by Chip Jacobs
The audience hummed. There were baffled expressions and wry grins, people suddenly forgetting about Federico’s butter-cream frosting. One council member, a former Vietnam protester turned Brooks-Brothers-wearing, urban-planning junkie, clinked his salad fork against his plate in support. “Here, here!” he said.
“Now where Indians once worshipped and the Indiana Colony later settled, you have luxury homes, asphalt streets, as well as the total eradication of Adolphus’s gardens. How, good people, is that fair trade?”
Through his narrow eye slits, Fake Teddy zoomed in on three side tables that could’ve starred on Pasadena’s “Sgt. Pepper” album cover. The people there, either natives or city-associated, represented a town with talent in spades. TV show-runner Stephen J. Cannell sat next to guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen, who was beside band-mate David Lee Roth (a transplant from Bloomington, Indiana); paired by them were science-fiction writer Octavia Butler and Caltech physicist Kip Thorne; Vroman’s regular (and Oscar-winner) Sally Field and a grandson of General George S. Patton anchored another special table. L.A. Law actor Harry Hamlin was there, too, blocking Fake Teddy’s view of another costumed guest. The bogus ex-president really couldn’t stumble now.
All this was chafing the ego of the speaker he interrupted, craving as Percy did to impress the VIPs with the glitzy morsels he dug up. How pilot Al Goebels flew a biplane with girls strapped to its wings under a bridge arch in a 1926 Flag Day stunt; that, six years later, actor Eddie Cantor drove a chariot beneath the colossus in “Roman Scandals”; or future leading man William Holden, as a local hellion, tiptoing outside a bridge column on a juvenile dare. Now a charlatan was upstaging him via righteous indignation
“A pox upon you if you haven’t toasted the four construction workers who perished so his gal could rise,” Fake Teddy said. “When we neglect others’ sacrifice, we debase ourselves. John Visco, Harry Collins, C. J. Johnson, Normal Clark: this city is indebted.”
Fake Teddy, much like Alternative Nick during the Arroyo-101 tour, couldn’t believe the passionate language sailing out of his mouth. Nor that he was watching Sally Field ask someone, “Who’s John Visco?”
He wasn’t alone in crashing this December 13, 1993, party, just the most cartoonish. South of the ceremony, on the embankment below the orange-ish federal appeal’s courthouse, twenty middle-aged and older women were arrayed in two choir-like rows. Each of the black-dressed ladies had lost spouses, siblings, children, and others from the deck, inducting them into a club they never sought to join: a club of people with missing pieces, in a city where the bridge was revered as its concrete grand dame, its touchstone.
During breaks in the earlier speeches, the ladies quietly chanted nondenominational prayers and sang verses from James Taylor’s elegiac “Fire and Rain.” Their leader was a fleshy-faced woman whose clinically depressed son leapt the same day the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Her name was Connie Prunell.
“We must distinguish fable from myth,” Fake Teddy continued after steadying himself. “We must remember that when we gawk at man-made beauty, we blind ourselves to smaller wonders. Don’t—”
“Take a hike, clown,” yelled someone from the rear. “Who are you to scold us?”
Percy, energized by that catcall, sidestepped toward the podium with Pasadena’s city’s symbol, a key-crossed crown, on it. He tapped on Fake Teddy’s jacketed arm to pressure him to yield. When he wouldn’t, Percy, cheeks reddening, hovered.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Fake Teddy. “America could do worse than imitating the best of Pasadena in its ardor for the sciences and arts, in its stand against the unjust, in its opposition to spectators hurling marshmallows at those guys in white suits riding scooters during the Rose Parade. But you’ve closed your eyes for too long about an uncomfortable reality, or dis-reality: certain objects absorb the energy of man’s lesser instincts.”
Percy glowered at the police chief at one of the tables, making a throat-slashing gesture. Fake Teddy needed the hook. No one, though, expected canine surprise.
“Look, Daddy,” yipped an attendee’s young daughter. “A cute puppy crawled out of the president’s neck. He has a little beard.”
This was true, for Royo, the beige Lab-boxer with the gray Fu Manchu, had been situated clumsily around Nick’s neck, under his stuffy jacket, for the speech. The dog needed fresh air, and also to pointedly remind Nick not to forget to say what he promised to add. Trying to communicate telepathically into such a full mind was like rowing through mud.
