Shining City

by Seth Greenland

  Late on a Friday afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky and the temperature cooler, Marcus and Jan headed out on their second walk of the day. They enjoyed the dwindling time they had together, no longer burdened by having to maintain an elaborate illusion. Marcus wore shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt. He’d put some weight back on and appeared healthy. Jan was wearing loose white pants and a white long-sleeved cotton pullover. Marcus thought she looked beautiful, which indicated to him that she had made peace with his impending absence and would get through it without too much Sturm und Drang. As they held hands and walked in silence, a large man rode by on a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Classic. He gunned his engine before disappearing down the street. They barely looked at him.

  Marcus said “Isn’t it funny how people with enough disposable income to buy a bike like that still like to think of themselves as rebels?”

  “That guy’s probably a dentist.”

  “The genius of the company that makes that bike is that they know how to package rebellion and sell it to a guy who works in an office.”

  “You’re a rebel.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Marcus, you are.” She rubbed his back with her hand.

  He put his arm around her, and with mock self-importance, said “Yeah, that’s me, I’m a certified, card-carrying criminal kingpin, the genuine article, with street cred, bona fides, and a prison sentence. I’m Pimp Daddy. It said so on television. I just wish there was some way to work that.”

  When they returned to the house, Marcus poured himself a beer and sat in the backyard with Bertrand Russell, who was blissfully unaware that his master would soon no longer be there. It must be glorious to exist in the eternal present, Marcus thought, as he watched the little dog dig a hole. He wished he had faith. He envied those who did, and the blissful afterlife they were promised. In the meantime, this was the dirty world in which he found himself, the moist field on which he played; this realm of animal and mineral, salt, iron, water, dust, light, desire, and darkness. He’d seen it up close, tasted it, felt it in his pores. It was the essence, bountiful and life-giving, and human beings wanted to touch it, wanted to live, to stretch their spines, arch their backs, and, arms spread, face the sun, fingertips reaching upward toward the eternal sky. But they needed to go to school, to work, to make money, to raise families, to bury the dead. He understood. He knew. His conversation with Jan had concentrated his mind, and a means of exploiting that knowledge was taking shape.

  Marcus drained his beer and went back into the house, where he found Jan talking to Plum on the phone. She looked up when Marcus entered, motioned that he should wait a moment, then said goodbye and hung up.

  “Plum wants to have us over for dinner.”

  “It needs to be soon.”

  “Tomorrow night all right?”

  “Yes, great. Listen, I have this idea…”

  Plum had left Reseda and was now living in a hillside Craftsman house in Echo Park. Her new home had blond wood floors, and its large windows faced south toward the silvery skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles. Marcus and Jan were suitably complimentary about the place and conveyed enthusiasm for the architecture and her decorating choices during the obligatory tour they were given upon arrival. It was hard to begrudge Plum the satisfaction she felt at being able to reinvent her life. They dined beneath a trellis at the picnic table in her backyard, surrounded by fragrant bougainvillea and a bursting garden. Plum served a ragout with garlic bread and a salad, and they talked about everything except where Marcus was going to be at this time next week. The food was sumptuous and well prepared, and they drank two bottles of Montepulciano.

  Marcus had always perceived Plum to be perpetually if subtly aggrieved, someone who lived under a dark cloud largely of her own making. Clearly, she had found some degree of satisfaction, and it manifested in her easy manner, which was entirely new. Despite his own grim fate, he was happy that one person had gained some ongoing benefit from his choices. By the time they were eating the peach cobbler she had prepared, Marcus was feeling so open-hearted toward Plum that he readily acceded when she asked if they wanted to watch the piece of video art she had been working on.

  “It’s being screened in a Tokyo gallery,” she said. “The opening’s next week and I’m flying over.”

  “That’s terrific,” Marcus said, trying to mean it.

  “I wish we could come,” Jan said.

  “I owe you guys.”

  Jan hugged Plum.

  Now the three of them were gathered in Plum’s home entertainment area in the living room. She had purchased a set of brown leather chairs and a matching sofa, which were set off against a Scandinavian rug. The focus of the furniture arrangement was a large-screen television. Marcus relaxed into the sofa, relishing the supple softness of the leather. He knew this degree of comfort would soon be a memory.

  Plum clicked the remote control, and a startling picture filled the screen: herself in full S&M regalia—thigh high, spike-heeled vinyl boots, a leather thong and bustier, the ensemble accented with studded black leather bracelets and a dog collar—and wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails. It took Marcus a moment to realize that she was posing in front of the Federal Courthouse building in downtown Los Angeles, statuesque against a hard blue sky. There she was again in front of the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters, gazing into the distance, Washington Crossing the Delaware, bondage version. And again, her Amazon form in front of City Hall, the sunlight glinting on the silver chains that traversed her weaponized cleavage.

  “The piece is about external manifestations of power versus internal ones,” the non-video Plum said earnestly, enthralled by her own iconic image. Marcus and Jan nodded. The action then moved to a cavernous Chinese restaurant that was empty, save for Plum, who sat haughtily at a table where two waiters in high heels and women’s panties served her.

