by Chip Jacobs
“There’s your story. Smell dem roses, chamber of commerce.”
“Well, right city, different location. The better morality tale is about the bridge. That’s what I need to write about.”
Nick’s pallor blanched. “Need? Tell me I misheard you. Or that you’re joking.”
“I can’t. And I’m not.”
Nick slugged off his Budweiser. “Have you forgotten my Chernobyl analogy? How that bridge is radioactive for me?”
“Hear me out,” Julie said. “If you leave Pasadena, it won’t be a problem. If you stay, which I dearly hope you will, I’ll help you confront your phobia. You’re following your heart with your idea. I’m following mine.”
The waitress approached, interrupting Julie’s bid to grab Nick’s hand and Nick leaning away. They ordered pork bellies, entrees, and more alcohol. Julie got a second chardonnay. Nick switched from beer to Tanqueray-rocks.
Because he’d swooned for Julie, he compelled himself to listen to her, already knowing he’d never bless any book on that confounded bridge. Anyway, she ran through what she’d excavated; how the stylish pathway was the city’s greatest feat—a concrete foyer that elicited investment, skyrocketed car sales, and inspired engineers. She teased its dicey politics and dramatic collapse, some of which had flown out of Alternative Nick on the Arroyo 101 tour. She talked about the paranormal connections, including the tawdriest rumor of them all: that the ghost of a construction worker, who’d been inadvertently cut to shreds and poured into in a concrete beam, still haunted the deck in his suspenders.
“Captivating,” Nick said when she took a breath. “Now, for God’s sake, reconsider. Please.”
“Couldn’t I ask the same of you?”
Their decibel level gradually went up, at one point almost extinguishing the candle.
“I suppose you’ll include the darkest stuff, too,” Nick said.
“What choice do I have? Everyone in Los Angeles refers to it as Suicide Bridge.”
Their drinks and pork bellies arrived, and then their entrees, all of which gave Nick time to reframe his argument to make her drop this. “Julie, you do have a choice, a good one. You can write about Busch Gardens instead of Pasadena’s death zone.”
She took a bite of salmon and responded. “I’m not planning to sensationalize anything, and that’s assuming I can land a publishing deal. But this bridge is a worthy subject, and the people who died off of it warrant more than a paragraph in a coffee-table book. Did you know the city once explored installing nets along the sides? Or that sticks of dynamite were found below an arch?”
“No,” Nick said, getting a piece of roast duck into a nervous stomach. “And I don’t care. I have news to share with you too.”
“And I can’t want to hear it. Just five more minutes.”
“This is our tenth date. You’re spoiling it.”
“What should I say? ‘You’re right. Now let’s go do it at the top of your playground rocket ship’?”
“And they accuse me of being flippant. But yes, and yes.” He rolled his hand in a get-on-with-it gesture next.
“You want to know one reason I feel so strongly about the subject? Let me introduce you to Myrtle Ward.”
Myrtle, Julie said, was a young mother and wife crestfallen about losing her cafeteria job and about the shape of the world circa 1937. Deciding to leave the latter behind, she put her three-year-old daughter in the car and drove to Pasadena. After parking, she and Jean walked out to one of the bridge’s pedestrian alcoves. When Myrtle lifted her daughter over the balustrade, two people watching them hollered, “No!” But disturbed Myrtle went through with the unthinkable, dropping the child one hundred forty-three feet. Seconds later, Myrtle jumped in the attempted murder-suicide to alleviate her pain.
Only Jean didn’t die. She pinballed into the brambles of a tree and survived the normally lethal fall. Bruised, still wearing the name tag that her mother pinned on her dress for identification purposes, she crawled toward a corpse, crying, “Mommy, Mommy.”
Pasadena, afterward, was mortified, and soon there was wire-mesh fencing that rose up about eight feet along the rim to prevent any repeats. City hall wanted reporters, who it blamed for embellishing the macabre, to now write about something other than Suicide Bridge. On the one-year anniversary of the tragedy, Pasadena highlighted its response while indirectly ridiculing critics accusing it of moving too slowly. Actors were hired to reenact Myrtle attempting to throw her daughter to her death, but this time her unspeakable crime was averted by that life-saving fence.
