"It was a painfully agonizing silence," she later wrote. "I moved closer to him and gripped his hand in mine."
10 AN ORANGE CHRISTMAS
IN THE FIRST weeks of December, Eric Galt became acquainted with a young woman named Marie Tomaso,162 a cocktail waitress at the Sultan Room, the bar on the ground floor of his hotel. She was an olive-skinned, dark-eyed woman from New Orleans who had a Rubenesque figure and wore a striking black wig. Some nights she worked as an "exotic dancer" at a club nearby on Hollywood Boulevard.
Marie Tomaso thought Galt seemed completely out of place in the Sultan Room. He wore a nice dark suit and kept to himself, hardly speaking a word. She noticed that his skin had an unhealthy pallor, "like he didn't get out too often."163 He told her he'd lived in Guadalajara for six years and had operated a bar down there. They became friends, and one night he drove her home, where she introduced him to her cousin, a go-go dancer named Rita Stein. The three began to hang out together.
Rita Stein was a young mother whose life had recently been plunged into emotional turmoil; she had left her eight-year-old twin girls in New Orleans with her mom, but apparently a child services official there had threatened to place them in a foster home. Now Rita desperately needed to fetch her children--but she had no car and no money and could not easily break away from her job as a dancer. Eventually, Rita and Marie prevailed upon Galt. He told them he'd be glad to help. He had a soft spot for kids in trouble--and needed to attend to some "business" in New Orleans, anyway. Besides, he could use a break from Los Angeles.
Rita introduced Galt to her brother, Charlie Stein, who lived around the corner from the St. Francis Hotel on Franklin Avenue. At Rita's urging, Charlie had volunteered to join Galt on the road trip and help out with the driving.
Charles Stein was a deeply eccentric man164--perhaps even stranger than Galt. A convicted pimp and drug dealer, and a dedicated chess fiend, Stein believed himself to be a psychic healer. He talked to trees and other life-forms, and practiced odd remedies: he swore he had once healed Marie of an arthritis flare-up by removing her panties and then burying them in the backyard. Stein also believed in flying saucers; he liked to drive out to Yucca Valley on weekends and scan the skies for UFOs.
Although Stein and Galt were the same age, they could not have contrasted more starkly in appearance: Stein was a disheveled, balding moose of a man, weighing more than 240 pounds. He had a biblical black beard and wore beads and sandals. He was a hippie, basically--a decidedly far-out version of the breed. His mother, who lived in New Orleans, described him as "crazy but harmless."
Galt was suspicious of Charlie Stein. When Rita first suggested her brother as a traveling companion, Galt thought he smelled a rat and told Rita and Marie, in a blind rage, "I got a gun165--if this is a setup, I'll kill him."
Charlie Stein didn't think much of Galt, either. He thought Galt wore "an excessive amount" of hair cream. From the moment they met, the psychic picked up powerful "anti-vibrations." But Stein wanted to help his sister Rita reunite with his little nieces, and he was looking forward to revisiting the Big Easy, his old hometown, where, among other things, he had once been a bouncer at a French Quarter strip joint.
So it was decided: on December 15, this spectacularly odd couple packed up the Mustang and prepared to embark on a chivalric errand to Louisiana to collect two distressed waifs in time for Christmas. Before leaving, Galt had one stipulation166: he wanted Charlie, Marie, and Rita to accompany him to the American Independent Party headquarters on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood and sign their names on the "Wallace for President" petition. Galt was stone-cold serious about this: he would not drive to New Orleans unless the three signed their names. They found it a highly weird eleventh-hour demand--particularly since they had no interest whatsoever in George Wallace--but they gave in and lent their names to the cause. "I figured he was getting paid167 for votes," Charlie later said, noting that Galt seemed quite familiar with the Wallace headquarters and "knew his way around the place."
When Charlie Stein signed the petition, the registrar at the counter, a sweet elderly lady named Charlotte Rivett, thanked him and said, "God bless you for registering for Mr. Wallace."
