Free Three Ways to Die by Lee Goldberg

JACK WEBB'S STAR

    "The story you are about to hear is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

    When it comes to sex, everyone is wired differently. You just can't predict what will get some people excited. I knew a guy who got a hard-on any time he licked an envelope. He couldn't tell you why it turned him on, it just did.
    For my wife Carly, it's Jack Webb. He was an actor who played this cop named Joe Friday on a TV show called Dragne t that ran in the Fifties and Sixties. Later, they made a Tom Hanks movie out of it that sucked and another TV series, with that Al Bundy guy from Married With Children , and it also sucked, but I'm digressing.
    Jack Webb had a turtle face and moved like he was in a full body cast. The cop he played was just as stiff, physically, politically, and morally. His trademark was the dry, almost robotic way he spoke, a rat-a-tat-tat of short sentences, a style that could be summed up by his favorite phrase: "Just the facts, ma'am."
    Carly was too young to have seen Dragnet on-the-air. Her exposure to Jack Webb came from her grandfather, a retired cop who showed her episodes whenever she visited his place up in Big Bear. He thought it would teach her to respect the law and abide by a strict moral code. It didn't work out that way.
    For whatever reason, Jack Webb made a strong, erotic impression on her, completely rewiring her sexual synapses. All she had to do was watch Jack question somebody for thirty seconds and she was ready to fuck anything warm-blooded that was within reach. Dragnet was rarely rerun on TV so we had the whole series on video. That was my wife's porn stash.
    I was thinking of Jack Webb on that fateful day for a couple of reasons. One, because I hadn't had sex with my wife in weeks and two, because Jack Webb's star on the Walk of Fame was right outside of the building at Hollywood & Vine where I was stuck in traffic school for a speeding ticket.
    I picked traffic school run by a local comedy club and taught by a stand-up comic. I figured that a few laughs would make the eight hours of highlights from the California Vehicle Code easier to take. If I was smart, which I think I've already established that I'm not, I would have asked myself "How good can this stand-up comic be if the best gig he can get is in a traffic school class?"
    There were two dozen of us traffic offenders crammed into a second-floor room in the Taft Building. That was twice the maximum room occupancy allowed by the fire department, at least according to the sign above the door that, in my boredom, I'd re-read six times.
    We all sat on folding chairs, except for a fat guy in an electric wheelchair with two red flags duct-taped to his seat-back. The walls of the room were water-stained and it smelled like a gym, maybe because the windows had been nailed shut since the days when Charlie Chaplin and Will Rogers had offices in the building.
    The windows looked out on the old Broadway department store, which was surrounded by scaffolding because it was being converted into lofts. Big banners offered the opportunity to live at "the original address for glamour." Just below the banner, I could see a homeless guy urinating in one of the doorways. I wouldn't call that glamorous, but I'm not in advertising.
    Our teacher was a comedienne named Irma, who introduced herself as a yucky , a "young urban comic." She was the only one who laughed at that. Everything about her drooped, from her eyelids to her ass, a sad fact made painfully obvious by the pink tank-top and black leotards she'd unwisely chosen to wear. She'd been teaching traffic school for a decade, though she was quick to point out that she'd just done a pilot.
    "Me, too," said a twentysomething, African-American woman in the back of the room. "Mine flew for Southwest Airlines."
    That was the funniest joke of the day, maybe because it wasn't meant to be. The clueless twentysomething was apparently the only twentysomething in L.A. who wasn't