The Silver Lake Bandit

Freddy tossed the stiff lizard that had died in the bathtub onto the mound of jacaranda petals gathered outside the garage. He was only a few more steps from the dumpster, but he wanted to see what the lizard looked like lying on top of the purple flowers.

With his phone, Freddy took seventeen photos of the dead reptile. After much deliberation, he posted a cropped, filtered one online that garnered seventy-six hearts.

“They’re called likes,” said Echo. “You press the heart button, but you’re really just liking it.”

Freddy and Echo lived in Silver Lake. They owned a wine-and-paint business. They held wine tastings paired with painting lessons. Freddy selected the wine. Echo gave the lessons, though Freddy fancied himself the real artist in the relationship.

***

The opening credits of The Silver Lake Bandit scroll over time-lapsed footage of a lizard carcass dissolving in a pile of jacaranda flowers. Then the film cuts to Freddy sitting on a stool in front of his garage.

“I just wanted to see what the lizard would look like,” he says to the documentary filmmaker. “I seek out beauty in unexpected places. You have to in L.A. It’s a city without splendor.”

Quick cut to Echo standing in front of a canvas at the top of a cliff overlooking the ocean. She paints while she speaks.

“I told Freddy the lizard was a bad omen, and he just laughed. I told him we should have canceled class. I was planning on teaching still life with oranges. He was serving a wine called Red Sky Red.”

Freddy again, on the stool. “All day long I had this feeling we were going to have a memorable class. I can’t explain it. It wasn’t a bad feeling. It was just… expectant. Before we got in the car, I took off my sandals and walked barefoot through the bees buzzing in the pool of jacaranda petals. I didn’t get stung. Walkin’ on fire, man. Walkin’ on fire.”

Echo, staring down at her palette. “As we drove to the studio, I counted the jacaranda trees. I remember thinking they had such dignity, trying to stand proud while all their colors were falling off. Freddy just kept turning on the windshield wipers to clear the flowers away.”

*** 

As they drove to the studio that day, Freddy thought about the way Echo had pronounced pinot noir on their first date. New ear, she had said to the waiter. Then, correcting herself, nowhere. Again, confidently, nowhere. I’ll have the pinot nowhere. Freddy worried he would have to force himself, should the relationship continue, to find her mispronunciation charming. But, as it turned out, he didn’t have to pretend. By the end of dinner, he was hooked on Echo.

“I didn’t just catch her drift. I drowned in it, man,” he explained afterward to his friend Bodie, who only wanted to know whether Echo was hot or not.

Echo listened to PJ Harvey and Neko Case. She lived in Los Feliz. She had a black and red cross and dagger tattooed on her left arm. She was reading The Hunger Games trilogy for the first time. She grew up in Buena Park in a family of lapsed Catholics. Her mom was the lone holdout until she was fifty-seven years old, at which point she announced to the family one Saturday night at a California Pizza Kitchen that she wouldn’t be going to church anymore; eleven days later, she died of a heart attack. Echo had painted every day since the funeral.

“I owe it to her. She always believed in my art. More than she believed in that vengeful God,” Echo said that night over pinot noir.

Three and a half years later and I still love her, Freddy thought, as he switched on the windshield wipers to clear off the jacaranda petals. She probably needs me more than I need her. But I would never leave.

Echo’s art improved dramatically after they met, as Freddy understood it. Her series on Christian imagery in coral reefs, for instance, was exhibited to rave reviews at galleries in San Clemente, Laguna Beach, and Claremont, and the subsequent sales paid their rent for the next two months.

I’m Echo’s muse, thought Freddy. A male muse. What’s the name for that, he wondered. A bro muse—a bruse? A dude muse—a dudes? Or a man muse—a… muse?  

“What are you smiling at?” Echo asked. “You enjoy killing flowers?”

“The flowers are already dead, baby. That’s why they’re falling from the trees.”

“Maybe they’re trying to catch a ride. You ever think about that? Maybe they need to be on our windshield. Maybe it’s part of a bigger plan.”

“Do you realize how sticky they are? What a pain it is to clean them off the car? Fuck that noise.”

“No one says ‘fuck that noise’ anymore. And you never use it correctly, anyway.”

When they arrived at the studio, they began preparations for their twenty guests, each of whom had paid fifty dollars for a flight of reds and a painting lesson.

While they set up, Freddy liked to do what he called “a dry listen,” running through the music playlist he created specially for each class. He wanted to make sure the songs were in just the right order, that the aesthetic, logic, and emotional trajectory of the mix were perfect.

