by Chip Jacobs
A head twitch, then scrunch of the eyes: “Sorry ’bout that. Wandering mind. Must be that Muzak version of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”
Jorge stood there, balancing compassion with his sales quota. Behind him, an associate reorganized chinos beneath a blown-up photo of a dewy, Peruvian rainforest.
“Now that you’re back, should I fetch a different shirt, something more Bill Gates, less Eddie Vedder?”
Nick, who people often said resembled the Dr. Pepper ad-man, except with a slightly crooked nose and a perennial cowlick, stared again at the street banner promoting the eightieth birthday of “Pasadena’s Original Dame.” Now Jorge locked onto it.
“I’ve never seen a town so addicted to its own history,” he said. “Sure not like that in Sherman Oaks, where I live. Culture there is Galleria deep. Here you have the museums, a Cheesecake Factory, JPL, Julia Child’s childhood home.”
Nick barely heard him. “Off the wall question: you wouldn’t happen to know when Colorado Street became a boulevard?”
“No idea. But I do know everything up front is twenty percent off.”
Nick, the southpaw, patted his jeans’ left back pocket. “Dang. I’m sorry, uh, Jorge,” he said, after zeroing in on the salesman’s plastic nametag. “I forgot my wallet.”
In his driveway, Nick wondered why he bothered browsing amid that politically correct capitalism. He already owned seven shirts (and a pair of chinos). The lengths the underachieving will do to forget what doesn’t matter. Like waking hours.
The young, floppy-eared dog, which he adopted a year ago after it followed him during a jog around the Rose Bowl, bounded off the tan leather couch to greet him. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be on there after his puppy incisors earlier reduced one armrest into a carcass of tattered foam, but Nick let it slide. He named him Royo in homage to the Arroyo Seco. Fleet Burdett, Nick’s best friend, argued “Luffy” was more apt, as the destruction he inflicted on Nick’s place was in scale to what Hitler’s Luftwaffe exacted on London’s architecture.
Hattie, Nick’s wife of two years, had her own tag for him: Royo Asswipe. Did he forget, she once asked, that he wed “a non-animal person?” Even as a child, she never liked TV’s Snoopy and Scooby-Doo, and thought Old Yeller had it coming. After Royo mauled her stiletto heels, old Girl Scout sash, and box of tampons in one chew-fest week, she didn’t hesitate exiling him outside—in the rain—if Nick were away.
His affection for the dog and Hattie’s revulsion of Royo Asswipe, coupled with her disgust over Nick’s general indifference on other matters, became a metaphor for an un-gratifying union between two ill-suited people. Post-honeymoon, there weren’t any “for better.” There were only Hattie’s mutterings of “for what?”
In a phone conversation with her mother that Nick overheard, she compared him to “a light switch set permanently on dim.” Harsh as that assessment was, Nick knew she was right. So, he drove to the Santa Anita mall in Arcadia to prove he could still make her smile, buying her an eighty-dollar “sun” necklace festooned with teensy diamonds. After she opened it, there was perfunctory sex and tepid vows to be more attentive. By dinner, though, they weren’t speaking. Royo had filched the necklace from the coffee table, bolted outside with it through the doggy door, and buried it in the same hole in which he buried Hattie’s best yoga pants.
To punish Nick, Hattie weaponized her absences. She began working long hours as the assistant to a cable company CFO notorious for fetishizing women’s elbows. And Hattie’s, he remarked to her over a spreadsheet, “are the sexiest this side of Paris.”
Then again, Nick was less devoted to his profession than his curly haired vegan spouse was to hers. Life at Wham-O Corporation nowadays wasn’t scintillating. His favorite time of day was coming home to his small, English Tudor home, in the San Rafael hills on Pasadena’s western quarters, to cavort with the most idiosyncratic personality under his roof.
Almost telepathically, the dog grabbed his own leash the second Nick’s brain decided on a walk; he found Nick’s misplaced car keys simultaneously with Nick’s realization he lost them. Royo whizzed on stucco, barked at BMWs, and rolled on dry grass like it was seeded with dead-cat fur. When Nick played Led Zeppelin tunes on his sunburst Les Paul guitar, the scamp often danced on hind legs. Every morning, the mutt licked Nick’s face three times.
“Sounds like you have a special bond,” Fleet said during a backyard BBQ at his Euclid Street cottage. “I hear in Arkansas, you two could make it official.” Nick laughed. Then he beaned Fleet, an aspiring alternative medicine doctor, in the chin with a half corncob.
