Behind the tailgate I have a jack and a worn spare. It will take twenty minutes to change the tire as Buzzcut postures and guffaws to the locals. Because in my former life I had sprung for the gaudy and useless eighteen-inch alloy spoke wheels, the big tire will cost me a day’s wage to replace, and put me closer to the limit on my newly acquired, pauper-class Fleet Bank MasterCard on which I will pay 28 percent. And thus I will sink further into debt. I walk toward Buzzcut. He pretends not to notice. I’m twenty feet from him and he looks up at me with a sneer.
“Did you slash my tire?” I don’t know why I’m even asking. I don’t anticipate a response that would satisfy.
“Say what, Captain?” he smirks.
I reflexively catapult headlong into unyielding righteousness and repeat, “Did you slash my fucking tire?!!”
Without responding he opens the door of the pickup, gets in and revs the big V8. I move to the front of the truck and he looks at me with a put-on look of incredulity. I hold my ground. I see his right arm move and I hear the beefy truck’s transmission thunk into gear.
Defiance is not necessarily a bad posture. In the best of circumstances it demonstrates sincerity and courage. But in the rock-paper-scissors ordering of the Volunteer Veterans parking lot, it doesn’t top his wise-guy disdain. So I alter my stance and feign diffidence. As Buzzcut stares me down from the driver’s seat, I shrug as if to say, “None of this is worth my valuable attention.” I turn away for effect and start to walk. It must be undoubtedly clear to any street-wise observer that I am just trying to save face.
Confident and with me out of his path, Buzzcut pulls out. That’s when I go for the chunk of cinderblock that I’ve held in the corner of my vision. It’s a couple of steps away on the asphalt, put there to hold the swinging gate open. As Buzzcut roars by I grab the block, loft it over my shoulder and let fly at the passenger-side window.
There is, within the instant of an act of violence, not a suspension of the notion of consequence as many might say, but rather an invitation to consequence. It is not only that one isn’t aware that there may be a penalty for a transgression, but that one is so briefly, irrationally consumed with anger at one’s self, rather than the other person, that one relishes and invites the consequence.
It is incontrovertibly satisfying to see safety glass shattering into a million pieces. I brim with adolescent awe. Suddenly, where there was once a window there are thousands of tiny pebbles of glass. Filling the newly created void is the slack-jawed face of Buzzcut. And then he’s not there anymore. He’s out of the car and coming fast at me. I look around to see if anybody’s going to be brave and good enough to come between us. The auctioneer fades away. The Mexicans retreat. I reverse a couple of steps. Buzzcut’s face is beet red. His giant forearms are cocked for action.
I put my hands in front of my face. He regards this as an invitation. I see something coming at me, perhaps a fist. It’s over in an instant. Lights out.
Chapter 2
I wake up lying on the asphalt. A concerned Chicana stands over me. Time has escaped me. This is new.
“Did I…?” I begin to ask. I have never passed out before.
“Tres minutos,” she replies, holding up three fingers. My mind slips and I dig for traction. My head throbs unspeakably. My cheek is sore and there is a raw bump on the back of my skull—no doubt where I hit the ground. I sit up and look around. Cinderblock wall. Chain-link fence. Rusted pickups. I know where I am. I look over and see an empty space where Buzzcut’s Dodge was. Oh, yes.
It could be worse. Synapses will reconnect. I start to get up, but I am interrupted by shooting, numbing, excruciating pain radiating from my shoulder and chest. I return to the pavement. The woman looks at me puzzled.
I try to reach for my phone, but the pain in my shoulder is too much for my right arm and I am propped on my left.
“My phone. In my pocket,” I cough out.
She hesitates, and then seems to comprehend. She reaches into my pocket, pulls out my phone, and puts it in my open hand. I dial Nick. As I tell him my story I already know what he’ll say. Nick doesn’t disappoint. “What are you doing in Anaheim? I told you not to go to Anaheim.”
“I know you did, but could you please help me out?”
