by Hart Hanson
“Return to the womb. She feels safe,” I said.
“You should be encouraging Tinkertoy at every opportunity to better her day-to-day existence,” Connie said.
I reminded Connie that, due to my callous and unyielding decree that Oasis Limo be a nonsmoking workplace, Tinkertoy had ceased chain-smoking Camels in favor of chain-chewing bubble gum. Same with Ripple. Same with Lucky.
“The fact is,” I told her, “I’ve saved everybody from cancer. Isn’t that why you sleep with me?”
“I don’t sleep with you,” she said, “at least not regularly.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What’s with that?”
“I don’t want to give you false hope,” she said. “Toma las cosas como vienen. How is Darren?”
Darren Cameron Monning is Ripple’s real name. Connie’s concerns for Ripple are maternal. It’s Connie’s contention that I should call Ripple by his real name because Ripple is obviously a rhyming version of Cripple and Connie wants Ripple to overcome that self-loathing, self-defeating self-image. I’ve tried calling Ripple by his real name a thousand times and he has not responded even once, even stoned out of his gourd or roused from a sound sleep. When I asked Connie why it was all right for Tinkertoy to have a nickname and not Ripple (Tinkertoy’s real name is Rose Margaret Vandevere), Connie said it’s because Tinkertoy has the right to reimagine herself as a different woman from the one who was degraded and tortured in Iraq, while Ripple must remember that he is still the same man he was before he lost his legs.
“Same man,” I agreed, “except only half as tall.”
“How are his new prosthetics?” Connie asked.
“The kid’s hard to fit because he’s lopsided,” I said, “so he’s back in the wheelchair. Sometimes he uses one fake leg and crutches, but it hurts.”
I wasn’t positive that Ripple’s constant ingestion of THC hadn’t blunted his ambition to stand tall but thought it best not to get Connie going on that subject.
“Has Darren found anybody?”
Meaning a girlfriend.
I shook my head.
“It’s been over eight months,” Connie said. “Darren’s nineteen. He should be bonding with a human being, not masturbándose to Internet porn.”
Ripple does more than masturbate to porn. He reads graphic novels, loves sci-fi and fantasy, and is adamant that God (whom he believes in wholeheartedly) is an extremely advanced cruel alien conducting Mengele-like experiments on humanity who will get His divine ass kicked when the good-guy aliens finally show up to liberate this concentration camp we call Earth.
“Lucky tried to talk to Ripple about women,” I said. “But he did that Afghan thing of holding hands.”
“How did Darren respond?”
“By drawing an extremely detailed cartoon of a beheaded Lucky eating his own genitalia.”
“Esto es muy desconcertante . . .”
“Yes,” I said, because why not?
“The kind of physical trauma Darren has faced, the destruction of his physical self, he needs time to find himself as a sexual being again.”
I nodded, because why argue?
“I imagine he had his fair share of sex before his injuries.”
“Absolutely,” I said, “if by fair share you mean once.”
“Once? You mean one time? ¿Una vez?”
“Ripple grew up small-town religious in Three Rivers. He and his high school girlfriend saved it for marriage and they only got married two days before he shipped out.”
“Darren is married?”
“Waiting on his divorce.”
“What happened?”
“What happened? The kid lost two legs in two different ways in two minutes. Eighteen-year-old wife takes one look, no, thanks, that’s that, end of conjugals.”
“The girl was religious enough to want to be married before they had sex but not lo suficientemente devota to stay married to Darren after he came home wounded.”
“Correct,” I said, but what I was thinking was of course because religion is bullshit crap. I didn’t say that part out loud because I currently put my chances of staying the night at fifty-fifty and didn’t want to jinx it by insulting Connie’s friend Jesus. As a devout lapsed Catholic (it’s a real thing), Connie could be surprisingly defensive on behalf of God.
“Maybe the problem is Ripple still loves her,” I said. “Maybe he can’t even imagine being with someone else.”
