Embellishment by Claudia Caplan

Embellishment

The Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail is one of the largest jails in the world.  According to Mother Jones magazine, it is also one of the worst.  County, as it’s known, is notoriously overcrowded and violent. Surprisingly, it is not in some desolate area on the fringes of the vast sprawl that is L.A. County. It is in the middle of downtown adjacent to Chinatown and just a short drive (if there is such a thing in Southern California) from Dodger Stadium.  

The process of visiting the Central Jail is tedious and time-consuming.  Women – for probably 90% of the visitors are women – line up several hours before the appointed time.  Reflecting the incarcerated population of the United States, the vast majority are young African-Americans and Latinas.  Many of them have children in tow including some with newborns.  When their turn comes, they will hold the baby up to a pane of glass embedded with wire mesh to give the child’s father a first look.  In line, most of the conversation revolves around one simple question, “What’s yours in for?”  Answers like drug dealing and gang murder are commonplace.  As you approach the head of the line, no-nonsense prison personnel examine everything you’ve brought with you. Handbags are unceremoniously dumped out and the contents are reviewed.  There are no strip searches.  The next step is a metal detector. Discounting the barbed wire and the pervasive sense of menace, you might as well be at a busy airport. 

I was not the typical visitor to County.  I lived in the affluent hipster neighborhood of Los Feliz. I worked as a creative director at an advertising agency in West L.A.  What was “mine” in for?  He had a difficult time discerning the difference between his money and that of others.  His view of what constituted a personal possession was, to put it kindly, fluid.  Despite his failings, I needed to do more than just field his nightly collect calls from jail.  I needed to see him.  I needed to support him.  And I needed to figure out which tile design worked best for my kitchen backsplash. My man in jail was neither husband nor lover.  He was my interior decorator.

I met Ken at a party.  It was a party at my former boss’s house.  Howie had just moved his family from a small-ish house in Bel Air to a large-ish house in Deep Canyon.  When I walked in, I was immediately struck by the décor.  It was stylish without being trendy. It was personal and it had personality. It reflected Howie and his wife but somehow, in some subtle way, it went them one better. There was no doubt that it was professionally done but it didn’t scream “decorator”  as many L.A. homes of the rich and tasteless did.  Howie and Carol were far from tasteless.  They had the good taste to choose the right person to express who they were. I asked Carol who had done the house and in her typically vague way, she said, “Oh Ken’s around here somewhere.”  I found Ken.  He was a gay man in his twenties.  Preppy, charming, Ken looked like Jim Morrison if he had gone to Andover.  Dark hair, bright blue eyes and that dishy quality of an out gay man in the early 90s when it had suddenly become okay to be openly gay – even, or perhaps especially, in the time of AIDS.  Ken was fun and funny.  After a ten minute conversation, we were friends.  He walked me around and showed me everything he had done and the thought process behind it.  Would he come over and look at my house?  Sure.  

Ken came over.  He arrived driving an early ‘60s red Coupe de Ville convertible the size of an aircraft carrier.  He had style.  He had ideas. Ideas for wallpaper and built-in bookshelves. New furniture, new configurations, reframing of art, rugs, knick-knacks. He wanted to go shopping.  I wanted to go shopping.  I had no idea how I would afford his ideas but I knew it would be fun.  

For our shopping trip to the design showrooms, he showed up in a yellow late model Jaguar.  He laughed and said that in L.A., Jags were the preferred vehicles of Beverly Hills divorcées.  He had always wanted to write a sitcom called “Jag Ladies” about formerly wealthy matrons living in their cars — the last vestige of their previously opulent lifestyles.  That was his sense of humor.  It was also mine.  Our relationship was one huge never-ending in-joke.  Ken regaled me with stories of his upbringing in San Diego as an only child of an old-money older couple.  There was magnificent jewelry, priceless antiques, multiple homes, fabulous yachts and on and on.  His father was gone but his mother lived an elegant life in La Jolla.  My husband was embarrassingly jealous of Ken.  Rather, he was jealous of what I shared with Ken that I didn’t share with him.