“There’s a science to the art of making mixes, you know,” he had told Echo more than once.

“There’s a science to the art of making mixes, you know,” she always mocked back, lowering her voice and wagging her finger in the air. 

Some nights Freddy would be rearranging the playlists minutes before they opened, neglecting his wine set up in the process. An irritated Echo would shout his name repeatedly. Such was the case on that particular night.

***

 “I thought my transition from Talking Heads to The Killers was sloppy,” says Freddy in the documentary, as an animated graphic of an iTunes playlist pops up next to a close shot of his head. “The Dandy Warhols didn’t quite do it. Neither did The Shins. For a minute I thought Old 97’s, but then I realized how careless that would be.”

On the iTunes graphic, each new band that Freddy mentions is slotted into the playlist and then deleted with an animated puff of smoke. 

“I was leaning toward Interpol when Echo started shouting at me. I couldn’t think straight. I always tell her, there’s a science to the art of making mixes. Under pressure, I dragged an Interpol song into the list, but I added ‘Hands Away’ when what I really wanted was ‘Slow Hands.’ Such a stupid mistake. ‘Hands Away’ is an instrumental and it totally didn’t fit. But I was distracted.”

***

Freddy thought Echo was calling his name because she wanted him to finish the playlist, but what she really wanted him to know was that a man in a mask had entered the studio and was pointing a gun at her.

“Hey Mr. Deejay,” said the masked man. “Where’s the cash box?”

“You’re robbing us?” asked Freddy, holding his hands in the air.

“Don’t question him,” Echo said. “Just give him what he wants.”

The masked man was short and dumpy and his gun was small.  

“We don’t have a cash box,” said Freddy. “This is an art studio. And we have twenty people coming here any minute now for painting lessons. I think you’ve made a mistake. I don’t think this is the store you’re looking for.”

Echo raised her eyebrows in a what the fuck gesture, while Freddy gave her his trust me squint.

“You’re not a bail bonds place?” asked the masked man.

“Wrong zip code,” said Freddy. “Same building number and street name, but wrong neighborhood. You want Joe’s Bonds in Inglewood. We get their mail sometimes.”

The man lifted his black ski mask part way, revealing a bushy red beard. He spit, but it landed on his black Converse. He cursed and spit again, farther this time, in Freddy’s direction. Then he pulled the mask back down.

“Son of a bitch,” he sighed.

Echo stared at the spittle drying on the bandit’s shoe. He kept the gun pointed at her. With his free hand he started scratching his chest.

Freddy raised his hands even higher and cleared his throat.

“Seriously, man, we have a painting class that starts at seven, and if you don’t leave now, they’re all going to see you. I’m trying to do you a solid. Walk out now and we can forget this ever happened.”

Echo mouthed the words “do you a solid” and rolled her eyes.

“Did you say you’re teaching a painting class?” asked the masked man.

“With wine,” said Freddy.

“Red or white?”

“Tonight we have a superb flight of reds from Paso Robles.”

The bandit kept scratching his chest.

“Okay, I want a lesson,” he finally said, pointing his gun at Freddy now. “Put a sign on the door that class is canceled.”

“What? Are you serious?” said Freddy.

“Hurry up and put a sign out there. And lock the door.”

“We can’t cancel class,” said Freddy. “We’ll never hear the end of it on Yelp. Some customers are driving all the way from Santa Monica!”

“I don’t care if they’re coming from Antarctica.” He pointed the gun back at Echo. “You do it. Make the sign.”

Echo stepped over to the nearest easel, picked up a brush, dipped it in purple, and painted in big letters on a flip pad, “TONIGHTS CLASS IS CANCELED DUE TO AN EMERGENCY.”

She tore off the paper and fetched some scotch tape from a drawer.

“Actually, cancelled has two l’s,” said Freddy.

“Two l’s is optional,” said the bandit. “But she missed an apostrophe.”

Echo opened the door and taped the sign to the exterior. She smoothed out the tape with her middle finger while looking directly at Freddy and the masked man. Then she closed the door again and locked it.

“Good job,” said the masked man. “Now who’s the teacher?”

“She is,” said Freddy quickly.

“Well, okay then. Get some wine, Mr. Deejay. And fire up some music. Let’s get this lesson started.”

*** 

In the documentary, the camera pans across the painting made by the Silver Lake Bandit: a bowl of oranges on a yellow tablecloth in front of an open window that looks out onto the ocean. 