Whether or not that recreation sparked more bad karma, the suicides continued, though not as frequently. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst supposedly offered to pony up the money for a stronger barrier. The city rebuffed him.
“I’m sure of all it, minus the Hearst story,” Julie said. “Pasadena by then had a reputation for sophistication and Millionaire’s Row, and also as the best locale in Southern California to die. Now I’m finished.”
Nick was no longer interested in any of this fine cuisine. In the flattest of tones, he said, “David Loomer, my Silicon Valley investor, presented me an offer sheet.”
“Oh, Nick,” Julie said with appropriate zeal, “That’s wonderful. You did it!”
“He’s paying me one hundred fifty thousand dollars just to allow his engineers to improve my prototype. They’re renting me an apartment near their office. If we go into production, a Japanese automaker might subsidize it.”
“I should’ve let you talk first. Nothing I said was urgent. What are you going to do?”
“Leave. What else? I was intending to ask you to come with me. I still will, if you—”
Julie’s eyes widened; her smiles lines retreated. “If I what? Abandon a book about the bridge? That smells like an ultimatum?”
“I may be burned out on Pasadena hype, but I’d never dream of picking at people’s deepest scabs. The ambition isn’t worth it.”
“I suppose you avoid true crime books, then; even ones that try fostering debate.”
Nick slapped his hand on the table, bouncing Julie’s salmon. Diners swiveled their heads; hostesses stood guard. “You know, I think I’ll fly to your hometown for a few weekends to write about Chicago’s murder rate, or the old meatpacking factories that killed people. Worked for Upton Sinclair.”
Julie snatched her purse, got up, and loomed over the table with half the restaurant eavesdropping. How often does a couple, where the woman resembles a pointy-chinned Jodie Foster and the man a cowlicked Dr. Pepper guy, squabble louder than the wild green parrots that’d returned to Pasadena after decades?
Noticing they’d created a ruckus, she lowered her voice. “When we met, I felt such a charge. Now I realize that it was infatuation. Hattie was wrong. It’s not that your dimmer is set too low. It came out of the factory defective. Don’t come into Vroman’s when I’m in. And I’m writing that damn book.”
She hustled out, regretting she hadn’t ground a pork belly into Nick’s face.
—
Whether it was his angst around the moving boxes, or the dusty Hot Pocket he ate after extracting it from under the couch, Royo wasn’t acting himself. Over three days’ time, he lost interest in the food bowl he’d normally push around the kitchen floor trying to dab every crumb. Flecks of gray also were cropping up in his black muzzle. Then there was the change in peculiarities. On walks, he no longer stopped to smack his lips on exotic flowers. Nor did he fake a limp anymore to trick passerby into coddling him.
Nick took him to the Foothill Veterinary Hospital the day after his breakup with Julie—a severing, he deluded himself, made splitting town that much easier. The vet diagnosed nothing wrong. He speculated the intelligent dog must’ve sensed change brewing and recommended Nick continue monitoring him and unpack his favorite toy. When Nick pulled out the tug-of-war rope, Royo disregarded it.
Still alarmed, he summoned his muttenheimer up on the sofa for a heart-to-heart. He assured him that they’d never split. The Bay Area’s green spaces exceeded Brookside Park’s, he added, and the junk food was just as plentiful, as were the promiscuous lady schnauzers. Royo listened. Then he bounded down to pant in the corner.
When Fleet drove over, Nick had to think more human. Fleet was helping him tie up loose ends from his pell-mell relocation (utility shut-offs, mail-forwarding, etc.) and agreed to sell his furniture and other leftover possessions at the next Rose Bowl flea market. Nick wanted the house on the market and his Toyota unloaded ASAP.
“You have my eternal thanks for doing this,” he said. “You’re getting a solar generator.”
“I’d rather have cold cash and Robert Plant’s autograph,” Fleet replied with a smirk. “But if you promise to visit for the next Doo Dah Parade, that’ll suffice.”