Stein darted his eyes at her and said, "What's God got to do with it?"168
Now that Rita, Marie, and Charlie had met their end of the bargain, Galt was keen to go. He dropped off Rita and Marie straightaway, and Charlie threw his stuff in the trunk of the Mustang, next to Galt's blue leatherette suitcase and a Kodak camera box. That afternoon Eric Galt and Charlie Stein headed east through the traffic snarls of Los Angeles.
THEY RODE ALL night169 through the desert and into the following day, trading off whenever one driver grew tired. They passed through Yuma, Tucson, Las Cruces, and El Paso and bored deep into the mesquite country of Texas. Sometimes when Galt was sleeping in the passenger seat, he said, "Charlie would nudge me170 awake and exclaim that a flying saucer had just passed the car." They made a few pit stops for hamburgers--Galt always ordered his with "everything on 'em." On two different occasions along the way, Galt got out of the car and called someone--he didn't say whom--from pay phones. Stein assumed it was someone he planned to meet in New Orleans.
They didn't talk much during their cross-country marathon, but Galt did mention at one point that he had served in the Army and that he was now living off money he'd gotten from selling a bar he owned somewhere in Mexico. Galt liked to drive with the wheel in one hand and a beer in the other. They got to talking about George Wallace and "coloreds" at one point. Galt told Stein that his Alabama license plates made it dangerous to pass through black neighborhoods in L.A. "Once," he said, "they threw tomatoes at me!" Throughout the drive, Stein kept getting more "anti-vibrations" from his traveling companion. He was sure Galt had "a mental block."
"He was a cat on a mission," Stein later said. "He was acting a part. He never talked much--you couldn't get near him."
"What did you say your last name was?" Stein once asked during the drive.
"It's Galt,"171 he replied peevishly. "Eric Starvo Galt. Galt!" For once, he enunciated, as though he wanted to make absolutely sure Stein heard what he said. Stein thought he protested too much, that something sounded phony about the name and the exaggerated firmness with which he stated it.
After passing through San Antonio and then Houston, they pulled in to New Orleans on December 17. Charlie Stein stayed at his mother's place, but Galt checked in to the Provincial Hotel, on Chartres Street in the French Quarter. He signed the register "Eric S. Galt, of Birmingham." Galt didn't tell Stein what he planned to do--"just some business," is all he'd allow--though he did say at one point that he planned to meet some guy with an Italian-sounding surname. Galt also said he'd be hanging out on Canal Street at Le Bunny Lounge, a local dive.
A mere thirty-six hours after arriving in New Orleans, however, he was ready to leave. On the morning of December 19, he picked up Charlie and the eight-year-old twins, Kim and Cheryl, along with some clothes and a few toys--including a miniature blackboard. Then they drove straight back to Los Angeles. Aside from gas, food, and bathroom breaks, they stopped only once--for a snowball fight in Texas. Kim and Cheryl, who rode in the backseat, hated the country music Galt played on the radio--and were annoyed by the way he hummed along. To them, he sounded like "a train whistle."172
This highly dysfunctional party of Joads arrived in Los Angeles on December 21, a Thursday. Galt and Stein delivered the girls to their mother just in time for Christmas. Galt spent the next few days holed up in the St. Francis Hotel. There wasn't much else to do--even the Wallace campaign was winding down for the holidays. Wallace himself had returned to Montgomery, where his wife, the real governor, now lay bedridden and dying.
On Christmas Day, Galt kept to his room, reading and basking in the orange light thrown by the neon sign outside his window. "You ought to know that Christmas173 is for family people," he later wrote. "It don't mean anything to a loner like me. It's just another day and
another night to go to a bar or sit in your room and look at the paper and drink a beer or two and maybe switch on the TV."
For New Year's, Galt decided to head out to Las Vegas and have a look around--he drove by himself and slept in the Mustang. "I didn't do any gambling,"174 he said. "I just drove up there and looked around and watched people poking money into slot machines."
