schaeffer and Donnie Moore. We saw Schaeffer on “My Sister Sam” being pert and funny, and Moore sizzling balls past opposing batters before a playoff pitch sent him tumbling into hell.

“It isn’t the full moon,” Hal said, “it’s the media.” He glanced at me. “You guys create sex symbols that stir the crazies up and put pressure on heroes not to fail. That’s what happened to Schaeffer. That’s what happened to Moore.”

“You know,” Scotty said, “it’s funny, but neither of them looked like potential victims. Victims are flawed people. They have no chin or their ears are big or they walk funny. Those two were perfect.”

“It reminds me of the poem about the guy who had everything going for him,” Hal said. “He was perfect too. Then one sunny afternoon he went home and shot himself in the head.”

“There’s no way to tell,” I said.

“Just 21 years old,” Scotty said.

We sat in silence for a moment and then Hal said, “Who was pitching for the Dodgers?”