In the years between 1979 and 1982--following the release of his first solo album and many years after the break-up of his band, the Modern Lovers--Jonathan Richman rented a ramshackle bedsit in a rooming house in Venice Beach, California. It was in these tumbledown years that Richman found a new, pure creative voice, penning such idiosyncratic and deceptively simplistic songs as "That Summer Feeling," "Not Yet Three," and "Give Paris One More Chance." It was also in this time, during the endless, searing summer of 1980, that Richman solved the mystery of the Canal Strangler, ending a decade long paralysis and paranoia which had gripped his bohemian neighborhood.

            He'd left his car back in Boston, took the bus or filched a ride with his friend Sammy when he needed a lift into Hollywood. Sammy was his neighbor and was a musician like Jonathan. He'd met Sammy on his first night as a denizen of Venice Beach, "a Venusian," Sammy had said, and not just a touring musician passing through town in a battered bus full of duct-taped gear and misguided bandmates. It was Sammy who had set him up in the rooming house; they both lived under the auspices of a football-shaped Mexican woman called Abuela.

            Neither Sammy nor Abuela were the Canal Strangler.

            Common supposition held that the Strangler, who struck only in summer and killed, apparently, indiscriminately, was not a Venusian. Many people passed through Venice Beach, even in 1980, even after its halcyon days as a schismatical mecca. The boardwalk, such as it was, was changing from a place where genuine eccentrics flourished and congregated to a sort of Disneyland of oddities, homeless, and, simmering in its carnivalesque air, fear and anger. It took Jonathan Richman, a perpetual outsider with an unconventional weltschuaang , to discover that the Canal Strangler was not a stranger, but walked among them.

            "How do you know?" Sammy asked.

            They were drinking beers as the sweltering summer sun sunk behind the far-away Santa Monica mountains; at the moment it was perfectly aligned with the Ferris wheel out on the pier, so that the circular amusement appeared to be dully afire. Jonathan paid it little heed, but Sammy stared into it, feeling his retinas grow wide and soupy. He hadn't had a joint in a few days; Venice was lately as dry pharmaceutically as the desert away from which the small community had crawled only thirty years before.

            Jonathan liked to think of Venice Beach as something that had evolved out of the fuggy jungle of Los Angeles, though he knew many saw it as something opposite. As something missing a chromosome or unable to adapt. The retarded younger brother of the splayed metropolis to its east. Well, forget 'em, Jonathan thought. Anything you want, you've got it right here. Including a murder rate.

            "I just know," Jonathan told Sammy.

            "That's not an answer, man." Sammy considered his beer bottle. "Want another?"

            "Sure."

            Sammy cracked open two more.

            Jonathan took a deep drink with his eyes closed and said, "You know what it is? It's where they find the bodies. They're not, like, dumped off the piers or anything, right? They're hidden. Secreted away, like someone knew where to put 'em so they'd be found."

            Neither of them had introduced the subject explicitly; it was on the minds of the two friends as the Strangler was on everyone's lips that last summer. Maybe it was that the fevered dread had reached its apex, or perhaps a community can only take so much fright before it's paralyzed, helpless. Perhaps, even, that was the Canal Strangler's ultimate goal (some ventured): utter paralysis of the beachside community. Control through terror.

            "But why would he want 'em to be found?" Sammy asked.

            "I dunno," said Jonathan. "But he does, right? He doesn't hide them; there are plenty of places to hide a body around here--"

            Sammy laughed. "Look who knows."

            Jonathan let it go by. "But he doesn't hide them. He leaves 'em somewhere won't nobody find them for a few days, but not somewhere they'll never be found at all."

            "I don't know what you're talking about, man."

            "He wants the bodies to be found, just not immediately, right? That's all. And..."

            "I knew there was more."

            "Oh, yeah, man, there's lots more. There's the victims, right?"

            "There have to be."

            "Yeah, ha, very funny. But, like, they're not vagabonds, hobos."

            "Maybe you wanna go over and see if there's a thing at McCabe's," Sammy cut in.

            "They're regular people. Like you and me. And there's always a thing at McCabe's."

            "Maybe it's a good thing." And before Jonathan could respond, Sammy added, "And there's nothing regular about you and me."