Nick and Doreen arrive as a couple about an hour after my call. Nick owns two Toyota trucks with camper shells. They drive the ratty, ten-year-old one with chalked and scratched gray paint and torn upholstery. When Nick is scouting books he doesn’t want anybody to suppose there’s a living in what he’s doing and to expect more than pennies for their books. The rotting truck makes the case eloquently. The shiny big-tired, four-wheel-drive model at home has a near-new two thousand miles on it and is reserved for nights on the town. For sunny-day recreation he owns a pristine, totally optioned and chromed Harley-Davidson Duoglide.
When they arrive I am sitting in the passenger seat of my Volvo, very much the pariah of the parking lot. Once it had become clear that I would survive, the locals went out of their way not to notice my presence. My tire was still flat, and no doubt I could have paid someone ten bucks to put on the spare, but my ribs hurt far too much to drive home. When I made a list of possible rescuers, only Nick and Yellow Cab came to mind.
“You look turrible,” Nick says as he approaches me. Nick left Queens thirty years ago, but Queens didn’t leave him.
“Thanks for coming.”
“I couldn’t leave you here.” He looks around warily. “You could get killed.”
Doreen emerges from the car, looks at me and then Nick who studies the flat tire. “Tell me you got a spare, Ralphie,” Nick says.
My real name is Mitchell. Mitchell Fourchette. I’m often openly addressed by my moniker “Ralph” or “Ralphie” by compatriots in the book biz because I have a habit of wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts. They fit better and last longer than the other brands, even if the little embroidered polo pony on the front is an affectation. In my former life I would buy them at department stores for fifty bucks apiece. Now I buy them secondhand at thrift stores for about six.
I make a move to help Nick find the spare and wince in pain.
“Jeez,” Nick shakes his head admonishingly.
“You told Ralphie not to go, didn’t you, baby?” Doreen interjects. Nick ignores her, as is his custom and sets to work replacing my tire. Doreen offers me a bottle of Los Angeles tap water repackaged in a battered Evian container as Nick finishes the job smoothly, his honed street sense dictating that quick and quiet is the safest path out of Anaheim. He chauffeurs me back to his house in the Volvo as Doreen follows in the truck. As we drive, Nick complains to me about her tailgating.
I lie on the sofa at Nick’s house, head throbbing, ribs aching, Doreen enters from the kitchen with a steaming mug and a handful of tablets and capsules.
“Valerian tea,” she says as she offers the mug. She’s wearing a seedy maroon bathrobe. Dull, stringy, brown hair hangs long over her shoulders. Her face is lathered with drugstore makeup.
“Do you have any Advil?” I ask. I am pretty sure I haven’t broken anything. I now can flex my shoulder with only minor discomfort. It is my rib cage that really pains me.
“This is better,” she says offering the capsules.
“It’s not going to make me hallucinate or anything?”
“Everything is a hallucination. All we know is what the mind sees.”
“He’s not here for Zen, Doreen,” says Nick. Nick is a small man, wiry, probably in his early sixties. His hair is Clairol-dyed in an unlikely Roy Orbison black sheen and combed neatly across a large bald area above his wavy forehead. His face is rodent-like and perpetually on edge, as if he is only too aware that to most of the world he is prey.
“It’s Chinese herbs. It’s better than Advil,” she proffers.
I know Doreen had a previous proclivity for combining vodka and seconal. Nick told me recently that she spends two evenings a week in a court-mandated rehab program. But I am ready for anything. I ta
ke three capsules from her and down them with some hot, sweet-tasting tea, a small part of me hoping for something spectacular. I adjust my body on the sofa and a dagger of pain assaults my chest.
“Maybe you broke a rib,” says Doreen. I nod. I expect what inevitably follows—a recitation of those supposedly obscure factoids that everyone knows, but to which we are nonetheless required to ritually pay homage.
“There’s nothing you can do, anyway,” she continues. “Same treatment if it’s bruised or broken. Don’t do anything. If it’s better in a week it’s bruised. If it’s better in six weeks it’s broken. They used to tape them.”
“Yeah. I know they don’t tape ribs anymore.” When will the last person die who still remembers that doctors once wrapped tape around broken ribs in a futile attempt to promote healing? Am I part of that generation? It seems they taped ribs when I was very young.
