“I had most of them. I sold the Raphael book and I can’t find the motherfucker.”
He pores through a musty file box of art books that are part of a series detailing the complete works of European painters, not finding what he wants. Sweat drips along his cheeks in the hotbox of a shed.
“Helmet Head came to my house last night,” I tell him.
“What the fuck for?”
“I don’t know how he even found out where I live.”
“I know this miserable fucking frog book is here…” He continues rummaging.
“He scares the shit out of me.”
“What was he doing?”
“I think he was trying to scare me.”
“What does he care about you, Ralph? He’s got so much crazy crap buzzing inside his head he’s got no room for you.”
“I had a sort of a confrontation with him yesterday morning.”
“A confrontation? I thought you were a smart guy.”
“You were wrong.”
“Jeez, Ralph. You don’t want to go rattling Helmet Head’s cage.”
“I want my book back.”
“Well, maybe you’re just fucked. Maybe that’s all there is to it.”
“I need the money.”
“You don’t even know that you got a real first edition. Look, I know how it is…things start to go south on you and then you start ruminating and you start thinking like I couldn’t have gotten in this place if I didn’t have enemies and you start putting all your attention there…”
“The other side of that is you hang around and be a patsy and everything in life continues to fuck you over until you’re dead.”
“It all leads to the same place, Ralph. Doesn’t it?”
“Where do you think he sells his stuff, Nick?”
“How do I know? Maybe on the moon.”
“EBay?”
“Probably.”
“How do I find his store site?” I ask.
“If he’s got your book, you could search for it.”
“I already have.”
“Well, he probably hasn’t listed it yet.”
“Somebody has to know his last name.”
“Jeez, Ralph. I don’t know if his first name is really Hector.”
“You know he speaks Japanese? I heard him at some garage sale where he talked to the sellers in perfect Japanese.”
“How do you know it was perfect?”
“It sounded perfect.”
“Maybe he was raised in Japan.”
“Except his Russian is perfect, too.”
“Can I give you a little advice, Ralph? You know how you’re always asking me for advice?”
“I am?”
“Yeah. Sometimes you act like a little kid, wanting to know about this book or that binding or whatever, or where to go. Remember, I told you not to go to Anaheim?”
I nod. He’s so right.
“So let it go, Ralph. Just let it go.”
I nod again as if he’s the sage. In fact I believe he is, but I know also there is something restive in me that can’t be quelled. It’s not just that I have been challenged by the loss of the book, but also that I am deep-inside thirsty for battle. But just for this moment, I will let it pass.
Chapter 15
To observe the arrival of the new millennium, True, Caleb and I drove north up Interstate 5 to Pearblossom, to watch the stars under the clear, cold, high desert skies. Nobody seemed to really know for sure how one appropriately honors a new millennium and there was pandemic nervousness—not only about the possible catastrophic effects of the computer glitch dubbed Y2K—but about how to celebrate after a thousand years of anticipation. Even grandiose plans by movie stars and captains of industry to spend the millennial moment in 747s flying directly over the international dateline while drinking champagne with a hundred of their closest friends seemed to ring hollow in the cosmic momentousness of the event. There were a couple of parties from the agency to which I was invited, and True had a bid from some faculty people who wanted to reserve a large table at an Italian restaurant in Encino, but neither of us wanted to celebrate without young Caleb, the genuine heir of the coming millennium.
I think True and I were both a little extra spooked about the year 2000. True’s Dad had died a few days after the New Year in 1999, and there was something in the chilly, declinated-sun, post-Christmas feel of the day that recalled the day we received the phone call from True’s uncle announcing the death of her saintly father.
We found a patch of desert ground off the side of a dirt road and laid down a tarp and a pair of sleeping bags that we zipped together. We brought Caleb’s stuffed animals, Moncrief the monkey and Mr. Dog the beagle, to help him feel secure. We packed raisins, marshmallows, apple juice and graham crackers for Caleb and a ten-year-old bottle of Moet and some smoked salmon with crackers and capers for us. And then we all snuggled into the sleeping bag under the canopy of the Milky Way. If the whole scene reeked of Spielbergian sentimentality, it was still wondrous and powerful to me.