“Don’t do that,” Connie said. “We’re having a good time. We’re talking about Ripple. If you want to tener relaciones sexuales tonight, don’t make everything about you.”
I shut up because I did want to tener relaciones sexuales tonight. When I felt the blip of tension bleed away, I told Connie that I was confident that someday soon Ripple’s redheaded horniness would outweigh his broken heart and missing legs and his fury at what happened to him in Afghanistan, and the right (meaning odd) girl would come along and he’d make up for lost time.
You’ll notice that Connie didn’t interrogate me about Lucky.
It’s not because she doesn’t like Lucky, she does, but Lucky is a client. Connie’s working to get him on a path to citizenship so that he can live and work in the States legally. Because Connie takes her responsibilities as an officer of the court seriously, she won’t gossip about clients. Believe me, I’ve tried to find excuses for her to take on Tinkertoy and Ripple as clients too so I’d never have to discuss any of them.
After we finished our meal and I was done bringing Connie up to date on my employees, Connie stipulated that the only way that we were going to make love that night was if I lay perfectly still—my aching, stitched-up head cradled by pillows—while she did all the heavy lifting. I did not argue. (Would you?)
“Relajarse,” said Connie, completely unnecessarily since I was already relaxed from food and love and desire and pills and wine.
A duck paddled by on the canal just outside her open French doors, on the other side of a stand of black bamboo, which at least provides the illusion of privacy. The duck quacked at us, which, due to red wine and painkillers and joie de vivre, made me laugh so hard that Connie placed her hand over my mouth.
“Just so I’m clear, Counselor,” I whispered when she let go, “would this be conferring or fucking?”
Connie did not answer due to focus and concentration and did something with her timing and muscle control that made life worth living but froze me into a statue, my toes curled so tightly they cracked like starting a fire.
The duck quacked and then Connie quacked, only after which I took my turn to quack—after which I slept like a drunken fat Lutheran in church, my first solid, rejuvenating sleep in days.
Morning came too soon.
One more quick and very satisfying intimate conference with my lawyer (during which I took a more active role than I had the night before), then raisin toast and coffee and Vicodin, after which I declined Connie’s offer of a lift and set out to walk the couple of miles from the Venice Canals to Oasis Limousine Services in Santa Monica, because if there’s one thing a soldier turned limo driver likes to do when he’s not working, it’s walk.
I emerged from Connie’s canal onto South Venice Boulevard, up to hipster-heaven Abbot Kinney, grabbed a café con leche to go at Abbot’s Habit, and continued east on California Avenue toward Lincoln, smelling jasmine, roses, sage, and a hundred other Southern California plants, mixed in with the scent of Venice bohemians and tech geniuses firing up the occasional morning bowl.
I like Lincoln Boulevard; it keeps you on your toes engaging with the three stages of junkiedom: Junkie. Methadone patient. Reformed junkie. I strode past Olympic High School, through knots of keener kids heading in early, grateful that Lucky had provided me with an Oasis Limo Services cap to hide my gashed and bloody stitched-up head. Past Pico, and over the 10 freeway, morning traffic bad in both direc
tions, as usual, but especially coming from the east into Santa Monica. I zigzagged north and west toward Ninth, over to Santa Monica Boulevard, and up to my domicile and place of business.
Oasis Limousine Services squats a little more than a mile inland from the beach, just off the main drag in an alley. A tallish, badly proportioned, charmless, single-story twenty-foot-ceilinged brick building billed as earthquake-proof (I call bullshit), with three mechanic’s bays, a tinted-windowed office at the front, and a toolroom behind the bays. There’s a frost-fenced enclosure, where we can secure vehicles at night, that we call the Yard. Before I bought the property at police auction it was a chop shop with a reinforced roof atop which a mobile home had been hoisted by a crane.
The penthouse. My home.