The diagnosis suits me fine. Having been drummed out of Blue Cross months ago for missing payments, I can do nicely without a trip to the emergency room.
I am mostly tuned in to the roar of big diesel trucks. Nick lives in a two-story converted garage behind a house in West Los Angeles. From the window of his back bathroom you can read the numbers on the license plates on the trucks barreling down the Santa Monica Freeway. You can hear them from anywhere in the house, even with the windows closed and the curtains drawn. You can smell them too, along with indigenous incense, mildew and cat pee.
Nick owns the front house and rents it for eighteen hundred a month to a twenty-something who edits music videos. Nick bought the place twenty-four years ago for ninety thousand dollars and converted the garage ten years ago. Being a landlord nets him about a thousand a month after he pays his mortgage, and even with the fumes and the noise, the house is worth an instant eight hundred thousand on its 40x120 lot. This rodent-like scrounge and one-time refrigerator repairman had figured out that Westside real estate trumped the tech stock high flyers of the NASDAQ, something neither Hotchkiss nor Yale managed to teach me.
“Did I tell you not to go to Anaheim?” he asks for the twentieth time.
“You told me, Nick.”
He turns to Doreen. “I told him. I told him that those guys in Anaheim are animals.”
“They’re animals down there.” Doreen nods in sage agreement.
There can be no question that Nick and Doreen’s familiarity with life on the nether rungs outstrips mine, and if they say that they are animals in Anaheim, then it must be so. It is reassuring to me that I am in the presence of their expertise and experience. Everything in my own life has been laid open to question, and Nick and Doreen have become my anchors as I am buffeted by the rips and currents of doubt.
It is a testament to the eternal power of that which works that Nick and Doreen found each other. Doreen is easily two inches taller than the diminutive Nick. Her parched skin hangs loosely on a thin, bony frame. Her teeth are umber from cigarettes and she has a red scar on her forehead where a careless dermatologist once crudely excised a sketchy keratosis. No doubt they were a marginally more attractive couple when they met eleven years ago. Perhaps Nick didn’t have a need to dye his hair. Doreen probably had a warmer and suppler epidermis in gentler days before court-mandated rehab. But let’s face it. Nick could have walked down the beach boardwalk in Santa Monica on any day in summer and seen beautiful young women with tight honey skin, pouty lips, firm bellies and flared hips. As a younger, but nonetheless scrawny and shriveled prole with a demeanor that might charitably be described as interior, it wouldn’t take long for him to find out that these women were unavailable to him. But what was his process for so comfortably aspiring to tobacco-stained Doreen? And so not to appear as unsympathetic and sexist, let us consider the reverse. What was it that Doreen found in Nick that made her so content to be nestled into the crook of his bony arm on the sofa, watching cheap porn on a fuzzy projection TV? When and why did they lower their aspirations? If I could study Nick and Doreen, and clarify the mysteries of their mutual attraction, then perhaps I could unravel the disappointment and disaster that has become my life and free myself from the struggle that dogs me and subsumes me.
Why, for example, did I choose the chimerical JDS Uniphase, Lucent and Qualcomm when I could have chosen the reliable, stalwart and available Fidelity Asset Manager balanced fund conservatively managed by seasoned MBAs? I could have massaged my portfolio of premium large cap stocks with a 40 percent mix of short- and long-term bonds to cushion any possible decline in equities. Just as Nick would have been predictably rebuffed by the beach hardbodies for overreaching, I was rebuffed as a hapless untermench by the NASDAQ.
My eyelids laze to mid-pupil. I begin to drift. I am grateful that Nick and Doreen came to my rescue without hesitation, without the customary offering of reluctant, insincere alternatives preferred by former friends. (“Of course I’d be glad to come if you need me, but it’ll take me forever to get to Anaheim from here. Don’t you think you’d be better off if you called an ambulance or the Auto Club?”) If Caleb were ten years older and eligible to have a driver’s license, I know that he would have rushed to his dad’s rescue.