“Get back in there,” the mic caught Nick whispering to him. “I’ll tell them.”
Royo wiggled back under the jacket, which knocked Fake Teddy’s mask askew, which in turn prompted the audience to snicker and point again. At their table, Kip Thorne giggled at Octavia Butler’s crack about a cross-species mutant. The pretend POTUS cleared his throat for his ending remarks, just the same.
“One quick aside,” he said. “When in doubt, heed the purer species. And never again should we compel our dogs to wear reindeer sweaters at Christmas or deprive them of daily bacon. Indeed, if we were less arrogant, we’d realize it’s not just cancer they can sniff out but thirty-seven other diseases doctors struggle to diagnose. The most evolved of pooches can even predict disasters and detect evil. How dare we insult them by baby talk?”
The eighty-member audience was now speechless, and Percy was done being patient. Back at the dais, he brazenly shoved Fake Teddy to the left, saying into the mic, “Okay, okay, show’s over.” Thinking it was, he straightened his tie.
But Fake Teddy snatched the mic from its holder, and when Percy tried wrestling it away, he hopped to the side. “A last thought from my bully pulpit. As I told your YMCA in 1911: remember, not all movement is necessarily progress.”
Percy lunged to retake the mic, yet Fake Teddy shuffled farther to the left, stretching the cord. “In honor of my friend Lilly Busch, I say, “Ich bin ein Pasadenan!”
Fake Teddy then dropped the mic, which produced a burst of ear-splitting feedback, and started walking the direction he came. Percy picked it up, trying to be the consummate pro. “We thank,” he said, “the Doo Dah Parade for sending us a representative to talk hogwash. Mr. Mayor, the stage is yours.”
Last Chance with the Concrete Dame
Back at the alcove, Nick was torn down the middle. He was electrified by how Fake Teddy spoke up for the dead and against myth sugarcoated as history, and also mortified he’d made himself persona non grata in his birthplace, last days here and all.
Though night was falling, he was clammy under his mask and jacket. So, he removed them both, and leaned down to allow the whiskered sidekick on his shoulders to hop onto the bench. “That, weirdly, went well,” he told Royo. “Now what?”
“You tell me,” Royo said with restored telepathy. “I’m not your cheat sheet.”
Everywhere around green and red Christmas lights sparkled, including on a church bell tower near the old Turner & Stevens Mortuary.
“So long as you know that, one way or another, we’re still blowing town.”
“Sure, Nick, sure.”
“That sounded patronizing.”
“Harsh as it is to say, you’re not awake yet. I wouldn’t have needed to assault that float to connect you with Reginald if you were.”
“How did you know to do that?”
“Michael, the man in the Zep jacket, the one we called graybeard before, egged me on. Defiling Julie’s calf was my initiative.”
“I always sensed that guy was different. Mystical, even.”
“Sorry to tell you. Sensing doesn’t get you bubkes today.”
They actually were inside the Southwest terminal at LAX when Nick realized they couldn’t board their flight. No way. A dog speaking into your head and forming vowels on his forehead is a phenomenon smart not to blow off. Limo driver Al, fortunately, hadn’t left, and
pronounced himself happy to ferry them home. On the way, he let Nick use his Nokia cellphone to dial Loomer. After Nick notified him he wouldn’t be arriving tonight, his PO-ed investor warned him he “better get his priorities straight.”
In the backseat of the Benz, Royo returned to brainwave chatter, suggesting Nick press his head against his for a crash history lesson. Nick, with nothing to lose except a future, tilted forward. Roll life!
The past washed over him in jerky clips, where silhouetted people moved in a dream-like fog: a man riding an exotic animal along a trail, and then chasing a gaunt dog with a bag in his teeth; the same man speaking with a woman in pearls on a park bench, and later squatting on a hillside tinkering with a small lamp. The fog, however, lifted as quickly as it shrouded, and Nick felt like someone neither here nor there. There was but one definitive way to learn who he might’ve been, what this was about, and the geriatric he witnessed die had sprinkled breadcrumbs. “Go look it up,” Reginald had said from his Sunny Slope Manor room.