“I suppose he was a good student,” says Echo. “He asked questions. And he was open to feedback. He had a knack for foreground and contour. Spheres weren’t his thing; he was bad with the oranges. But everything with straight lines—the table, the table legs, the windowsill and frame—he had some talent. I was impressed with his execution, considering the circumstances.”

On the screen, a small circle appears over the painting as the camera zooms in on a detail. An ominous bass tone rises in the film score.

“Yeah, that was strange,” says Echo. “I didn’t tell him to paint that.”

A barely-visible hangman is seen in the Bandit’s painting, on the beach outside the window, far beyond the bowl of oranges.

“The hangman?” says Freddy. “Yeah, that was some weird Wizard of Oz shit. Have you heard the rumor that a munchkin supposedly hanged himself on set, and it was caught on film? I think the Bandit put the hangman there on purpose. I think he knew he would become a rumor, too—his own urban legend.”

Fifteen seconds of The Wizard of Oz are spliced into the documentary. Munchkins sing to Dorothy, telling her they represent the lollipop guild. They welcome her to munchkin land. 

“I don’t know about any munchkin suicide,” says Echo, dabbing her brush in her palette. “But there’s definitely something outside that window, on the beach, that looks a lot like a figure hanging from the gallows. I guess it just shows you how dark his heart is.”

The camera pans down to Echo’s canvas, where she’s painted rows and rows of hangmen in a field of jacaranda petals.

***  

Freddy poured a flight of reds from Red Sky Winery in Paso Robles and Echo took her place at the front of the studio. The Bandit sat at the easel farthest from Echo, closest to the door. He painted with his right hand while the gun rested in the other, on his lap.

“No funny business, Mr. Deejay. Stand where I can see you. Hands out of your pockets.”

Freddy’s cell phone had been ringing nonstop since seven o’clock, presumably with angry customers driving all the way back to Santa Monica. The Bandit made him set the phone on the desk by the door.

“I’ve always wanted to be an artist,” said the Bandit. “I always thought if crime didn’t pay then art probably would.”

“Looking good, bro,” said Freddy.

“I’m not your bro, bro,” said the Bandit. “And by the way, your playlist sucks. You don’t go from The Talking Heads to a lousy Interpol instrumental.”

“Actually, they’re called Talking Heads,” said Freddy. “No ‘the.’”

“And you’re called douchebag,” said the Bandit. “No ‘the.’”

Echo found herself snickering.

“Are you dating this asshole?” the Bandit asked.

“We’re cohabitating.”

“You mean like roommates?”

“It’s more like co-tenants,” she said.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I,” Freddy muttered.

At the end of the lesson, the Bandit stood up, blew Echo a kiss through his mask, gave Freddy the middle finger, and walked out.

He left his painting. He titled it, “Me and the Artist.”

*** 

“Freddy was all about monetizing our trauma. I was preoccupied by the revelation that I didn’t love Freddy anymore,” says Echo.

The camera pans across a screenshot of Freddy’s website, Silver Lake Banditries, where visitors can buy mugs, t-shirts, posters, shot glasses, and buttons with reprints of the Bandit’s painting.

Then, one half of the screen shows sales surging on an animated cash register, while on the other half, a photo of Freddy and Echo slowly tears in two.

 “Sure, that co-tenant line bugged me, but I chalked it up to the stress of having a gun pointed at her,” says Freddy. “Unfortunately, we were never the same after that.”

“Co-tenant seemed like the right word,” says Echo, packing up her painting supplies. “So did douchebag, when the Bandit called him that. In fact, I thought we should have sold t-shirts that said, ‘Douchebag, no the,’ with a picture of Freddy’s face. I don’t know. I think ordeals just clarify things. You’re experiencing this profound panic and terror, and time becomes all hazy and out of joint. Then suddenly there’s this lucidity, like you’re in the hull of a sinking ship and you catch sight of a porthole that opens onto a bright blue sky.”

*** 

Four weeks after their first date, Freddy and Echo were running late for a dinner party. Technically, thought Freddy, Echo was running late. He showed up at her apartment in Los Feliz on time, having left Long Beach extra early in case there was traffic. Echo gave him a distracted kiss at the door. She hadn’t yet showered or made the guacamole. Freddy asked if he could do anything to help. She waved him off.