When he returned to Los Angeles, the newspapers were full of good news: the Wallace project in California had been a resounding success. The American Independent Party had met its deadline and announced on January 2, 1968, that it had gathered more than a hundred thousand signatures, nearly twice the required number. Pundits were dumbfounded by the Wallace phenomenon. The triumph of the petition drive was, according to one political scientist, "a nearly impossible feat."175
"The experts said it couldn't be done," Wallace proclaimed to roaring crowds in Los Angeles. "This points out again that, really, the experts insofar as politics are concerned are the people themselves. If you can get on the ballot in California, you can get on the ballot of any state in the union!"
Eric Galt could begin the New Year with the satisfaction of knowing that he had done his small part to put George Wallace's name on the official ballot for the California presidential primary in June.
A FEW DAYS later, January 4, 1968, Galt went to see another L.A. hypnotist, the Reverend Xavier von Koss, at his office at 16010 Crenshaw Boulevard. Koss was a practitioner of good reputation in Los Angeles and the president of the International Society of Hypnosis. Galt consulted with Koss for an hour and discussed his desire to undergo treatment. But to Galt's irritation, Koss pressed him with larger questions. "What are your goals in life?" Koss asked him.
Galt tried to answer him as narrowly as possible. "I'm thinking about taking a course in bartending," he said.
"But why are you interested in hypnotism?"
Galt said he thought hypnosis would improve his memory and make him more efficient in carrying out mental tasks. "Somewhere," he said, "I saw where a person under the influence of hypnotism can solve problems in thirty seconds that would take an ordinary person thirty minutes."
Koss could sense that there was more to Galt's interest in hypnosis than merely mind fortification. Koss thought he was a lost soul, someone searching for some kind of validation--and a way to fit into society. "All persons,176 like myself, who work in the profession of mind power can readily discern the main motivational drive of any person," Koss later said. "Galt belongs to the recognition type. He desires recognition from his group. He yearns to feel that he is somebody. The desire for recognition for him is superior to sex, superior to money, superior to self-preservation."
Koss advised Galt that in order to reach a better and more meaningful life, he had to see in his mind's eye what he wanted to achieve--a statement that Galt seemed to agree with vigorously. He recommended three books for Galt to read--Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz; Self-hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living, by Leslie LeCron; and How to Cash In On Your Hidden Memory Power, by William Hersey. Galt was grateful--he jotted down the titles and would later buy every one of them.
Yet books alone would not accomplish much, Koss cautioned. He began to tell Galt about all the hard work that lay before him if he truly wanted to improve his station in life. Koss said, "You must complete your course177 in bartending, you must work hard, you must go to night school, you must construct a settled-down life."
It was all too much for Galt, and he began to retreat from the conversation. "I lost him,"178 Koss said. "I could feel a wall rising between us. His mind moved far away from what I was saying to him."
Still, Galt said he was interested in undergoing hypnosis, and the Reverend Xavier von Koss was willing to oblige. He began a series of tests to ascertain whether Galt would be a good candidate. Quickly, however, he detected "a very strong subconscious resistance" to his procedures. "He could not cooperate," Koss said. "This is always the case when a person fears that under hypnosis he may reveal something he wishes to conceal."
11 WALKING BUZZARDS
FEBRUARY 1, 1968, was a rainy day, the skies leaden and dull. On Colonial Road in East Memphis, the spindly dogwood branches clawed at the cold air. A loud orange sanitation truck, crammed full with the day's refuse, grumbled down the street, past the ranch-style houses, past the fake chalets and pseudo Tudors, where the prim yards of dormant grass were marred only by truant magnolia leaves, brown and lusterless, clattering in the wind.
At the wheel of the big truck179 was a man named Willie Crain, the crew chief. Two workers rode in the back, taking shelter in the maw of its compacting mechanism to escape the pecking rain. They were Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five, two men who were new to sanitation work, toiling at the bottom of the department's pay scale, still learning the ropes. They made less than a hundred dollars a week, and because the city regarded them as "unclassified laborers," they had no benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no insurance, no uniforms, and, especially noteworthy on this day, no raincoats.
The "tub-toters" of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. They wore threadbare hand-me-downs left on the curbs by well-meaning families. They grew accustomed to home owners who called them "boy." They mastered a kind of shuffling gait, neither fast nor slow, neither proud nor servile, a gait that drew no attention to itself. All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.