I think of the look on Caleb’s face when the family court mediator asked him to chat with her for a little while by himself and leave his parents in the waiting room. He responded to her false smile with a brave nod and followed her into her office. He had to know that even though his father and mother struggled to spare him responsibility by appearing light and jolly for this occasion, the stakes were monstrously high for him. I am sure that he spoke well of me on the other side of the door. I hope he told her how I make him cashew nut butter sandwiches on honey wheat bread with raisins and sunflower seeds after school and how he has his own little desk and chair in a corner of the living room of my small apartment on Idaho Avenue. California law requires mediation.
3170. (a) If it appears on the face of a petition, application, or other pleading to obtain or modify a temporary or permanent custody or visitation order that custody, visitation, or both are contested, the court shall set the contested issues for mediation.
The office smelled faintly of old magazines and dirty diapers. “I’ll be out in the hall,” I said to True. We were both there because neither of us trusted the other to deliver Caleb to the mediator without infusing him with last-minute bias. In fact, our white-hot enmity had less to do with the past circumstances that broke us apart and more to do with our anger at each other for what each perceived as an effort to deprive the other of the presence of our beloved child. Our feelings were strong, elemental and predictable. True held a month-old Time magazine in front of her face. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the excited molecules of the shiny pages spontaneously combusted under the focused beam of her angry gaze. She didn’t reply, didn’t look up. Did the State of California really expect me to sit there in the waiting room and submit to her anger and contempt for the twenty minutes that Caleb was with the mediator?
The mediator, a superficially sincere young woman in a Macy’s suit, had explained to us on a previous visit that she wanted to talk to Caleb alone, but that their policy is to never ask a child which parent the child would prefer to live with.
“Talking to Caleb will help me assist you in developing an effective parent plan,” she said as she approximated eye contact. Effective parent plan? How about we cut him in half at his balance point? That would be effective.
Let me tell you about an effective parent plan. A year ago I moved out of our big house in Mar Vista and into a one-bedroom apartment in a nondescript triplex in Santa Monica. We can get into the circumstances later, but you can probably guess that they were very painful and subject to a Rashomonic panoply of interpretation.
Unlike nearby Santa Monica and Culver City, which are incorporated towns and have their own school systems, Mar Vista is part of the bottom-of-the-barrel Los Angeles Unified School District. The dilapidated local school on 27th Street has the air of a concrete and chain-link prison. Local gang graffi
ti adorns the exterior walls. Inside it festers with oversized classes, tired, pessimistic teachers and nurture-starved children.
Santa Monica has very good schools. My $800-a-month, rent-controlled apartment in the posher northern part of the city is within the district boundaries of the jewel of the elementary school crown, Bayside School. It is recently painted, cheery and benign. Its classroom walls are proudly papered with student art and teacher decoupage. If any good was to come out of the wrenching dissolution of our family, it was that Caleb would be upgraded to kindergarten at Bayside School.
Even True couldn’t deny the simple good sense of Caleb’s attending Bayside in what she could only perceive to be my territory. We usually had limited, tense communications regarding his welfare and upbringing. They occurred exclusively by telephone. We traded custody by picking up Caleb at the end of the preschool day to spare him an encounter dripping with the residue of our enmity. Although we undoubtedly traumatized him by making him a pawn in our protracted battle, there was no doubt that each of us loved him to the depths of our souls and beyond. Each of us was absolutely convinced that we acted exclusively in Caleb’s best interests.
In August, two weeks before Caleb was to begin school at Bayside by mutual agreement, True called me. I knew from the cool hello that her agenda would be fixed and unpleasant.
“I’ve been thinking.” (I took this as warning.) “I don’t know if it’s good for Caleb to be in a place that’s overrun with pampered rich brats.” (Uh-oh.)
“They’re five and six years old. It’s not like they’re all driving Porsches and eating off the grazing menu at Spago,” I replied, knowing full well that sarcasm never works in my favor.
“I thought you were the great populist.”
In fact, despite being a half-black and half-Italian Catholic, I had gone to Hotchkiss School, an Episcopalian boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut. It was the sort of experience that would make one either a Republican or an anarchist.
Some Books Aren’t for Reading Page 2