by Chip Jacobs
Thirty yards ahead, up around the next congratulatory banner, was Captain Crum’s potential FUBAR. Reginald—the tuxedoed provocateur—sat on an inlaid bench in an alcove over the bridge’s highest span. His legs were stretched out in front, lying on top of a walker immobilizing the sergeant, who’d probably never live this down.
“Nick!” Reginald yelled out in the same jaunty, croaky voice. “You’re a sight for these rheumy eyes.” In one hand was the acetylene torch.
“Mr. Plant,” Nick asked from ten feet away, “why are you doing this?”
“It’s Reginald. And I had to.” Hu. “I saw the shock on your face when you left my room. Even if I wrangled your number, you would’ve hung up on me.” Hu.
“You have me there,” Nick said.
“This was the only way, the only place.”
The geezer looked like Nick felt: death warmed over. He was sweating, panting hu between some sentences, with the complexion of low-fat milk and blue-ish lips. He did, however, act more lucid than before.
“And you couldn’t have worn anything nicer than the sloppy ensemble you have on, not a navy blazer? Dress for success. A Bowler would hide that cowlick.” Hu.
Nick noticed the top hat in the street. “Hats are for bald guys,” he said. “And crazy old men.”
“Yo, show some respect,” said the bald and still supine Donald Grubb. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“Neither, sergeant, do you. He has dementia—and says he knows me from my previous life.”
“Actually, I told him,” Reginald interrupted. “He started out doubting me, too.” Hu, hu.
“The only true things about him,” Nick said, looking at Grubb, “are his quick hands. And that he’s Robert Plant’s uncle.”
“Roger that on the quick hands,” Grubb said. “I’m more of a Steven Tyler guy myself.”
Nick wasn’t bilious anymore; it was nervousness about being in this particular spot. “I thought cops were skeptical hearing mumbo jumbo,” he said, exasperated. “C’mon, he claims we met when I was riding an ostrich. Not the Budweiser Clydesdale they ride at the Rose Parade. An ostrich. It’s bullshit”
“I told you,” Grubb said. “Show some respect.”
“You’re a stand-up fella, sergeant,” Reginald said, blotting his forehead with a hankie using his free hand. “Even on your back.” Hu. “At glacial speed, he removed his legs from the arms of the walker in this theater of the absurd.
Grubb gathered his fallen sunglasses and blue cap and stood up. Nick expected he’d be slapping the cuffs on before frog marching Reginald off on his walker. Grubb, instead, bent down, picked up the top hat, and dusted it off. Onto the sidewalk he stepped, where he kissed his abductor on the forehead and set the hat over his silvery hair.
“Sergeant, I pray whatever inconvenience I caused you will be surpassed by what our young friend accomplishes.” Hu. “Though I don’t know what that is. Thank you.”
Grubb’s eyes welled up. “No. I should be thanking you, sir. And you’re anything but incidental. Listening to your story, I realize I need to stop burning through the Rolaids, dwelling on the situations I can’t unsee. I’m going to start working more on my soul than my—my self-martyrdom. If the Dalai Lama comes to Vroman’s, I’ll be in the front row.”
“Brilliantly put, as my English mother would say.” Hu. “I hope to see you above a long time from now.”
Grubb snagged his walkie-talkie and jogged off, whistling Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
Reginald, spry of spirit, weak of flesh, motioned for Nick to join him on the bench. The gent did fill out a tux better than he did a mangy tracksuit.
“I think I’ll stand,” Nick said. “But congratulations for getting your way. Are you going to accuse me of riding Grover Cleveland’s wife again?
“She was a bird, Nick. She lived at Cawston Ostrich Farm. You used to work there.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “The fog’s lifting. Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington rode sidesaddle with me.”
“Joke now,” hu. “You told me back then you met Mr. Roosevelt. Go look it up.” Hu. “Even after you left Cawston, you were happy as a clam. You devised some kind of lamps for around the bridge. On Saturdays we’d perform shows for the ill kids. Royo and me were part of the act. I’d hold up a hoop that he’d jump through onto your back while you were riding Mrs. Cleveland.” Hu hu hu hu. “It was something.”
“Yeah, something that never happened. You need to go the Huntington ER.”