I sauntered into the office to find Ripple in his wheelchair, facedown on his desk, sleeping, his copper thatch of hair half covering a comic book featuring zombies eating sexy nuns. Dressed in his unvarying uniform of black khaki cargo shorts, a yellow Minions T-shirt, and his I LOVE JESUS BUT I STILL CUSS fanny pack, Ripple looked more like an innocent choirboy than the furious, morbid, obsessed-with-violence lunatic I knew him to be.
“Wake up,” I said, kicking Ripple’s wheelchair, and continued through the office into the mechanic’s bay, where Tinkertoy was changing out the solenoid on Number Three, a 2011 Cadillac DTS limo and the bane of Tinkertoy’s existence. Three challenges Tinkertoy’s every assumption about the rational world of mechanics and machinery by displaying a willful and haunted personality (as does Tinkertoy).
I’d become accustomed to approaching Tinkertoy slowly and carefully because when she is startled in any way, to any degree, she screams like she’s being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac.
I cleared my throat.
“I heard you. Already,” she said. “Telling Ripple to. Wake up.”
Tinkertoy is an imposing African American woman, six feet tall, solid, as dark as black coffee. To me, she looks like some kind of royalty.
“Wait. They keep you in jail overnight?” Ripple asked, wheeling up behind us, a big sleep crease in his face that made him look about fourteen. The jaded smirk he affected to indicate that he knew exactly where I’d been all night didn’t make him look any more mature.
“Company announcement: we now work exclusively for Bismarck Avila.”
Tinkertoy nodded and returned to her work. Ripple was not so accepting.
“Wait, Bismarck Avila? The rapper-skater dude?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He’s blackmailing me to work for him.”
“Wait, so now Bismarck Avila’s our only client?”
“That’s what exclusive means, Ripple.”
“So, wait—I cancel all our other clients?”
You may have noticed that Ripple says wait a lot. One of the VA wizards told me it’s because Ripple is subconsciously trying to slow life down, which is only to be expected from somebody whose whole life got changed for the worse in a couple of minutes. The world spins too fast.
It probably also explains why Ripple is wearing out his medical marijuana card, another effort to slow down time.
“I’ll drive Avila. Switch my regulars over to Lucky.”
“Wait. Why would Avila hire you?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“You shot his bodyguard!”
“Not even close. Where’d you get that?”
“TMZ. What really happened?”
“I saved his life.”
“So, you’re a hero?”
“Exactly.”
“Wait. Your reward is to be blackmailed into doing something you don’t want to do?”
“No good deed . . .”
“Is Avila paying us?”
“He’s paying us double.”
Ripple pulled his lips back from his teeth, shook his orange head, and flared his nostrils in the universal manner of teenagers who think their elders are idiots.
“Any questions?”
“Yes, how do we get blackmailed by everybody all the time?”
Tinkertoy tumbled into the conversation in her typical way, most commonly described as clumsy or offensive. “Why you?”
“Because I’m delightful, Tinkertoy. I’m due at his place in Calabasas in an hour and a half.”
“You taking Number One?” Ripple asked.
One is our prestige vehicle: a 2015 Mercedes-Benz S550 sedan stretch limo. Nice. Understated. The vehicle that brought Bismarck Avila to us in the first place.
“Two,” I said.
“What about? Three?” Tinkertoy asked, pointing at her nemesis, the Caddie.
“Three will never make it,” Ripple said.
“I fixed it,” Tinkertoy said.
“You say Three’s fixed, but it never is.”
“Three. Is fixed.”
“Not unless you conducted an exorcism, because Three is haunted and the ghost who haunts Three hates you.”
Ripple zipped open his I LOVE JESUS BUT I STILL CUSS fanny pack and dug out a medical marijuana toffee bonbon.
“Half the limos in town had people die in them,” I said. “It doesn’t make them haunted.”
“Wait! Die?” Ripple shouted. “Ha! Try murdered! With a machete!”
(Accurate, but it happened before we owned the vehicle so not our problem.)
“I’m taking Two,” I said.