I had a Casio digital watch that I had synchronized to the US Naval Observatory’s atomic clock through its website, and I could mark the second that we entered the year 2000. We decided we would avoid the hype that inevitably would come from listening to the radio, even the dulcet NPR. It was best just to be with each other and with the moment.
My little secret was that my consciousness was bifurcated for most of the evening. Yes, I did locate Orion’s belt with True’s assistance and we both got caught up in pointing it out to Caleb.
But another conversation was aggressively competing for space inside my brain as we urged Caleb to try to find the Big Dipper—a conversation related to Y2K and the safety of my investments. A few months before, there was widespread fear that the old mainframe computers that govern so much of our infrastructure—electric power grids, telephone switching, financial databases—would be brought down by an international digital aneurysm because of their inability to transition from the opening digits 19 to the digits 20 as we passed from 1999 to 2000. It seemed like a stunning lack of foresight—a mass clapping of hands to large foreheads. In many cases, the computers were so old that the young software designers didn’t even speak their language and computer engineer oldsters who spoke the moribund programming language of Fortran were dragged and herded out of retirement to coax some sense into the reprobate old mainframes. As of New Year’s Eve, the predictions of the pessimists were being discounted. Neither Y2K nor the stock market would brook any pessimism. And I was betting my bankroll with the optimists.
Meanwhile the NASDAQ had finished out 1999 at a stellar 4069, up 85.6 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up a comforting 25 percent for the year. The vaunted and ever-giving JDS Uniphase was performing a celebratory splitting of its shares once again on December 31. So as I snuggled under the stars with my family unit, I had reason to feel optimism as we entered the new millennium.
I had bought fifty shares of Qualcomm a week before at $612 a share. Qualcomm, which made communications chips, was selling for $25 a share in March, but several analysts had pegged a target of $1000 for middle 2000 and if recent experience was to be any guide, targets were always upped long before their arrival date.
I bought the Qualcomm shares from a margin account I set up with the earnings of my earlier investments. Otherwise, I would have had to transfer money from our central account and needed True’s signature. She would have given it if I asked, but it seemed simpler to use the margin account and I didn’t want to worry her. I waited by my computer watching the price, hoping for a dip. It was, however, on an inexorable rise, and when it went from $603 to $615 I regretted not having jumped in earlier. I resolved not to miss another opportunity.
I put in an online order with Schein at market price and in an instant I received confirmation of the purchase of fifty shares at $614¾ plus a $29 commission. That’s a total of $30,766.50. But when the stock goes to 1000, which even conservative Paine
Webber says it will, then my investment would be worth…it takes a moment…wait…
“There it is, there’s the Big Dipper,” said True to Caleb, interrupting my calculation. The young prince looked up to the sky where True pointed.
In round numbers, fifty shares are worth $50,000 and the profit on that is $19,000 and change. And on margin, I only had to put up $6,000. Which really means a 300 percent profit on my investment.
Caleb focused his attention for the moment in the general direction of the northern sky. I tried to finish my counting as I smiled in response. Nineteen thousand is a year of college. Four more deals like this set aside in CDs and I’d have college knocked. Task completed, I lowered my head to Caleb’s shoulder and followed his pointing finger to the area of Ursa Major and the Big Dipper. While in this position I found it irresistible to put my lips on his sweet neck and blow a raspberry. He giggled and pulled away. I grabbed him and repeated. I could have done it forever, but True asked me to stop.
“I’m giving him an astronomy lesson,” I replied.
“Let’s just be quiet and enjoy the solitude. Okay?”
I stopped, but Caleb’s eyes seem to plead for more.
“He wants it,” I begged.
“Resist,” said True.