“You were such a bright light. But you lost it after the collapse. And you still don’t have it back.” Hu. “The day the bridge opened, someone dognapped Royo and we had a big fight. See how much I’ve remembered?” Hu. “You and Royo vanished.” Hu, hu. “Everybody forgot you.”
“You can barely catch your breath. You need oxygen.”
“Oh, balderdash! You need to understand why this old gal meant so much to me over my life.” Hu. “Why I used to visit here so often to think. It was you. You loved this bridge so much before that I loved it to keep you alive.” Hu. “In my heart.”
Nick checked his watch and looked back at Reginald. “If we were friends like you say, your friend is begging you to now hand over the torch and give up.”
“No can do.” Hu. “Though you may not be the Nick I remember, I’m finally the Reginald I wanted to be. I’m doing handsprings into the next life for Sally. Hubba hubba.”
“You know what. Maybe you were right. Cawston sold knives then, didn’t they?”
“You’re lying—to me, to yourself.” Hu. “You saw the knife on my dresser. You’re a soufflé that hasn’t risen. So I’m upping the temperature.”
“What’s with all the metaphors about my settings?” Nick mumbled.
Reginald tugged his antique, side-shade sunglasses down over his eyes. “I suppose you don’t recognize these? You gave them to me.”
“What can I say? I’m generous. Sir, let’s go. Please.”
Reginald pursed his mouth and flicked on that hissing, yellow-blue torch. “Don’t you understand? It was no more an accident that you came to my room at Sunny Slope than it was a co-hinky-dink that I met Sally at the dentist’s office when I bungled the date of my appointment.” Hu. “Or that she was diagnosed with breast cancer on her seventy-fifth birthday.” Hu, hu, hu. “The fight I got into with the juvenile delinquent who tried shoplifting cufflinks to feed his drug habit was the cosmos’ way of sending me toward this.” Hu. “It cost me my store and booted me into that nursing home just so—”
“What?” asked a flustered Nick.
“Just so this moment could happen.” Hu, hu, hu, hu. “Reginald pulled at his tuxedo collar. “We’re all connected strings, I tell you, strings plucking each other in a trillion directions.”
Nick thought back to those Caltech astrophysicists at Pie ’N Burger talking about a different string theory. “Whatever you say, Carl Sagan. Put down the torch.”
“Only if you put down your cynicism first.” With one mottled hand keeping that welder’s torch burning, his other groped around in the plastic Orchard Supply Hardware store bag next to him on the bench. With a grunt, he extracted a gold plaque and held it up for Nick to read. “I suppose you don’t recall this, either?”
“How could I? I’ve never seen it before.”
“Okeydoke,” he said, borrowing one of Nick’s old lines. He then gyrated around and methodically carved through the bottom, four iron bars of the anti-suicide fence; he’d cut the upper sections before Sergeant Grubb’s appearance. Reginald gazed up afterward. “Lookie there!” Hu. “Greener than Busch Gardens.”
The massive coronary that killed him seconds later produced a memorable daisy chain. After Reginald clutched his chest, his gangly upper body fell back hard against the compromised section of fence, which was about the dimension of a standard bedroom window.
His weight caused the portion to snap clean of the bars above and below it, and it spiraled downward. The forty-pound section crashed like a bomb through the atrium skylight of the unoccupied condo project partly beneath the bridge’s southern flank. After it shattered, Reginald’s top hat and gold plaque, the one inscribed with Teddy Roosevelt’s words admonishing Pasadena not to pave over the Arroyo, plunged, too.
Reginald’s body might’ve followed if Nick hadn’t rushed to grab his legs.
—
Three hours after he left, Nick keyed his door. At least he didn’t faint.
Soon, a black Mercedes-Benz Town Car with tinted windows turned into his driveway. The limo driver, a quiet little German with a light bulb-shaped head and goatee, hefted Nick’s bags into the trunk with ease.
By the time the Benz was gliding through Eagle Rock en route to Los Angeles International Airport, city authorities were nearly done with damage control. Reginald was in the morgue, a public works team was patching the fence, and workers had covered the condo skylight with plywood. Not a single TV news chopper or police-radio groupie knew FUBAR was averted. They were covering a freeway chase near Pomona.