The truck Walker and Cole rode in--a fumy, clanking behemoth known as a wiener barrel--was an antiquated model that the Department of Public Works had introduced ten years earlier. It had an enormous hydraulic ram activated by a button on the outside of the vehicle. Though the city was in the process of phasing it out of the fleet, six wiener barrels still worked the Memphis streets. These trucks were known to be dangerous, even lethal: in 1964, two garbage workers were killed180 when a defective compactor caused a truck to flip over. The faulty trucks were one of a host of reasons the Memphis sanitation workers had been trying to organize a union and--if necessary--go on strike.
Having completed their rounds, Crain, Walker, and Cole were happy to be heading toward the dump on Shelby Drive--and then, finally, home. They were cold and footsore, as they usually were by day's end, from lugging heavy tubs across suburban lawns for ten hours straight. The idea of wheeled bins had apparently not occurred to the Memphis Sanitation Department. Nor were home owners in those days expected to meet the collection crews halfway by hauling their own crap to the curb. So, like all walking buzzards across the city, Walker and Cole had to march up the long driveways to back doors and carports, clicking privacy gates and entering backyards--sometimes to the snarl of dogs. There they transferred the people's garbage to their tubs while also collecting tree cuttings, piles of leaves, dead animals, discarded clothes, busted furniture, or anything else the residents wanted taken away.
Now, as Crain, Cole, and Walker headed for the dump, their clothes were drenched in rain and encrusted with the juice that had dripped from the tubs all day. It was the usual slop of their profession--bacon drippings, clotted milk, chicken blood, souring gravies from the kitchens of East Memphis mingled with the tannic swill from old leaves. Plastic bags were not yet widely in use--no Ziploc or Hefty, no drawstrings or cinch ties to keep the sloshy messes contained. So the ooze accumulated on their clothes like a malodorous rime, and the city provided no showers or laundry for sanitation workers to clean themselves up at the end of the day. The men grew somewhat inured to it, but when they got home, they usually stripped down at the door: their wives couldn't stand the stench.
AT 4:20 THAT afternoon, a white woman was standing in her kitchen, looking out the window at Colonial Road
. She heard something strange--a grinding sound, a shout, a scream. She rushed out the front door and looked in horror at the scene unfolding before her.
Willie Crain's big wiener-barrel truck had stopped outside. Some kind of struggle was taking place. The two workers, Walker and Cole, had been standing in the back of the truck, but they were in trouble now. The wires to the compacting motor had shorted out, and something had tripped the mechanism. A shovel wedged in the wrong place, perhaps, or lightning in the area--something had caused an electrical malfunction.
Now the hydraulic ram was turning, grinding, squeezing, groaning. Crain slammed on the brakes, hopped out of the truck, and raced back to the safety switch. He mashed it and mashed it, but the ram inside would not stop.
Logy in their heavy, wet clothing, Walker and Cole tried to escape as soon as they heard the compactor motor turn on, but the hydraulic ram must have caught some stray fold or sleeve--and now began to pull them in. One of them seemed to break free, but at the last moment the machine found him again.
The screams were terrible as the compactor squeezed and ground them up inside. Crain frantically mashed the button. He could hear a terrible snapping inside--the crunch of human bone and sinew. The motor moaned on and on.
The horrified home owner, who witnessed only the second worker's death, talked to reporters. "He was standing there181 on the end of the truck, and the machine was moving," she said. "His body went in first and his legs were hanging out. Suddenly it looked like that big thing just swallowed him whole."
THE STORY OF the fatal accident scarcely made news in the Memphis paper the next morning. There was just a small item in the Commercial Appeal--a drab announcement with all the emotion of a bankruptcy notice. The paper failed to mention that the truck in question had a history of killing people, or that the families of Walker and Cole had no money to bury their two men, or that the city had no contractual obligation to compensate the widows beyond a rudimentary one-month severance. Earline Walker,182 the pregnant widow of Robert Walker, decided to have her husband buried in what amounted to a pauper's grave in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, down in the Delta, where their families had been field hands.