An hour later, after they’d had sex on the couch and Echo took a shower, she started cutting the avocados. Freddy stood next to her at the kitchen counter while she scooped the avocado from each peel and flicked it into a mixing bowl. He asked again if he could help. She sighed and gestured to the knife and limes.

“So when you introduce me to your friends tonight, you think you could say I’m a writer instead of a shoe salesman?” he said, slicing open a lime.

“But you sell shoes at Macy’s,” said Echo as she started mashing the avocado with a fork.

“That’s true. But I also write. I’ve written two and a half screenplays. I just sell shoes to pay the bills. No harm, no foul.”

“Babe, no one’s gonna care what your job is. If I like you, they’ll like you, because they’re my friends.” As long as you don’t say no harm, no foul in front of them, she thought.

She sprinkled salt in the mixing bowl and turned to him. “And I like you, so stop worrying.”

Echo leaned in to give Freddy a kiss just as he squeezed a lime over the bowl. A wayward spray shot her in the eye.

“Ouch!”

Her eye began to burn.

“What is it?” asked Freddy.

 “This is why I didn’t want you to help,” she muttered as she went to the sink to splash water on her face.

Freddy put his hand on her shoulder and kept apologizing, still not knowing what had happened.

Echo didn’t hear him. She was listening to the water run. Maybe it’s too soon to introduce him to my friends, she thought as she bent over the sink. Where is this going, anyway? I like him. I think about having sex with him when he’s not around. I like how he looks at me when he’s listening. And he’s got a creative side—he’s a writer. (Did she mentally just put air quotes around writer?) There’s no reason to run yet. He’s a decent guy. Relax. See where this goes.

As they drove to the dinner party—ultimately, they would arrive two hours after the other guests, when dessert was already being served—Freddy said, “Maybe the reason we’re so late is that subconsciously, you didn’t want to introduce me to your friends.”

Echo took her right hand off the steering wheel and rested it on Freddy’s leg.

“Maybe the reason we’re so late is you had me bent over the couch for an hour,” she said, and that shut him up for the rest of night.

 “It’s not difficult for three and a half years to go by in a relationship when you’re in your late twenties and you don’t know any better,” says Echo in the documentary. She is loading her painting supplies into her electric car. Behind her the sun is setting.

Cross cut: Freddy, standing up from his stool and pacing in front of his garage. “The cops didn’t believe us at first. But a few weeks later, the Bandit struck again. He stole a sushi-making lesson at this place in Beverly Hills. Same modus operandi. Same t-shirt and black mask, same black Converse, same small gun. Except this time, he showed up just as the owners were closing the kitchen. He made them teach him how to roll sushi. At gunpoint.”

Newspaper headlines appear on screen, each one tethered like a balloon to different locations on a map of Los Angeles. 

“Two weeks after that, he showed up at one of those places where you paint your own pottery, over in Burbank. After that it was a flower arranging class in West Hollywood. Then a Feng shui seminar downtown. Then Zumba in Glendale, but that one turned out to be a false report. The owner of the Zumba studio wanted the publicity to drum up business. I couldn’t imagine the Bandit doing Zumba with a gun, anyway. Too dangerous.”

A big “X” appears over a street view of the Zumba studio in Glendale.

Freddy looks directly at the camera. “You want me to sit down? Sorry. I just get excited about this part.” He climbs back onto the stool.

“The guy became a celebrity,” he continues. “People were hoping to be robbed. I mean, it was hip to be held up by the Silver Lake Bandit. Everyone who was anyone kept their doors unlocked after they closed and lingered for a while, just in case he showed up.”

Echo watches the sunset over the ocean, her back turned to the camera.

“It was twisted,” she says. “There was this contagious desire to be victimized.”

Freddy smiles. “The best thing was, after the Bandit robbed you, he would leave reviews on Yelp. They were amazing. Super positive. You got hit by the Bandit, and your business exploded. Ours did. Through the roof, man. Boom, boom, boom.” He punches the air with alternating fists.  

Echo turns to face the camera again.

“I had to process the trauma. How can you not? I needed to reflect on it. Freddy doesn’t have that mechanism. He doesn’t try to understand. Like with that dead lizard. He just puts stuff out there without thinking about what it means, hoping people will like it.”

Fade to black.

The words “Five Months After the Hold Up” materialize in the middle of the screen.