“As long as Royo’s not on a wanted poster, I’ll consider that.”
After sipping goodbye Budweisers and splitting a farewell joint, they walked into the cleaned-out kitchen. Nick then microwaved the Sara Lee Butter Streusel Coffee Cake that he’d been reserving in his freezer’s tundra for this bittersweet occasion. Reenacting what they did at two in the morning after their junior-year prom, Nick sliced the pie in two and they scarfed it, bowing again to the tyranny of the munchies.
Laidback Fleet turned serious after his last buttery mouthful. “Dude,” he said, “are you sure, really sure about doing this? Your imagination is humming now. There must be a local investor you could snag. People don’t usually leave Pasadena. Not unless they go feet first.”
“I am. This is what Mac would’ve wanted want me to do.”
Fleet, even with that Viking blood of his, wiped a tear. “Mac. I haven’t thought of him in years. What was that broken-record saying of his?”
“To have something meaningful for your tombstone. Mine can’t be the HoJack.”
“Yeah, that’d be a waste. Though, I thought the HoJack had potential.”
“Don’t get mad at me for being a broken record myself, okay? Reassure me again it wasn’t you who dropped that gadget and Manila envelope on my doorstep to screw with me?”
Fleet shook his head. “I swear on my acupuncture needles—and our friendship. It must’ve been you-know-who. There’s no scorn like an angry vegan’s.”
“Phew. Don’t forget. Southwest has forty-nine-dollar flights to SFO. Now get over here.”
They embraced in a protracted bro hug, and Nick walked Fleet to his car. As he did, Royo scampered out the doggy door and whimpered, head upturned to the stars.
When a Deck Beckons
The window-shaking commotion juddering him awake was reminiscent of his college years, when whirling Los Angeles police helicopters and car alarms stole shut-eye from him before a big test. This was like that, except that it was TV-news aircraft over the bridge and a virtual Elks Lodge gathering of parrots in his backyard lemon tree doing it.
Nick yawned from his sleeping bag, cotton-mouthed from last night’s revelry with Fleet. Up next to him popped Royo, whose slate muzzle and lengthening whiskers gave him a kind of doggy Fu Manchu mustache.
“What did the man say about today being the first day of the rest of our lives?” Nick said, tousling Royo’s ears and yawning again. “Apt for us.”
Royo got to his feet on a day he’d been trembling about, a day the graybeard from the Arroyo 101 tour told him, via brainwave, would make history without telling him how. Nick had no inkling what awaited them, or that he’d just quoted a cult demagogue who’d ordered a rattlesnake snuck into an adversary’s mailbox. He watched Royo perform a full-body shake, and listened to its sound ricochet through the soon-to-be deserted house.
It was only about five hours ago he finished packing his three suitcases and bubble wrapping the vintage projector. The machine was ingenious. You just positioned it so the mirrors reflected the sun’s heat into the glass and earthenware base and it’d project images against the evening sky. After experimenting with it last week in his backyard, he decided he’d bring it with him up north. It might be scalable for environmentalists, or as a collector’s item.
Breakfast would be instant coffee and a Pop-Tart for him, and yesterday’s leftover burrito, from Lucky Boy on Arroyo Seco Parkway, for Royo, provided his appetite resurfaced. The dog needed something in his belly before Nick sedated him with a Snausage-wrapped Benadryl and put him into a cage bound for the plane’s cargo hold.
Only piddling chores remained until his airport limo rolled up this afternoon. Nick had saved one task for its symbolism too: sweeping up the last of the Styrofoam pellets sent flying when Hattie slashed his bean bag. He had a broom and dustbin in his hands when the phone set to disconnect at midnight jangled. Nick hoped it was David Loomer, calling to announce he was throwing him a welcome party. Or that it was Fleet, home early from his class on ionic detoxification footbaths. It was neither.
“Mr. Chance: Captain Rick Crum here, Pasadena PD. You have a moment?”
“If this is about the light I shined over my house, that was a one-time deal,” Nick said, just as those squealing parrots, the subject of a recent New Yorker article, flapped away en masse.