Nick asked Al rush him to Eagle Rock Public Library before it closed. There, he went to the microfiche room and scrolled through the New York Times archives while Al watched his indubitably telepathic dog Royo outside. Sitting in a cubicle, the early century whizzed by at vertiginous speed. Eventually, a 1903 article about Theodore Roosevelt’s trip to Pasadena shone from the white screen. On it, he read how one Nick Chance had stumped the United States’ twenty-sixth president! You could’ve knocked him over with an ostrich feather. The ridiculous was now the irrefutable.
From the library, Al took Nick to his house; he wouldn’t take a dime for his services. Nick inside ripped open a carton that he’d asked Fleet to donate to the Salvation Army, and dug out the Teddy mask and a secondhand hunting jacket he’d gotten for a 1990 Halloween party. Trusting his gut, he packed the things he needed into his Toyota and drove to the bridge. At the western steps, he talked his way onto the deck, lying to one of the cops that he was a doing a routine for the party. His migraine—and fear of heights—no longer tormented him.
Nick, as Fake Teddy, intuitively knew the message for Pasadena’s elite. Where he went from here was less obvious, besides his awareness of two imperatives: positioning the solar projector on top of a balustrade, which was about fifty yards from where the disrupted ceremony was resuming behind banners and streamers, and withdrawing specific images from the Manila envelope.
“You know that you invented that gadget,” Royo told Nick clairvoyantly. “Get it working and solve the riddle. E-I-T-D-I. No time to ramble on.”
“I see what you did there. Geez: I was on to sun power before it was in vogue?”
“Let me rock your world some more, kemosabe. Today isn’t only this gal’s eightieth birthday. It’s the eightieth anniversary of your murder, right here. You were trying to rescue me when you got shoved over. Close your eyes.”
Once Nick did, he saw, again in foggy silhouette, a man up on the bench peering down as someone runs up behind him, arms outstretched. “So this is why she’s had this effect on me?” he said. “It was there the day I was born. Who did it?”
“A man named Ernest, if you can believe it. Dark human. But you broke your word.”
Nick clumped down on the bench next to Royo with more questions than there were wild oak trees in the Arroyo. He was about to nuzzle foreheads to tease out further answers when two things happened: the bridge’s grape-bunch lamps flicked on and someone joined them.
“The fuck you doing, rough rider?” Percy said, swerving around a banner, listing bridge milestones in Morning Glory fonts. “This get you off, playing the subversive?”
Nick wasn’t terribly shocked he desired a confrontation. “I’m not doing this for ego,” he said. “I’m doing my civic duty. Finally.”
“Then you’ll be delighted to learn that your civic duty scared off Al Gore. He was our scheduled surprise guest. The Secret Service agent listening to your bullshit kiboshed that, though; proud of yourself?”
“Al Gore, really?” Nick looked at Royo in an are-we-sure-we-know-what-we’re-doing manner. Gore was Pasadena’s kind of Democrat. Plus, he invented the Internet.
Royo didn’t know Al Gore from Al Bundy, learning the world, as he mostly did, through Nick’s. Now, he only craved payback—payback on behalf of his tail-wagging brethren. He sprang off the bench to confront Pasadena’s serial dog killer of 1913.
While Percy might’ve been your standard sleazebag in this life, the telltale aura of the man who chloroformed the stray dogs that growled in the presence of his malevolent soul still clung in Royo’s nostrils. He’d executed them in the basement of his shadowy house on the Arroyo’s eastern bluff. Royo knew that for a fact, being the mutt he was supposed to be.
On one of his exploratory jaunts outside Ivy Wall, Royo had followed the sounds of panicked barking to Percy’s property. For an hour, he’d tried freeing the prisoners by kicking in the basement window with his hind legs. When Percy finally heard him, he came out dangling a slab of raw steak that Royo could smell was laced with poison. He fled, back to Ivy Wall, souring fast on humanity.
Citizens could’ve unmasked the real Percy behind the icehouse proprietor and civic big man. But distractions—Colorado Street Bridge fever, percolating racial tensions over a future public pool at Brookside Park, and other topics—shielded him from scrutiny.