Ken was choosing amazing things for the house.  He took me to little consignment boutiques filled with the outcast items of Hollywood types who were too bored or too broke to keep what they had originally purchased.  He took fabric samples from showrooms and used them to upholster chair seats.  I kept asking him, what do I owe you?  What did this cost?  And he kept telling me not to worry about it or he suggested I write checks to him for surprisingly nominal amounts.   He said he had plenty of rich clients who footed his bills.  

Ken quickly became part of the family.  I took him to D.C. to meet my mother.  My mother, who hates everyone, was thoroughly charmed by him.  In his soft navy cashmere blazer and khakis, he looked every bit the sweet young man. When she came to visit, she insisted that Ken escort her around L.A.  Despite my husband’s misgivings, Ken was a hit.  And my house had never looked cooler.  Ken had ideas I would have never been brave enough to execute on my own.  Intense floral Ralph Lauren wallpaper appeared above the wainscoting in the dining room.  Yellow silk curtains puddled on the floor of the living room.  The bedroom was painted pink. How much did all of this cost?  I had no idea.

It was the summer after I met Ken. My phone rang.  It was Howie.  

“I have something to tell you.  I have to warn you. I’m so sorry. We think Ken is stealing from us.  He and our personal assistant.” 

For a certain class of people in Los Angeles, personal assistants were their crucial support system. They picked up the groceries and the kids from school.  They paid the bills and made travel arrangements.  They were the invisible force that made everything go with the least amount of friction.  

“What are you talking about?”  

“There’s money missing.  Lots of money.  And I have this cashmere blazer that disappeared for months.  I thought maybe the dry cleaner had lost it. It reappeared in my closet and there was a receipt in the pocket from a restaurant in D.C.  Wasn’t Ken in D.C. with you?”  

“Yes but…”   

“And that isn’t all.  We have these two really expensive white camelback sofas that have completely disappeared.”

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. I was waiting for new living room furniture to arrive and we were having people over.  Ken said not to worry.  He would have something for me until my stuff was delivered.  As Howie continued to talk, I looked into my living room at the two newly-arrived white camelback sofas.

I had to believe Ken.  He was my friend.  It was a misunderstanding.  It was the personal assistant.  Ken told me he had always been suspicious of him.  I was furious at Howie.  How could he accuse Ken of stealing?  Ken wasn’t just someone who worked for Howie, he was his friend.  He was Carol’s friend.  I stopped talking to Howie.  I had to take sides and without question, I was on Ken’s side.  

In the midst of all this, we sold our house and bought a new one in Sherman Oaks, a total gut job.  It needed everything.  New floors, new windows, new doors, new kitchen, new bathrooms, an addition for a family room.  Ken and I searched out ideas in every shelter magazine from Architectural Digest to Elle Décor.  Room by room we made a plan and put it into effect.  Just to be on the safe side, and because my husband insisted, I paid all the suppliers directly rather than have the money go through Ken.  We were living in a tiny rental house with a toddler and a dog and we couldn’t wait to move into the new house and have some room again. 

Another morning.  Another phone call.  It was Ken’s best friend Peter who lived in the same apartment building in West Hollywood as Ken did.

“They’ve arrested Ken.”

“What?”

“The police. They’ve arrested Ken.  He’s in jail.  You have to help him.” 

“Peter that’s crazy. Why hasn’t his mother bailed him out?”

“They won’t take the trailer as collateral.”

So there it was.  The jewels, the cars, the houses, the wealth.  All were embellishments. Figments of Ken’s active imagination and his desire to be who he was not.  The trailer?  Now that was real. 

And so, Ken and I worked on the house in a new way.  Every evening a collect call came from County.  Every evening we talked about faucets and marble and lighting and flooring.  Somehow even jail hadn’t changed Ken.  He was as funny and gossipy as ever.  He was there at the same time as the parricide Menendez brothers and he had amusing stories about Lyle’s toupee and which was the cute one and whether he thought they had really been molested by their father.  Through Ken’s eyes, jail didn’t seem all that awful.  Years before Orange Is the New Black, he made it sound like a quirky television show. Ken mailed me a report written by a Department of Corrections psychiatrist diagnosing him as manic-depressive.  This, he said, was the reason he was charming and grandiose and a thief.   