Royo’s larcenous streak eventually changed everything. During a weekend visit from Maude, Hattie’s college roommate, and Maude’s three-year-old daughter, Royo cunningly waited for them to depart the living room. Unsupervised, he snagged the little girl’s Crump ’N Curl Cabbage Patch Kid doll and carried it outside to behead in his backyard killing fields.
Hattie phoned Nick that night at his hotel in San Francisco, where he was attending a business conference. “Sit down,” she said with bogus concern. “Your dog is missing. He must’ve wiggled out through the backyard gate. Don’t blame me. You were supposed to tighten the bolt months ago.”
Nick cut his trip short, rushing home on Southwest Airlines. Paranoid about Royo’s safety, he imagined the worst outcome first. Eaten by foothill coyotes. Abducted by medical researchers. When the Pasadena Humane Society phoned the next morning, Nick almost moonwalked. His pal was there, unharmed.
“So, where did you find him?” he asked. “In the trash cans of the restaurant up the street?”
“No,” the rep said. “The guy in a Nissan who brought him in here said he watched some woman shove him out of her car in front of the federal appeals building; you know, the pink tower where you’d expect to see Philip Marlowe loitering. He thought she was trying to get him run over by traffic on Orange Grove Boulevard.”
“Let me guess,” Nick said. “The woman was driving a green Saab.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s my wife’s car.”
Bombs flew afterward. Nick accused Hattie of “attempted dogacide,” of cheating on him with her perverted boss, of serving him tofu, quinoa, and other vegan horrors she knew he disliked. She upbraided him as “a sleepwalking loser” more protective of Royo, with his obsessive, two-page list of instructions for his care, than about her bliss.
“How can I try making you happy,” Nick said, “when you’re happiest being miserable?”
“For starters,” she answered, “give a shit about something.”
To get away from her, he stamped into the garage, where the snow skis, tennis racket, telescope, and other hobbies he once enjoyed lay on a shelf in cobwebbed repose. That’s when he noticed something new in there: the folded U-Haul packing boxes and bubble wrap that Hattie pre-positioned to leave him. In a rare burst of emotion, Nick wrenched open the aluminum garage door, hoping it’d snap.
Hattie was soon in the space where they resumed their woolly fight in view of neighbors doing weekend chores. Some of them lingered outside, trimming hedges or painting chipped columns, just to watch the sparks fly where there were none before.
“You need a shrink,” she yelled. “Tell him the dog you allow to lick you on the mouth spends hours a day tongue-bathing his privates.”
“I will. But it’s the closest I come to genitalia these days.”
Hattie flared her lips and swiveled her head looking to redress that insult. Target located, she marched toward Nick’s workbench and took the box cutter from it. She then crisscrossed the garage to where Nick kept his junior-high-era beanbag chair and slashed a two-foot laceration across its vinyl membrane. So ferociously did she do this that the white pellets inside burst out, showering the pair in a Styrofoam-ash storm on their last day together.
A month later, their cozy home on that shady bl
ock was a desolate bachelor pad. Among its winnowed contents were a king-size bed, an Ikea dresser, Nick’s leather furniture set, plus his classic rock CDs and USC diploma. Peculiar, Nick thought, after Hattie moved out. Royo mainly wrecked her possessions.
—
From his junior year at the Lord-of-Flies-Esque Stone Canyon Prep High to this rudderless moment of his late-twenties, Nick was often wide awake at two a.m. Awake staring at the ceiling, or drenched in sweat following a recurring nightmare about dying. With Hattie gone, he could exploit his insomnia to enjoy a tranquil Pasadena where the luxury cars and latte drinkers were replaced by streetlamps burning intriguingly.
It was only a nine-minute drive to his office on Green Street, whose bushy trees formed an arboreal tunnel over the asphalt. This road, one block south of Colorado Boulevard, was unrelated to Pasadena’s celebrated Greene brothers, a pair of sibling architects who, at century’s turn, elevated the boxy bungalow design into a fusion of style and function. Darlings of the Arts & Crafts movement, they created the gracefully trussed Gamble House on Orange Grove, which no respectable tourist map would exclude. Yet even that masterpiece of dark wood didn’t get a street named after them, something irreverent Nick and Fleet found endlessly hilarious. There was no third “e” in this Green.