I withdrew from the beloved neck. Silence crept over us. A shooting star flew across the sky. I looked to True and we acknowledged it with a glance. Before long I counted down on my Casio the seconds that ended 1999 and we toasted the New Year with champagne and kisses. After exhausted and over-stimulated Caleb had fallen deeply asleep, we put his head on a pillow and covered him with a blanket. True and I made love slowly and silently in our zipped-together sleeping bags under our heavenly canopy.
Chapter 16
It is Saturday morning and as I weigh Nick’s advice from the previous day to let go of my anger at HH, I am in the car, tracking down a yard sale far up one of the canyons north of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. It was advertised with just a small hand-lettered yard sale sign on a telephone pole on Sunset and didn’t appear in the paper or on Craigslist so it won’t be ravished early by the Craigslist herd. It’s a good neighborhood, moderately upscale and dotted with book-laden UCLA faculty. It’s promising.
I drive three miles up winding roads to a pleasant hillside house where a family is shedding old sets of dishes, faded dhurrie rugs, and (drum roll) their daughter’s high school textbooks—a shiny pile four feet high. They are pristine, as if she had never opened them.
It is not uncommon in upscale Brentwood for a private school child with divorced parents to have three sets of books. One for the mother’s house, one for the father’s, and one for the school locker—an indulgence that may seem nonsensical to most, but it neatly relieves the inevitable migration of a book to the wrong house and the consequent nuisance of having to retrieve it from a hostile ex-spouse. Let me not be judgmental of others in this matter and we will see how many books Caleb will have. I dread it.
Father and stepmother stand cheerily out front, enjoying their dress-up roles as smiling and solicitous neighborhood retailers. Feigning indifference I wander over to the books, trying to determine how old they are. If they’re current editions, they can be worth $50 to $75 each. If they’re out-of-date they’re worthless. Being glossy and new is a good sign. Newer books have brighter graphics, with banners announcing CDs and DVDs inside and passcode numbers for entry to supplementary websites. The newest ones have barcodes for thirteen-digit ISBN numbers, as opposed to the earlier standard of ten digits. But the only way to determine for sure if they’re valuable current editions is to look them up in my cell phone database.
I open the first one. It’s three years old. High school texts don’t update as often as college texts, and a three-year-old book has a good chance of being current. There are at least twenty of them here. I pull another one off and look at the publisher’s page. It’s a year old. This could be good for me.
“How much for the books?” I ask with flat affect, trying to mask my interest. The husband turns to the wife.
“How much for the books, Cher?”
“I don’t know. I think Jessica said five dollars,” she replies.
Five dollars each could be painful if a big percentage of them are outdated editions and worthless. If they were a buck or two each I could easily buy the lot and afford to toss the rejects after I looked them up.
“Where is she?” he asks.
“Sleeping, of course.” She turns to me with a shrug that says, “Teenagers…what are you gonna do?” I nod in sympathy.
I try to speed it along. I have other sales to go to, but if these books are current editions, they could make my day. About fifteen books times sixty dollars. Nine hundred bucks.
“How about forty for the lot?” I ask. If only half are up to date, I’d still be in my sweet spot with a ten-to-one profit.
“I think she said five each,” was the pleasant, but unyielding reply. I see I’m going to have to go through them individually and weed out the ones that are outdated and worthless.
These people don’t need to bargain. For the few dollars it will bring them this transaction should really be about getting the books out of the house.
“You want to wake her up and ask her?” he asks his wife.
I’m blindsided and squirming. Everything I have learned from experience and from Nick’s tutoring tells me to close the deal immediately before good fortune reverses itself.
I am too late. Mayhem announces itself with the buzzing sound of a motorbike approaching. I turn to look as Helmet Head pulls up, parks and dismounts in a single fluid motion. He heads straight for the books.
I plant myself in front of them and pointedly re-examine them, making a pile. This is lingua franca for all booksellers that the books are spoken for. You make a pile, it’s your pile. End of story. He reaches over me and examines one of the books.