I went to County and waited in line to show him fabric swatches and tiles through the glass of the visiting cubicle. Eventually, I bailed him out so I could get the house done and we could move in.  He had a trial and was ordered to pay a fine plus time served.  It turned out that Howie wasn’t the only client he had stolen from.  My husband was constantly worried that Ken would find a way to steal from us and the pressure became too much.  And there was my late stepfather’s rocking chair sent out for upholstery that never came back.  My son kept asking where it was.  Inevitably, Ken and I drifted apart.  Too many bad things had happened. Too little was left to hold us together.

Ten years later, I got divorced. Without my ex-husband around, I suddenly felt free to miss Ken.  I called him and we went to dinner and we were friends again. It was as though no time had passed.  Ken and another guy owned a chic little resale boutique on La Brea and he seemed to be doing well.  My son’s bar mitzvah was coming up and Ken helped me with the design for the party.  Instead of screaming “bar mitzvah,” it was a fall palette of leaves and apples, reds and yellows.  As usual when Ken was involved, it was tasteful and just different enough.

It was my birthday. I was at the movies by myself.  I was waiting for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love to start.  My phone rang.  It was the second time Peter had ever called me.

“Ken’s dead.”

“What?”

Ken’s dead.  The police were closing in on him again and he couldn’t stand it.  He surrounded himself with pictures of friends and family and he swallowed a bottle of pills with a bottle of bourbon and he’s dead. I’ll let you know about the memorial service.  I have to go.”

He hung up.  I sat in the theater, numb.  I stayed for the movie anyway.  It was awful.

********

Last year I watched American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace on FX.  Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan was Ken.  He was the apparently sweet preppy gay boy from San Diego who couldn’t help but create another identity because he was so mortified by who he really was.  I’m not suggesting that Ken was capable of murder let alone a string of brutal multiple murders. But there was something there.  Something of the manic in Criss’s portrayal evoked Ken as surely as if Darren Criss had studied him.  He dressed like him and he even physically resembled him.  The lies were so similarly crafted.  As each new episode came on, I tried not to watch. I had to watch.  And as I watched, I began to believe that it had all been a con.  I had never been invited to a funeral or a memorial service.  Ken’s death was just another con in a long string of deceptions.  Aided and abetted by Peter, he was doing what he’d always done.  I had no idea why he’d want to con me.  But then again, why not?  

I became so obsessed with the idea that Ken was still alive, I began searching for him on the internet.  I even did some of those paid background checks to see what I could dig up.  I found his old addresses in West Hollywood and Del Mar.  I found the date of his mother’s death. Tantalizingly, I found no date of death for Ken, just a sequence of addresses in and around Los Angeles and a phone number I called that seemed to be disconnected.  I was living on the East Coast but had a business trip to L.A. so I decided to check out an address that sounded promising not far from where he had last lived.  It was a classic Hancock Park low-rise apartment building.  Stylish and charming.  Just what Ken would choose.  Weirdly, the stucco was painted a sunny yellow almost identical to the shade I had just painted my house in Maryland. I walked around. I took pictures.  Finally, one of the residents walked out to ask what I was doing and I felt too foolish to stay or explain.  

I’ve known people who died.  I accepted their deaths.  I don’t believe in an afterlife.  But I also don’t necessarily believe that Ken would kill himself. I probably never really did believe it. But I do still believe that one day I may turn a corner in New York and walk right into him.  I will not be surprised. He will not be abashed.

Claudia Caplan worked in Los Angeles and New York as an advertising copywriter and creative director.  Currently, she is a history major at Columbia University.  Her writing on business has appeared in Advertising Age, Adweek, and Business Insider.  Her writing on sports has appeared in The Fields of Green.