  “I’m commenting on gender roles in a multi-racial context,” she said.

  “Ah,” Marcus said.

  After several close-ups of a stiletto heel immersed in a bowl of shark’s-fin soup, the action shifted to Plum’s dungeon. A naked man was lying on a table, stroking his flaccid penis. After a moment, Plum made her entrance, striding into the room like a Prussian officer. In the tremulous moment before the anticipated violence of the event, it was almost possible to hear the Wagner. The man rolled over to look at her, and Marcus saw his face.

  No, it wasn’t.

  “Hit pause,” Marcus said.

  “Wait! It’s coming to a good part,” Plum said. The man was now climbing off the table.

  “Hit pause, hit pause.”

  The man had dropped to his knees.

  “Marcus …” Jan said.

  “Please pause it,” Marcus said.

  Plum impatiently clicked the remote and the frame froze, but not before the man affixed his lips to the toe of Plum’s vinyl boot. Jan looked at Marcus, confused. Then she followed his gaze to the screen.

  “Oh, my god,” Jan said.

  “Do you know who that is?” Marcus asked Plum.

  “He told me to call him Samantha.”

  “Does he know you were taping him?”

  “Of course not. But it’s only going to be shown in Tokyo. Why are you asking me this? Do you know him?”

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “Oh, yes.”

  Roon was flying to Kuala Lumpur that afternoon and was taken aback when Marcus called to ask for a meeting. Marcus sensed that Roon was going to try to avoid him, so he said it was an emergency. Roon relented, but it would have to be quick. Marcus briefly thought about putting on the suit he had worn to Nathan’s bar mitzvah, but then realized he did not have to impress his old friend. He was the only one in the elevator of the Century City building wearing khakis and an untucked short-sleeved shirt.

  Roon leased President Reagan’s old office for conversation value, and the walls were covered with Gipper memorabilia. A Praying President replica of the former chief executive occupied a place of ho
nor on his expansive desk, its MADE IN CHINA label discreetly out of view. The panoramic view of the hills was clear as tequila on this day.

  “Pimp Daddy?” Roon said. He was wearing a well-cut blue blazer and crisp gray slacks with cuffs. His white shirt was open at the collar. He leaned back in his desk chair and regarded Marcus.

  “It’s a brand.”

  “What, like Nike?”

  “I’ve been trying to come up with an angle, and it struck me, why pay some athlete millions of dollars to merchandise a line of junk with his name on it when you have me?” Roon grinned at the audacity of the notion, but Marcus was unruffled.

  “Everyone’s got an idea. It’s all in the execution.”

  “I trademarked the name.”

  Then Marcus pulled out a portfolio he’d placed next to his chair, unzipped it, and spread the contents on Roon’s desk.

  “Jan did these drawings.” They were product designs—artfully rendered eye candy to bewitch a potential investor and float dollars from pockets. Roon leafed through them. “You’ve still got your factories in China. We make all the stuff over there. China’s not the future any more, right? Now it’s the present. I have a vision, Roon, a Pimp Daddy empire. It begins with T-shirts, then expands to briefs and boxers, jackets, pajamas, sneakers, men’s fragrance, grooming products, wallpaper, wrapping paper, toilet paper, home furnishings, baby products, can you see little Pimp Daddy diapers? Get ’em in the cradle, right? And here’s the kicker, we open a chain of Pimp Daddy stores. This could be an international retailing juggernaut—New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and I’m willing to give you a taste once you recover the startup money. I think ten percent is fair.”

  “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “California is a community property state, Roon. Your wife would get half.” Marcus smiled. He had him. If he refused, Plum’s piece of video art would go direct from the Tokyo gallery to the Los Angeles Family Court. “Things change. You have to adapt. Wear sunscreen.”

  Roon did not remember having said the same words under far different circumstances several years earlier. He stared at Marcus dully.

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “There always is.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “No one wants to go to jail,” Roon said, momentarily buoyed by the vision of his tormentor behind bars. “But it’s important that you pay your debt to society.”

  “You’re going to get my sentence commuted.”

  “I can’t interfere with a judge, Marcus. That’s a crime. I’m not a criminal.”

  The sanctimony annoyed Marcus, but he cut it with a scythe.

  “I don’t want you to contact the judge, Roon. I want you to talk to the governor. He’s a good friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  Chapter 24

  It turned out that Marcus liked China. He found the country to be a fascinating, fast-evolving amalgamation of East and West, ancient and modern, Taoist and Communist, Buddhist and capitalist. Two months after having his sentence commuted, Marcus sat between Jan and Nathan in the back of a pedal rickshaw being driven through the choking traffic of Guodong, an industrial city four hours from Shanghai. The Pimp Daddy line of goods was going to be manufactured there and, as co-CEOs, they were temporarily needed in-country. Now the three of them were on their way to look at the villa where they would be staying for the next month. Marcus glanced up and saw huge billboards advertising cell phone service, big-screen televisions, a new family resort on the South China Sea. The driver steered out of the traffic and onto a side street. Soon they were ascending a curving road, past tree-shaded homes, light-dappled and radiant in the afternoon sun. This was where the new oligarchs lived.