“Those are mine.”
“Just looking.”
“So where is my Hemingway book?” I say to him. Much to my surprise he has the politic to ignore me. I think of Helmet Head as being engagement personified.
“How much for the books?” he asks the father, still ignoring me. I wince and look in appeal to the man, but he also pretends I am not there. In his eyes I am the troublemaker who is making him wake up Jessica.
“Five dollars apiece.”
“How many are there?” his chapped lips demand. Without waiting for an answer, he counts them. Sixteen. He reaches for his back pocket. I’m apoplectic. This isn’t just outrageous. This is like shitting in the bed or coldcocking an old lady. It is beyond the pale.
“These are my mine,” I protest, to HH and to the husband.
The husband smirks. From the first he didn’t like me. It’s plain he prefers the unkempt and threatening Helmet Head to me in my khakis and polo shirt with a genuine embroidered Ralph Lauren polo pony. Me, who has charmed the most feckless and demanding of corporate execs, selling them lackluster ad campaigns as if they were Steve Jobs and I was Chiat-Day.
Why doesn’t this husband recognize his brethren? I can only guess that he senses that I am in some way a doppelganger. I am too much like him, and therefore, in what he perceives as a damaged state, I am too close to his own fears about himself. To identify with my diminished position, would be to be linked and tainted with it. Better to side with the crazy, behatted guy with the grease stains on his pants. I am being vanquished by Helmet Head and suddenly I feel heavy, like the world is turning upside down in slow motion.
“The price was five dollars. You said you didn’t want to pay that,” the husband replies. The wife, who was about to go wake up Jennifer, thinks better of it and returns.
Helmet Head pulls out his wallet and starts peeling out cash.
“I was here first!” I protest, and reach for my wallet.
Helmet Head ignores me like I’m trash. He counts the money. “Ninety bucks. Right?”
I reach for my wallet and fumble for bills. “
Here! Here’s ninety dollars.”
Both men ignore me. I appeal to the wife.
“When I am negotiating it isn’t fair to give the sale to somebody else.” She averts her eyes from me, embarrassed by my pathetic entreaty.
I have this dream. I am at the helm of a giant supertanker (I know that in reality modern ships use little toggle handles to steer, but in my dream I am at a big ship’s wheel) and we are headed inexorably toward a far-off obstruction—a reef, a shore. I can’t quite say. I know that I am aware of the approaching disaster and desperately try to turn the wheel to avoid it, but the mass of the ship is so great and the inertia so insurmountable that I have only a very small effect no matter how frantically I spin the wheel. My dreams are rarely subtle and a ten-year-old could interpret them.
I turn to Helmet Head.
“You’re going to regret this!”
“Is that like a threat?”
“This man is a thief!” I say to the husband.
The husband takes Helmet Head’s money. “You had a shot and you didn’t want to pay the price. It seems fair to me.”
“You don’t understand. There is etiquette about this. You never undercut the first buyer.”
“Etiquette?” he asks, wide-eyed. “You’re kidding me?”
“He’s a crazy guy. He doesn’t follow the rules. He steals.”
As HH gathers the books he speaks to the woman as if he was the corner grocer and she was a regular customer. “Ask him if he works for the CIA.”
The inanity of his remark seems to bounce off as I look to her in a final appeal. Her face is a frown reserved for me.
“I think you should leave, now,” she says, as if she’s fearful I might do something bad.
Helmet Head is trying to put the books into bags so he can hang them off his motorbike. He gives me a sideways glance.
“Really,” she continues. “This is making me uncomfortable and I would like you to leave our property.”
She looks to the husband for support and he crosses his arms and looks sternly at me. Certainly he can intuit that I am a father and a husband and a former executive who earned six figures. I went to fucking Yale. I can’t just leave… Not without the simple validation that I deserve. That I have earned. That should be the minimum.
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