Cross-dissolve to amateur video footage of an art gallery in Silver Lake. First, there’s a shot of the placard outside—it’s the opening night of Echo’s show, Creative Threat. Inside, the camera pans from painting to painting. One canvas depicts a writer sweating over a blank sheet of paper in a typewriter while someone holds a gun to his head. Another portrays a painter trying to finish a watercolor in a forest while a fire rages around her. In a third, a composer scores a symphony in a lifeboat while sharks circle in choppy waters. A fourth shows a sculptor with hammer and chisel, working on a slab of marble in the middle of a town square overrun by zombies.

Then the camera jerks quickly and zooms in on two people in the back of the gallery, a man and a woman, standing in the corner, not quite in focus, arguing. The man is gesturing wildly—it’s Freddy and Echo. Freddy is wearing a red velvet blazer over a t-shirt that reads, “I Was Robbed By The Silver Lake Bandit.” Echo’s arms are folded across her chest and she’s shaking her head.

*** 

Freddy and Echo ended their co-tenancy at the opening of Creative Threat. In the weeks leading up to the show, Freddy had been pressuring Echo to include a piece more directly related to the Silver Lake Bandit.

“Can’t you just paint him or something?” he pleaded. “Maybe with a giant brush in one hand? And he’s pointing it like a gun?”

Echo told him that every piece she was painting was related to the Silver Lake Bandit, and if he didn’t understand that, then he didn’t deserve to be dating an artist.

Freddy also begged her to allow him to sell Bandit posters and t-shirts and mugs in the gallery foyer. He tried to convince her that, thanks to their encounter with the Bandit, the two of them were “blowing up,” that they were local celebrities, that his friend—and now agent—Bodie thought they could become the new “it couple” of the art world, that in fact, Bodie had already coined a couple moniker: Frecho. Freddy tried to impress on Echo that the “iron was hotter than hot, hot, hot,” that they had to “ride the Bandit wave a little longer.”

“Fuck that noise,” was all Echo said.

At the opening of Creative Threat a few weeks later, she overheard Freddy talking to an elderly woman who was admiring Echo’s depiction of a dancer performing on stage while looking up at an anvil dangling by a frayed rope above her head.

“If you buy it tonight,” Freddy said to the woman, “I’ll throw in an eleven-by-fourteen reprint of the original Silver Lake Bandit painting and a set of three Silver Lake Bandit mouse pads. Your grandkids will love them.” 

*** 

Fade in: the office front of Bodie Jones Ultimate Talent, Century City.

Inside, Bodie sits behind his desk, hands across his belly.

“Freddy’s not just my star client, he’s my best friend. The Silver Lake Bandit will be forgotten long before Freddy. The Bandit’s already old news. He was a flash-in-the-pan folk hero who disappeared after a few months. He never robbed again. The guy could have used a good agent, if you ask me. Maybe some freelance writers to help with the Yelp reviews.

“Now Freddy, on the other hand, Freddy remains in the public eye. Why? Because he helped people make sense of the Silver Lake Bandit. He brought the Bandit into our homes, made him user friendly, put him on our walls and in our kitchen cabinets. Helped define him for us. The Bandit made art dangerous; Freddy made the danger cool. That’s Freddy’s gift.

“We’re pivoting now, enhancing Freddy’s brand. Chances are good that he’ll be a judge on the next season of America Has Dreams. And he’s getting into producing. We’re looking at a clothing line. His screenplays are keeping him busy. Freddy’s blowing up, man. Boom, boom, boom.” Bodie punches the air with alternating fists.

Off screen, the filmmaker asks Bodie what he thinks this story tells us about Los Angeles.

“About L.A.? How the hell should I know?”

Then Bodie leans forward, elbows on desk, chin on folded hands.

“I will say this, though. There are three types of people out here: those who make art, those who sell it, and those who steal it. And this story has all three.”

Vertical dissolve.

Echo is sitting in her car with the window down. It starts to rain. Her painting of the hangmen and jacarandas lays at an angle on the back seat floor.

The filmmaker asks if there’s anything she would say to Freddy if he was standing here right now. Echo doesn’t miss a beat.

“I would tell him that the lizard died in the bathtub for a reason. It never belonged with the flowers.”

She switches on her windshield wipers and drives off camera.

Adam Golub

Adam Golub is professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he teaches courses on literature, popular culture, music, and monsters. His creative work has appeared in Atticus Review, Drunk Monkeys, Indicia, The Bookends Review, Pulp Literature, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us (McFarland, 2017) and the author of academic articles on topics including fandom, true crime, the blues, and cold war youth culture. Twitter: @adamgolub