Two is my favorite—an elegant 1954 Chrysler New Yorker limo, a vintage slab of yesteryear’s Detroit metal, deep midnight blue, fins extended behind like a contrail. Two has no air-conditioning, which would serve Bismarck Avila right because he lived in the hot, hot Valley and there should always be negative consequences to blackmail.
While Ripple and Tinkertoy argued about whether or not the Caddie was haunted, I took the opportunity to slip away to my penthouse on the roof, which involves climbing a ladder to a precarious galvanized rigger’s catwalk bolted to the ceiling, which leads to a pull-down mahogany stairway taken from the set of a pirate movie, which leads up to the roof. The rigger’s catwalk alone stopped Connie from even trying to reach my beautifully appointed penthouse on the roof of an ex–chop shop off an alley off car dealership row on Santa Monica Boulevard.
When I say beautifully appointed I am not being facetious. My penthouse is without a doubt the dopest nonpermitted home on the west side. The chop shop criminal mastermind who owned the building before me was under house arrest for two years awaiting trial, so he put a ton of dough and sweat equity into what started out as nothing more than a mobile home craned up onto the roof. He added walnut crown molding, skylights made from prism-like light collectors salvaged from a decommissioned nineteenth-century lighthouse, floors of reclaimed California oak from Will Rogers’s ranch, rugs from a Merv Griffin estate sale in Palm Springs, and a wrought-iron gazebo that has some connection to William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon.
My secret hideout.
Wearing a plastic Ralphs bag on my head to protect my stitches, I exited the shower (fixtures courtesy of a Jeremy Renner renovation in Bel Air) to find my mobile chirping.
Dad calling from the ranch in the mountains above Big Sur.
“Dad!”
“Hello, Mikey, can you hear me?”
I told him I could hear him just fine what with it being the twenty-first century and at least one of us living in a major metropolitan center.
“I was heading back from Salinas in the F-150, listening to news radio,” he said in his concerned-father voice, “and heard the damnedest story and thought I’d better call.”
Which meant the murder attempt on Bismarck Avila had made the news all the way up in Steinbeck country.
“What’d they say?”
“That a limo driver was being held as a person of interest in a shooting in a hotel bar,” Dad said. “I kn
ew it had to be you because who else would it be?”
“Dad, there are thousands of limo drivers in LA.”
“The radio said Oasis Limo Services.”
I admitted that narrowed it down.
I told my father the whole story from my point of view, very much as you’ve heard it so far (leaving out the sexy quacking sequence), after which Dad told me he was proud of me and thought I’d acquitted myself well, considering the circumstances.
After which the old man pivoted like a shortstop and blamed those exact same circumstances on me. “I can’t say I’ve ever understood why you have chosen a life that exposes you to so much violence.”
“I’m a limo driver, Dad. Not a hit man.”
“You joined the military.”
“It was either that or join a seminary and I thought the Jesuits might be unsympathetic to the fact that I do not believe in God.”
Dad asked about Connie and Lucky and Ripple and Tinkertoy and then Connie again because, like me, he’d like nothing more than to have her join the family as my wife.
“You’re all right, Mikey?”
“I got some stitches in my head but otherwise fine, Dad.”
“Can you come up north for a few days? Winter steelhead looking good.”
I told him I had work but promised to get up to see him as soon as I could.
“Remember what the poet asked, Mikey, ‘So . . . so you think you can tell, Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain?’”
“What’s that? William Blake?”
“Pink Floyd.”
And he hung up in exactly the same way rappers drop the microphone to claim the win.
I START MY NEW JOB
There are worse things to do under duress on a Monday morning than pilot a perfectly restored midnight-blue 1954 Chrysler New Yorker limousine down the California Incline to Pacific Coast Highway, windows open, wearing your most comfortable lightweight dark suit, slightly (but not unsafely) buzzed on Vicodin, sipping thermos coffee and listening to Lucky’s exotic, calming Arabian chill-out music. In Los Angeles, when the Santa Anas do finally stop blowing, it’s like Death Valley takes a deep breath and draws cooler ocean air in over the Southland basin and you remember for the hundredth time why this is paradise.