Nick, with Royo in tow, keyed the creaky door and switched on the fluorescent lights that whirred like summer cicadas. Wham-O rented this dumpy, industrial annex to house poor-selling merchandise and product engineers deluding themselves that toiling for a former retail juggernaut was wise career trajectory. Nick realized he should’ve quit to focus on an invention he’d been fine-tuning for years. Still, he lacked what self-help guru Tony Robbins claimed was essential for success: “either inspiration or desperation.”
Wham-O’s founding partners, Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, never were psychically crippled. Can-do sorts, they generated millions from mirthful ideas in a Cold War world. Just surveying the vintage posters on the metal-sided walls reminded Nick of that. Hula Hoops, Frisbees, Super Balls, Slip ’N Slides, Hacky Sacks, Wham-Os molded plastics and polymers were retail Americana. Busts along the way, like the Mr. Hootie Egg Rake, and lawsuits didn’t faze the headmen. It was the knock-off competitors and ascent of electronic games foreshadowing the company’s obituary that did.
Wham-O, nonetheless, left its mark. Unlike Nick, who’d yet to leave a scratch.
Now he swayed on his heels, questioning where he was headed. Across the annex, Royo was up on his hindquarters sniffing a teetering stack of boxes containing one of Nick’s products. “Get down!” he said, noticing this. When Royo obeyed, the highest carton fell smack into a puddle of brackish water from a leaking, underground condensate line—the one Nick’s muddling boss had promised to have fixed.
Royo grinned and trotted off, as if his mischief was intentional. Nick went over to the waterlogged box and pulled it onto dry floor. “Way to screw me,” he said. “Those were meant to go to QVC next week for a tryout. That was one Royo Asswipe move.”
He cracked the box to inspect the merchandise, and though it was dry, it remained depressing. The Di-Crapper, that’s what was in there: disposable diapers embossed with cultural lightning rods that folks loved to hate so much babies could defecate on their facial likenesses, pending trademark approval. In this particular box, Saddam Hussein and Yoko Ono starred on the composite-fiber lining.
Nobody in the novelty product business would ever mistake them for genre classics: the Ronco Pocket Fisherman and the Cha-Cha-Cha Chia. Should QVC reject the Di-Crapper, he’d be fortunate to sell his gimmickry at Costco, or the bargain bin at Piggly Wiggly markets. Nick’s previous concept didn’t knock anyone dead, selling a pathetic three thousand units. The Finger was another kitschy, lowbrow item he hatched for the smart-ass demographic. Every gift-wrapper who ever wrestled with an uncooperative present, he thought, could use an extra digit to tie fluffy bows or tape festive paper. Imagine the jungle, Nick told Wham-O management. “Give your mother the finger. She deserves it.”
Crunch. Nick punched his hand through his crate of joke diapers. He could hear what his mentor would’ve said about the crass junk: “You want this on your tombstone?”
Of all the people from Nick’s childhood, in the hills west of the Rose Bowl known as Linda Vista, Buford McKenzie was a soul without equal. “Mac,” as everyone called him, was an easygoing carpenter from New Orleans, a man with a receding hairline, beer belly, and not un-sexy wife. For many of the elementary-school-age boys on Nick’s street, he was their surrogate pop. They must’ve logged a hundred hours in Mac’s garage listening to him wax on about his favorite subject: “history’s doers,” which Mac described in thrilling ways no teachers could. During his pep talks, he swigged Michelob, the boys Fresca. Sometimes he grilled them Cajun sausages.
What most tickled Mac’s fancy were solar-power dreamers, and Nick caught the bug. Da Vinci, Newton, and Galileo, he said, all tried mining the sun to light the world. “With dumb luck, they could’ve. But kings and emperors feared those sunrays could be turned into weapons of war, the ultimate laser, and stuffed the genie back in the bottle. Think of that next time you pass a Shell station.”
The cross-legged boys in his garage stirred in amazement.
“Did anyone around here invent anything like that?” a young Nick asked excitedly.
“Aubrey Eneas did.”
“Aubrey? What a dorky name.”
“Would you prefer Thomas Edison?”
Aubrey, Mac explained, perfected “a bitchin’ solar engine” that channeled heat used to run massive water pumps. He introduced it in 1901 “down the road from here at a place called Cawston Ostrich Farm. Yes, once upon a time women would sell their firstborns to buy their feathers for hats and clothes. But Aubrey’s machine mattered more than silly fashion, and you, young grasshoppers, all need to matter yourselves someday.”