This new Percy marched past Royo and up to Nick, unloading on him with a vicious slap across the face. “I don’t know what grudge you have against Pasadena,” he said. “I know the bad-mouthing ends today.”
The slap left a red welt on Nick’s face and more. It jogged a memory in his head of former Percy in a woolly winter coat on a misty day under the bridge.
Royo didn’t care which iteration the creep was. He lunged at him with feral purpose, sinking his chompers through Percy’s argyle socks and into his left anklebone
“Owwwww, you mongrel,” Percy yelped. He leaned down, smashing his fist into the top of Royo’s head. The dog unclenched his jaw and backpedaled, growling.
The same wicked smile Percy flashed the doomed dogs in 1913 returned in 1993. “You know what? The Rose Bowl’s behind us. Field goal try!” The sandy-haired stockbroker then stepped back and booted Royo in the rib cage with an upward force that jettisoned him five feet onto the deck. Nick’s muse thumped sideways, crying, Er, er, er, errr. Within seconds, his body was twitching.
“Hey, Percy?” Nick said, weaponizing Percy’s vanity in a distraction ploy. “Isn’t the mayor calling you over for an award?”
“An award?” Percy said.
When he pivoted toward the ceremony, Nick barreled into his waist and tackled him onto the roadway. The tussle was on, and they threw alligator-arm punches but Percy, the workout warrior, soon got the better of him. While one hand pinned Nick down, the other reached into his blazer pocket. From it he grabbed his commemorative letter opener, the one engraved “Pasadena-Centennial” on its chrome blade, and stabbed Nick above the belly button through his Barbara Bush Chia Head T-shirt. Nick shrieked, grasping the bleeding hole in his belly; he’d been impaled by a souvenir.
Percy cooly plucked the letter opener from Nick’s stomach, which made a slurping sound and got to his feet. He cast off his blazer next—and speared himself in his left shoulder in a frame-up job. “Police!” he hollered, jumping onto the sidewalk in front of the bench for elevation. “Help! This wacko is trying to kill me.”
Nobody heard his bogus plea with applause rippling from the bridge rededication.
“Don’t stab me again,” Percy shouted. “I have a family (an ex-wife and a bling-collecting, pregnant mistress, anyway). “I’ll have to defend myself.”
A spasm-ing Royo made eye contact with Nick, whose duodenum was punctured. “E-I-T-D-I,” Royo said telepathically. “Percy’s being the real him. Time for the real you.”
Nick wobbled onto his legs while Percy scanned ea
st, waiting for the authorities. “Dude, cut the pep talk and just tell me,” Nick said. “We’re getting our butts kicked.” He spit blood.
“Don’t call me dude, my hail fellow,” Percy said with a cackle, believing Nick was speaking to him. “You’re going to jail. And your fat-ass dog is roadkill. Get it?”
The dimmer setting on Nick’s listless spirit cranked past manufacturer recommendations hearing the term “roadkill.” He spun Percy around and jammed the letter opener into his shoulder. Percy screamed, “Youch!” and Nick, the southpaw, round-housed him in his haughty jaw.
The punch staggered Percy backward into the concrete bench. And more. His upper body clanked into the re-soldered portion of fence subjected earlier to Reginald’s principled vandalism, and the jarring caused the patch to shear off its fresh welds and drop. It crashed on top of the plywood deck over the shattered condo skylight in a bang that everybody on the deck heard. Everybody.
To their left, Pasadena PD started ripping down the banners separating the battle and the star-studded party, which still hadn’t gotten to that red velvet Federico’s cake.
“I’ve seen enough police shows on TV to know the guys with big guns are coming,” Royo thought. “What rhymes with learn? Not that you do it proficiently.”
“At least I don’t bury yoga pants or behead a kid’s doll,” Nick said. Then across his wan face his eyes brightened. “Ooh, I figured it out,” he said. “E-I stands for earn it. Yeah, that’s it. But earn what?” He spun the knob on the projector, and gears whirled.
“I’m not telling,” Royo said via brainwaves. He coughed blood.
Captain Crum, Lieutenant Figgle, and three sharpshooters now jogged over, joining the other cops about thirty feet away. “Everybody freeze until I sort this fiasco out,” Crum said. “And why is everybody bleeding?”