“This isn’t about any light,” Crum said. “It’s about, uh, the most oddball predicament we’ve run into in a while. Your name came up.”
Grudgingly, wishing he’d ripped the phone cord out of its jack, he set down the broom.
Roughly fifteen minutes and four blocks, later, he climbed the eastern steps onto the deck of the garishly decorated Colorado Street Bridge. Nick, in Levi’s, a Barbara Bush Chia Pet T-shirt, and his “USC Inventors Club” sweatshirt, found Crum at the top.
According to urban legend, they were standing on the deck’s spookiest point—the point where visitors most often claimed encountering ghosts of that construction worker as well as a despondent banker and other floating beings. Nick thought the supernatural was hooey. His ghouls were molecular.
After shaking hands with Crum, they got down to it. “Here’s the thing,” said the captain, a freckled, forty-something with a casual smile and a widow’s peak. “We don’t need this type of publicity today. Capiche?”
“I understand, the big party,” Nick said. “And you have a nutcase holding your sergeant hostage with, if I heard you correctly, a walker and an acetylene torch.”
“Precisely. And he’s doing it dressed like Alfred.”
“As in E. Neuman?”
“As in Batman’s butler. But this prima donna’s crafty. Knows we can’t afford the PR black eye of sending in the SWAT team around all those balloons and banners. We’re communicating with him on the sergeant’s walkie-talkie, how he got it, I don’t know. He won’t divulge his name, either. Asks us to call him Mr. Incidental. From his voice we know he’s old.”
“Captain, I have a plane to catch this afternoon, a plane to a new life. You were vague on the phone about how I got dragged into this. Level with me.”
“I will. Mr. Incidental says he met you and your dog recently at his nursing home. He promises to release our officer if you’ll walk over to hear him out.”
Nick threw his head back in disgust, which made him feel dizzier than he already did; saliva was pooling in his mouth. “His name’s Reginald Plant, and he’s off his friggin’ rocker. He’s from Sunny Slope Manor on Fair Oaks.”
Crum grinned, jotting the information in his notepad. “That helps a bunch. Again, don’t underestimate him. Not only is he pinning down a former LAPD gang-detective, he’s sliced through part of the anti-suicide fence to get our attention. Convince him to surrender before this slides from embarrassing to FUBAR.”
“FUBAR?”
“Fucked up beyond all repair.”
“And there’s no one else for you to call? No grown children, friends?”
“How coul
d we? We didn’t have a name until you just told us.”
Nick was starting to feel green. “I still don’t know if I’m your man. Words can’t express how much I revile this bridge. I’m acrophobic here.”
“Hey, you think we’re walking on sunshine asking a civilian for intercession? Don’t make me play hardball, Nick. If you wuss out and this goes further sideways, I’ll have no option but to tell the papers you turned your back on the city.”
Just what I need: my investors thinking I’m a candy ass. “Behind that smile, captain, you’re an assasin. Tell me what to do.”
“Outstanding. Lieutenant Figgle here will help you rehearse. This senior, as the kids would say, is being a buzzkill.”
Nick looked at the crew-cut lieutenant, a three-generation Pasadena native whose parents shortened their last name by removing the “Berry” from the “Figgle.” The way he cocked his head forward was pigeon-esque.
—
Nick plodded east on trembly legs, straddling the centerline of the pressure-washed deck. He lobbed a stick of Wrigley’s into his mouth, trying to settle an acid stomach on Pasadena’s Progressive Age darling. Refurbished or not, she remained a paradox: simultaneously regal and noir-ish, a Beaux-Arts tribute to imagination, and also the glummest place in these-there foothills. Practically speaking, she was even less: little more than a forty-second traffic shortcut in a freeway-bisected town.
Forget that: one foot in front of the other. You’ll be gone by tonight. Nick’s self-actualization was amateurish, for the only thing he put in front of him was his mouth over the side of the bridge, where he rushed to projectile vomit his breakfast. Still, he found a replacement stick of Wrigley’s, pushed aside a déjà vu feeling of barfing here before, and plowed on.