Such Good Friends

The note got right to the point. It said, “Al, you idiot. Why did you give that (expletive) space in the paper?” It was signed Danny Perez.

At first, I didn’t know to which expletive he was referring, since I seek out and write about many of them in the new-format, easy-reading L.A. Times.

That is not an impossible task in Los Angeles. There are expletives everywhere. On any given day, you will find them jumping up and down in the streets waving and hollering, “Look at me, look at me!”

As a result, I have built a career chronicling the exploits of many expletives, from Hungry Valley to Redondo Beach.

Fortunately, in this case, Perez had attached a clipping which referred to one Jon Erik Beckjord, curator of Malibu’s Bigfoot Museum and self-appointed president of the National Cryptozoological Society.

I wrote about Beckjord recently during a slow day on the expletive beat, which caused Perez, also a sasquatch aficionado, to fire off his note.

Included in the envelope was a business card in the shape of a footprint (you know who’s) that identified Perez as proprietor of the Center for Bigfoot Studies in Norwalk.

I went out to see him one day to determine why such animosity existed between this intense, slightly built man of 26, and Beckjord, an amiable, part-time cinematographer of 39.

Perez once more got right to the point. “The man” he said, “is a fraud!”

Ah, ha.

To put it mildly, Perez and Beckjord are not good friends.

While Perez, a union electrician and insurance salesman, believes Beckjord to be a fake, Beckjord believes Perez to be, as he puts it, “among the walking wounded.”

“You know what he wants to do,” Beckjord said when I told him how Perez regarded him. “He wants to kill Bigfoot. The fool carries an Uzi on his expeditions.”

“Beckjord lives in another world,” Perez said, riveting me with a stare that could penetrate steel. “He has visions. “

Well now.

Both men agree, at least, on one thing: There’s something out there lumbering through the woods primeval and leaving its footprints in the mud.

Perez doesn’t know what it is and wants to find out. He admits to carrying a gun on his expeditions but sidesteps the question of whether or not he would shoot Mr. Bigfoot if he saw him.

“The bottom line,” he said somberly, “is to actually get a sasquatch. I just don’t know how you’d go about capturing one.”

Beckjord, who claims to have seen and made psychic contact with the beast, has been told by reliable sources that Bigfoot, when startled, is able to float off in a ball of golden light.

This leaves Beckjord to conclude that he could be a time traveler who is able to pop around from dimension to dimension, like an agent at a cocktail party.

These are the kinds of theories that leave Perez cold. “The truth is,” he says sourly, “the guy has never substantiated a thing.”

Both men have been interested in Mr. Bigfoot for about the same length of time, 15 years. To pursue his interest, Beckjord opened the cryptozoological museum in a room off the bar at Malibu’s Trancas Restaurant.

It consists of sketches, photographs, plaster casts of footprints and other bits of monster memorabilia.

Perez, on the other hand, has compiled a 200-page bibliography of books, magazine articles and newspaper stories published on the subject in the last 400 years.

On the day I visited him in Norwalk, he had just picked up a copy of a tabloid newspaper, the Sun, which headlined a story, “Bigfoot Captured Alive!”

The same issue also featured the headline, “Fat Man Explodes After Winning Pie-Eating Contest.”

I preferred reading about the fat man who exploded, but since Perez already considered me an idiot, I thought it best to stick to the Bigfoot story.

It said two hunters had returned to their cabin to find the creature lying on a couch, wearing one of the hunter’s blue pajamas.

The quick-witted men used a bag of potato chips to lure the creature into a bedroom and then locked the door. But, alas, Mr. Bigfoot smashed down a wall and escaped.

“It’s that kind of b.s.,” Perez said, “that discourages serious investigators.”

Then he added a comment about Beckjord that I am not allowed to repeat, even under our new mellow format.

I asked Beckjord why, since they share a common hairy interest, he and Perez couldn’t get along.

“It’s because we can’t capture Bigfoot,” he said. “We’re like rats in a cage who end up eating each other out of frustration.”

And, no doubt, who explode when they eat too much.