It was Mac’s last garage bull session. In winter 1973, heavy rains shellacked Southern California. Few places took the brunt more than the Devil’s Gate reservoir, which paralleled the Foothill Freeway’s western spur then under construction. Mac and two dozen or so blue collars were there on an early Sunday morning pouring concrete for a flyover bridge. Wrong place, wrong time; water gushing over the dam from the northern Arroyo Seco flooded the work zone, creating a torrent of steel, concrete, and lumber that carried away Mac and others. Some of their corpses needed to be jackhammered from the muck. Stories later circulated about neighborhood dogs barking crazily minutes before the disaster.
Nick wept for days, moped for a week—and stayed fascinated by the sun’s inexhaustible magic on a fossil fuel planet. These many years later, The Finger and Di-Crapper was all he’d accumulated for his tombstone.
—
On the Sunday following his insomniac visit to the Wham-O annex, an absentminded Nick went to fetch the paper. That’s when he nearly somersaulted over a duct-taped cardboard box left on his doormat. Hattie. She must’ve returned some of his things that she inadvertently packed in her hurry to move out. She probably wanted Nick’s canned chili con carne and bacon-infused beans out of her non-meat life as much as him.
He lugged the thing into his sparse living room, and sliced the tape sealing it with a car key, a trick that Mac taught him. Inside it, however, wasn’t a carnivore’s delight. It was a black, metal device that appeared, on first glance, to be either an antiquated slide projector or nickelodeon. On top of the doohickey were mirrors, a slot the width of a photograph, and a retractable lid. When Nick opened it, he saw a bed of crumbled dark glass and earthenware.
If Hattie didn’t drop this here, possibly in some kind of divorcing, gas-lighting stunt, Fleet was Nick’s other suspect. Perhaps he did it as a cheer-me-up, even though Nick last April Fool’s Day snuck wasabi into Fleet’s toothpaste. He probably bought it at the Rose Bowl Swap Meet. “You wonderful clown,” Nick said aloud, patting the box.
Royo trundled over to investigate. He cocked his head, and the vertical lines on his forehead, the ones normally frizzed in the shape of the Atari logo, straightened. Roooooh, he said.
The Vroman’s Girl
A cushy perk of a listless existence is never feeling guilty about a ninety-minute lunch. And, by the looks of the crowd this Thursday at Pie ’N Burger, Nick would be fortunate to get back to his crummy metal desk at his crummy Wham-O job before two.
The San Gabriel Valley’s best burger joint had twenty-plus customers brushing up between its faux-wood walls. Most were waiting for that heavenly patty, sautéed onions, and tangy goop, which Mother Teresa would’ve stopped blessing the poor to chow down. Sure there were French bistros and scrumptious ethnic joints in trendy new Old Pasadena. Yeah, there were steak-and-bourbon grills on their last heart-clogging legs and stalwarts like Mijares, whose zesty margaritas Paul McCartney was known to swill when in town.
But, as Nick told everyone, your salivary glands hadn’t lived until they visited here.
Today’s patrons included a former ace Dodger pitcher and an aging, bouffant-haired political consultant, whose views skewed just to the left of the nearby John Birch Society. Also waiting for a table were a Spandex-clad soccer mom scribbling notes in her day calendar, and three Caltech astrophysicists, whose sleepy, universe-exploring campus was just down the block.
One of the brainiacs in that group was a visiting professor from Indiana University. Rather than continuing to debate string theory with his fellow eggheads, he extolled his coordinates. “Pasadena,” he said, “is even more magnificent in person than it comes off on TV during the Rose Parade. Now I know why Einstein loved it. It radiates peace at a quark level.”
God, what a rube. Nick had seen “the Pasadena swoon” before. Sometimes, just informing people you’re from here induced a semi-hypnotic state characterized by dilated pupils and cooing voices. “Oh,” they’d gush, “I love Pasadena.” Mount Wilson trails, Warhol at the Norton Simon, those manicured neighborhoods, the playhouse: many would relocate here in a Burbank minute if they had the cash. Nick turned away from the fawning Hoosier. To him, civic pride was for blue-hairs, history for preppy preservationists. All that mattered was the present. And, speaking of which, someone just vacated a counter seat at the back of restaurant, the one opposite the mirrored pie cabinet reflecting seafoam-meringue frostings.