Nick snaked his Walkman out of his backpack as the limo ascended the Harbor Freeway onramp by Dodger Stadium. Click. He teed up Zep’s “In the Light” to get his headspace adjusted. The trippy, introductory synthesizer segued to his new creed about entrusting himself to find his road.
Even the headache that unmasked itself entering downtown couldn’t dampen his spirit. He slurped water from the limo’s complimentary water bottle, assuming he was dehydrated after vomiting, and would grab a snack at LAX. That “confounded bridge” could turn to salt.
And yet, the headache gave no quarter. Indeed, it clenched his skull like the first migraine of his life. Nick took deep breaths and applied reason. This was from stress, accumulated stress. In the last two weeks, his dog had assaulted a float, a girlfriend labeled him a defective product, and he speed-packed his house; earlier today, a codger spinning a ridiculous story died with melodrama. That’d fry anybody’s circuit board.
He worked his jaw and put his Ray-Bans on because the migraine was making even the shaded interior of the limo intolerable. He shut his eyes, but there was no relief there. Under his eyelids little yellow dots whizzed in electron orbits. Every bump, every turn, every second cranked the turnbuckle on his frontal lobe.
Nick slouched low into the leather of the back seat, and peeked over at Royo, who was strapped next to him in that chintzy Petco harness. Typically, he could smell Nick’s distress from a mile away, and would lick his face or nuzzle his snout under his arm to comfort him. Not now. He stared straight, appearing like he wouldn’t need any Benadryl because he’d tranquilized himself.
The Benz took the Sepulveda Boulevard exit, and street traffic was gridlocked. The migraine had Nick digging his fingers into the bubble wrap around the mysterious solar projector squished between him and the door. Forget any LAX food. In the terminal, he’d be sprinting to a kiosk to pound five Tylenol with a Budweiser chaser.
Out of nowhere, the quiet in the Benz exploded with a gunshot-ish pop, pop. Two of the bubble-wrap capsules had burst from Nick’s fingernails pressing into them, and the abruptness of it made his heart skip. Al, the German limo driver, lowered the partition to check if Nick was okay, and tsk-tsk-ed something.
Nick then swiveled his head inward toward Royo and noticed the detonating bubble wrap shook him out his daze. No longer was he gazing blankly ahead. No, he was pressing his wolfish noggin sideways into the seat next to Nick, so close Nick could practically taste the Lucky Boy burrito on which he’d nibbled. But that wasn’t the headline here. The fact his forehead was shaping letters again was. Shit.
In front of Nick’s glassy eyes, his brow formed an “E” and then an “I.” They letters repeated as clearly as the letters on the airport billboards advertising foreign-currency exchanges and “gentlemen clubs” around. In as much as a scoff as a question, Nick asked: “You’re not trying to tell me something, are you?”
The Benz approached the white curb, on top of which stood a toothy Southwest Airlines skycap; limo passengers generally tipped well. Nick, meantime, rubbed Royo’s forehead to erase those annoying letters. His own brain throbbed so fiercely he wasn’t sure he could recite the alphabet. The forehead letters had to be a nervous spasm, just as they’d been the morning after Royo grinded Julie’s calf. The Atari-like symbol would reappear.
The Benz braked in front of the terminal, and Al got out to retrieve the luggage from the trunk. Nick puffed air trying to convince himself he’d get through this. He then turned back to Royo. His forehead still was forming “E” and “I.” In moments, the dog would receive his drugging Snausage and be thrust into a claustrophobic travel cage.
“I can’t believe I asked you if were communicating. You’re just anxious.”
“And I’m stupefied you still haven’t gotten the message.”
Al knocked on the tinted glass to indicate the skycap was waiting. Nick ignored it.
“I must be off my own rocker,” he said. “I’m booking that MRI if this continues.”
Al banged on the window again. This time, Nick rolled it down an inch and curtly said, “Give me a sec. I’m having an episode here.”
Al smiled, as if not bothered a bit. And here Germans were disparaged for being efficiency freaks.
“Relax,” Nick murmurred to himself. “It’s been a nerve-racking day.”
“And it’s going to have a disastrous ending unless you start putting things together.”