*           *             *

            There was a good thing at McCabe's Guitar Shop, but Jonathan would no more see John Cale that evening than he would sprout pterodactyl's wings and catch a jet stream to Katmandu.   Since playing the final gig promoting his solo album down on Lansdowne Street back in Boston, Jonathan had shown little interest in music. He'd have been surprised if he'd listened to a dozen songs in the past two years. Still, he accompanied Sammy down to McCabe's on occasion, sat outside and smoked cigarettes and watched the pretty hippie girls pass by. Venice. His eardrums registered the plunk of the acoustic guitar inside, but Jonathan could never make out the songs, nor did he wish to. He'd gone off music a bit, he told Sammy, who pressed him to take up his Gibson on occasion, play with Sammy snapping a crappy snare drum in some bar. It'd be a way for free drinks, anyway.

            "I'll buy you a drink if you want a drink," Jonathan would reply.

            Sammy always wanted a drink.

            These things at McCabe's never went long, and Jonathan spent twenty minutes alternately watching the cloudless sky and smiling abashedly at the hippie girls who gave him smokes. They didn't know he'd played with Cale in an impromptu couple of numbers in New York a few years back, had met the former Velvet on several occasions. Nor did they ask. They just talked among themselves and Jonathan lost himself in their chatter. Until the one without flowers on her faded buttercup-colored skirt mentioned the Strangler. "I knew that guy they found a few weeks ago," she said.

            "Which one?" Jonathan asked. The huddle of girls turned to him. He blushed. "Sorry," he said. "I'm curious, y'know?"

            "That's sort of morbid," one of the others said. "But it's cool. Whatever your thing is, man."

            Jonathan didn't tell her that the Canal Strangler was not his "thing," nor, indeed, did he have any notion what his current thing might be. Maybe his thing was hanging around, staying out of Abuela's hair during the days and entertaining Sammy with funny stories from the old neighborhood.

            "You're not him, are you?" Buttercup-colored skirt asked him, cocking her head in that way, just so.

            "Who?" Jonathan asked.

            "The Strangler."

            The girls stared at him, suddenly on guard. Maybe it hadn't occurred to them that he could be. Certainly it hadn't suggested itself to Jonathan.

            Then Buttercup laughed.

            "Oh. You're kidding," Jonathan said.

            "That depends," Buttercup responded. "Are you him?"

            "No." Always serious, our Jonathan.

            "Good."

*          *             *

            Somehow they found that small park that was around the corner from the Guitar Shop. Jonathan was not in the habit of wandering into dark children's play areas accompanied by a woman with whom he'd traded a baker's dozen words. Buttercup--her name was really Markela, and she seemed only peripherally hippie-ish. Once one looked past the wafting skirt and peasant shirt, Markela contained an element much darker than her cohorts, both physically (her hair was an unblemished raven color, which matched her eyes which appeared as twin pools of oil, the pupils barely distinguishable from the black irises) and in countenance (there was a certain set of her squarish jaw, a particular crease that drew together her sharp eyebrows).

            Jonathan did, however, find himself wandering outside alone at night, allowing the salty ocean air to permeate his dirty skin. He never told himself he was looking for the Strangler; he wasn't, really. He was outside of himself as well as his musty bedsit in these nocturnal excursions, away from the nagging grandmother of his mind, demanding he chain himself to his instrument and enact an acoustic alchemy: something from nothing. Because, lately, there was nothing.

            He told this to Markela, absently, thinking she'd understand because he was saying it.

            "It sounds like writer's block," she said.

            It wasn't. He told her so.

            "Then what is it?"

            Jonathan shrugged. "Something else."

            "Ah," said Markela.

            Did she know?

            "You have other things on your mind?" she said.

            "Well, you have to, don't you?" He led her across the darkened playground; reedy sprigs of grass erupted here and there, appearing against the distant lights as alien creatures come to romp among the chutes and ladders.

            "I don't know," Markela told him, confidentially. "Sometimes I don't think of a thing."

            "Aw, that's not true." He sat down in a swing, but barely rocked it.

            They were silent a few moments, side by side on the vacant swingset, he barely moving, she fidgeting like a child. Markela kicked her sandals into the air, and they landed several feet away. It might have been the most beautiful thing Jonathan had ever seen.

            "I know who you are, you know," she said in manner that bespoke finality. He was surprised, and failed to respond, a moment when she didn't rise from the swing and leave. "I saw your band a few years ago."

            "You must've been a kid," Jonathan said by way of reply.

            "How old do you think I am?"

            He was bad at this question. He kicked some sand out away from beneath him, and turned to take her in; he appreciated the pretext: "guess my age."

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