Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Like “Dark Flower,” “Aloha” (I Am The Night Episode 5) opens by taking us back again to a turning point for Tamar: it’s 1949, and she’s in a courtroom while a psychiatrist describes her as a demented sex maniac with an Elektra complex. When he further tries to discredit her by mentioning that she even thought Hodel killed the Black Dahlia, derisive laughter ripples through the room.
In 1965, Jay delivers Peter a draft of his Brody Styles exoneration and updates him on the Hodel story: he’s not only found Tamar; he’s also found her daughter. He convinces Peter to send him and Fauna to Hawaii to interview Tamar, but Peter won’t let him go without a warning: “Remember where you are….Emperor Trajan was betrayed by his own men, okay? Buried up to his neck in sand, his counselor Vespasian said to him, ‘Memento quo nunc est.‘ Remember where you are.” This…does not line up with any reports of Trajan I found, but since Jay can’t hop on Wikipedia to correct him, he takes it as a non sequitur and goes on his way.
Jimmy Lee is preparing to take Fauna home with her but, of course, can’t know the reason Fauna seems so jumpy is that she’s watching for Jay. When he comes to pick her up, Jimmy Lee is furious and tears up their tickets to Hawaii. Fauna checks that he has a receipt, so when Jimmy Lee chases Jay out with a kitchen knife, Fauna just climbs out a bedroom window. Aloha!
The address Fauna had found in Corinna’s book turns out to be a local businesswoman who holds mail for people with no legal address, and she doesn’t know Tamar. Jay and Fauna then end up at a bar, where he recalls his last trip to Hawaii: on his way back from the Korean war. “They should’ve trained us how to come back, you know?” Their server doesn’t know Tamar either, but directs them to a beach where people are squatting. When Jay goes to the bathroom, the day-drunkest of a group of uniformed sailors drags Fauna onto the dance floor; Jay separates them before things get out of hand, but when the sailor wants to fight him, Jay is prepared, and swings a billiard ball in his sock at the guy’s face.
Without a per diem, Jay rents one motel room, with one bed; Fauna is alarmed, but he assures her that he likes sleeping in the car. This proves untrue when he has a nightmare of being back at the bar, served by Sepp and surrounded by Korean soldiers he’s killed, and Fauna comes out to wake him, having heard his screams from inside. She guesses what it was about, and assures him that he killed Sepp in their defense: “God’ll forgive you.” This sets Jay to muse that the Marines didn’t prepare him for how good it would feel to kill people: “You pay a price: they own you and you take a life. They come with you, they come with you forever.” Not knowing how to respond, Fauna gets indignant, telling Jay she’s only alive because he killed Sepp: “I don’t care how it made you feel.”
Both feeling better the next day, they run out of road trying to find the beach camp and are about to give up when they see kids playing on a ridge and hear the boy call the girl “Fauna.” Teen Fauna calls out to them and they chase the kids home, where a brunette in her forties emerges.
As she and Fauna walk on the beach, Tamar confirms what Jay had surmised: her family sent her to the convent during her pregnancy, and took Fauna away without letting Tamar hold her. Fauna asks about her father, and Tamar admits that he wasn’t “Negro”; she put that on Fauna’s birth certificate because she wanted her “to belong,” and because she admired black people. Frustrated, Fauna brings up Corinna’s claim that Tamar was dead. Tamar says Corinna hates her for what Tamar said at “the trial” — the first Fauna’s heard about it. Tamar says that Hodel had been charged with “improper acts,” right before Fauna was born, finally admitting, “He made love to me.” Fauna puts the pieces together and runs.
At the car, Fauna yells at Jay for not telling her what’s really going on. When she asks whether Hodel really is her father, Jay lamely replies, “Sometimes you catch a bad one, Fauna.” “My whole life has been a bad one,” she spits. “All my life, I just wanted to be something, and I’m just made of garbage and shit.” Jay tries to spin that this means she’s figured out the truth about life: “Death and evil — they’re around us all the time. And the line between is, um, it’s thin as tissue paper. You got the bad news. And you gotta know it for the rest of your life.” This is not a comfort to Fauna, who sets off walking back to their motel.
Jay calls Peter to update him on the story and ask to keep Fauna out of it. Peter says Fauna’s the key, and dangles a foreign correspondent posting to Vietnam if Jay brings him this story.
So Jay returns to Tamar’s, saying he covered Hodel’s trial and believed her: “What happened to you doesn’t have to happen again. We can stop it.” Tamar tells Jay how connected Hodel is; when he brings up the Black Dahlia murder, she bitterly laughs that “everyone” knew Hodel did it. She brings out a pile of paintings Hodel has made and sent her. “The police thought that they owned George. But if you own somebody, sometimes it turns out that they own you. You’ll find out. He already owns you.” There’s Elizabeth Short, Janis Brewster, and many others.
When Jay and Fauna return to L.A. in the midst of the Watts Rebellion, Jay meets Peter not at their usual bar, but in Chinatown. (Film fans will nod knowingly.) Before he goes in, Jay tells Fauna his suspicions about Hodel’s murder of the Black Dahlia. “Sometimes you catch a bad one, huh?” she sighs.
Peter’s already drunk as Jay lays out his evidence for Hodel’s guilt. Peter wants to see Fauna, and when Jay repeats his wish to leave her out of it, Peter squeals, “They can’t, they can’t!” Peter then monologues about what he learned about evil as a “baby reporter” at the liberation of Dachau, ending with his earlier warning: “Just remember where you are.” Jay is in…an ambush: the restaurant is full of cops, who draw on him as Billis comes out from the back.
From his car, Fauna sees Jay getting marched out in handcuffs, but reads his expression and doesn’t interfere. She returns to Big Momma’s empty house, and calls Jimmy Lee to apologize for what she put her through. “It don’t matter who your birth mother is: you’re always going to be Jimmy Lee’s little girl,” says Jimmy Lee. The sweet moment ends when Fauna asks about the trial and Jimmy Lee angrily tells her to stay in Hawaii. Fauna says she’s back in L.A., but Jimmy Lee doesn’t care: “You ain’t never gotta come back here as far as I’m concerned.”
Once she’s hung up, Jimmy Lee realizes she has bigger problems: Hodel is in her house. “Fauna’s in Hawaii?” he inquires. “It seems,” she lies. Hodel is courtly as he pretty openly prepares to murder Jimmy Lee, even scolding her for the state of her knives; she pours extra oil into a pan on the stove, and when a pounding comes at the door, she throws the hot oil at Hodel’s face, but misses. Hodel has stabbed her several times in the back and fled when Jimmy Lee’s neighbor runs in.
As Ella Fitzgerald sings “Street Of Dreams,” all our characters live their nightmares: Peter drinks guiltily; Jay gazes resignedly through the bars of his cell; alone, Fauna cries; and Hodel embarks on his 522-mile drive back to L.A….and this story’s conclusion.
Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano is the co-founder of TelevisionWithoutPity.com and Fametracker.com (R.I.P.), as well as Previously.tv. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210), and has contributed to New York, the New York Times magazine, Vulture, The Awl, and Slate, among many others. She lives in Austin.