If Nick opened his eyes any wider, they would’ve plopped onto his Levis. “Jesus, I can hear you, and you’re not moving your lips. Are you a psychic?”
“No, only sometimes telepathic. And I am only permitted to disclose this: Reginald was right. Dig, Nick: there’s no guarantees we’ll be together again.”
He frantically began searching the Benz—in the side compartment, between the seat cushions, around the overhead light—for a hidden microphone.
But Royo continued staring. “Stop asking how this is happening and start asking why it’s happening. I may be a rascal, but I’m as honest as a border collie.”
Nick slunk back down onto the seat. “So you were talking to me like this that day in the car when you bashed your head into the glove compartment?”
“Guilty. And it didn’t feel wunderbar, either.”
“And the movie ‘Heaven Can Wait:’ you flipped that on, too, deliberately?”
“Double guilty. Though I didn’t cause your headache. My boss did. We’re all trying to nudge something that’s being stubborn. You!”
Nick gazed into the dog’s saucer-y brown eyes while a motorcycle cop and driver Al bickered about why the limo still was idling in the white zone. “Let’s say I believe you—if I’m not in a coma or in purgatory. What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
Royo slapped his paw onto Nick’s shoulder. “You’re supposed to solve my forehead.”
Truth in Fakery
The speaker in a blue blazer and Banana Republic chinos was hamming it up for an audience that couldn’t wait for the gasbag to sit down. With dinner nearly over, the guests were pining to dig into Federico Bakery’s bridge-shaped “celebration cake.” Afterward, they’d ride in decorated cars to recreate the procession across the Colorado Street Bridge for its unveiling eighty years ago this day.
Also, Murphy Brown came on at nine.
“They tried bulldozing her into rubble not long after she went up. America’s car society demanded state-of-the-art infrastructure. But we showed them. Our gal here head-faked death more often than Keith Richards.”
Percy Shine blinked, waiting for laughs. He’d been mulling doing stand-up comedy if his stock-trading career never recovered from his insider-trading conviction, of which no one at this soiree knew. There was a smattering of chuckles.
“Any-who, she had the fervent devotion of a community who appreciated that some old objects remind us who we are. Heritage matters in the Arroyo, so help me Thaddeus Lowe. Let’s give it up for our preservationists. They kept the bridge standing long enough to be the royalty of Route Sixty-six.”
Hands clapped, mouths watered. The invitees already endured a litany of speakers, from solemn council members to soporific state engineers, effectively repeating the same themes on this cloudless, sixty-degree afternoon. Everyone got it: the past is our parent, and prologue, and, Mr. Miyagi, blah-cubed.
“Before I turn this over to the mayor, who may be announcing a surprise guest that should wow us all, I want to pay homage again to John Mercereau and John Waddell for spanning this gorge with such durable élan. You think they could’ve managed that in LA, when jugglers and jezebels roamed Spring Street?”
Percy took a small step back from the dais, peacocking his head at his alliterative jewel, waiting for others to savor it. None were. They were pointing and muttering at an eccentric figure strutting toward them from the east side of the deck. When Percy twirled and saw it, he was irked, figuring a numbskull bureaucrat forgot to tell him about this impersonation.
“Hail to the chief,” said the aspirational comic, winging it. “Nobody start any railroad monopolies, ’kay?”
Teddy Roosevelt had returned to life in a rubber mask exaggerating his squinty eyes and shaggy mustache, and a green, hunting-type jacket poofed up around the collar as if there were shoulder pads beneath it. On his way to the podium, he dropped off a carton at the same bench where Reginald died, though only select officials were briefed on his misfortune.
Fake Teddy clasped Percy’s smallish hand and stroked his neoprene mustache. “How extraordinary it is to be at your rededication,” he said into the mic with a fake, gravelly bluster, “and not just because I’ve been dead for seventy-four years.”
The crowd roared louder than at any of Percy’s rehearsed punch lines.
“Long ago, I look out from here, awestruck at the grandeur of the natural lands below. It was heaven on Earth before the Busches created a world wonder. Yet because modernization was accelerating, I fretted this valley would tantalize those who valued the dirtiest shade of green. I cautioned your mayor: ‘what a splendid natural park you have right here! Don’t let them spoil that.’ Lo and behold, they mostly did.”