  As they crested the hill, Marcus looked behind him toward the plain below. Factories churning out low-cost goods to be shipped around the globe stretched on for miles and miles beneath a vast sky. Barges bobbed on the waters of the mighty river in the distance. Somewhere below, a massive new road was being built to handle all the trucks that rumbled through, twenty-four hours a day. He hoped to assume his place as an avatar of this up-to-the-minute economy— his products offering moderately priced reflections of the American street in countries around the world. There was a time he would have railed against this development, observed how it represented the weakening of this or the vanishing of that. But those days were over and tomorrow beckoned.

  Three years later, on an early spring evening, Marcus stands on the deck of his new hilltop home overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Wearing a lightweight wool suit purchased on a recent trip to Paris, he sips a vodka and cranberry juice with a slice of lime prepared for him by the chef. The house, crafted from glass and steel, came on the market just as he and Jan were looking to sell their place in Malibu and move back to town. They like the beach, but there is so much going on with the business, and the constant driving back and forth to the city and to the airport where they lease their jet had become onerous. After nearly two decades on the valley floor, Marcus feels profound relief at being able to gaze upon his former domain from this rarefied perspective. That the deck on which he stands had been Julian’s makes it sweeter still. When his brother’s house became available, Marcus had hesitated before buying it. He thought Jan might not like the idea, might find it untoward or morbid. But she told him he should live in Julian’s house if only to finally vanquish his brother, lay the demon memories to rest. Marcus thought about it and concluded that Julian would have appreciated the twist.

  Jan is getting dressed in the master suite, which has an unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean. Nathan is in his room, filling out a college application. Lenore has married a man she met at the trial, a retiree with a good pension and an impressive collection of hookahs. They live in Orange County, but tonight they are in the living room playing with Bertrand Russell. The family is going out later.

  Marcus had proved to be a shrewd strategist, and Pimp Daddy was an instant success. A strategic marketing alliance with a popular hiphop artist known for beating a murder rap had caused the company to blow up in America. Professional athletes were wearing the line, models were photographed in it, and kids were fighting over the stuff on playgrounds. The company had gone public at the end of the first year and rolled into Europe, South America, and the Far East. Cheap knockoffs were growing like the poppies in the Afghan spring. Marcus had known the brand was indelible when he saw a photograph of a Pimp Daddy T-shirt on a soldier in an African civil war. The picture was subsequently used as part of an advertising campaign, and Marcus donated a million dollars to a fund for war orphans administered by a famous archbishop who was in line for a Nobel Prize. A photograph of the clergyman with his arm around the shoulders of Pimp Daddy’s founder was on the cover of the first annual report.

  Tonight Marcus is going to attend a dinner in the gilded ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he will be honored as Los Angeles Businessman of the Year. He knows these kinds of awards are nonsense, believes they lack real meaning and prey on the insecurities of people successful enough to know better. But perception is important, and this gold plaque will put the seal on his rehabilitation. To further enhance what already promises to be a glittering gala, Marcus has requested that the award be presented by his old friend Roon Primus.

  Marcus ruminates about what he will say later that evening when he is at the podium, gazing over a sea of his peers. Maybe he will allude to his humble background and the inspiration of his hardworking father, or regale them with tales of his intrepid, larcenous grandfather. He considers talking about the great minds he was exposed to in his philosophical studies and his years cultivating the common touch in the trenches at the toy factory. He cogitates on what it will feel like to stand in the very ballroom where, a few years earlier, Roon had treated him rudely. He mulls over the story of how he deftly outmaneuvered him and, as a result of his own steady hand and unswerving eye, has now attained heights heretofore unimaginable. Any and all of the
numberless struggles and his eventual inspiring triumph are fodder for his after-dinner remarks.

  But Marcus knows what people really want to hear.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Bill Diamond, Michael Disend, Drew Greenland, Sam Harper, David Kanter, Jeff Rothberg, Leslie Schwartz, Mark Haskell Smith, and John Tomko for generously reading early drafts of this book.

  Thanks to my agents, Henry Dunow and Sylvie Rabineau.

  Thanks to my editors, Colin Dickerman and Benjamin Adams.

  Thanks to my father, Leo Greenland, who remains an inspiration.

  And finally, thanks to Susan—my first and best reader—and our children, Allegra and Gabe.

  By the same author

  The Bones

  PLAYS

  Jungle Rot

  Red Memories

  Jerusalem

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Seth Greenland is the author of The Bones. An award-winning playwright, he has also written extensively for film and television. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

  Praise for Shining City

  “He’s a satirist who takes glee in the disconnect between our familiar, sunny city and the desperate times in which we live. His tone is infectious. What else can we do but laugh?”

  —Los Angeles Times Magazine

  “Greenland efficiently maps out a bumpin’ joyride of sex, prostitutes, murder, betrayal, revenge and extravagant bar mitzvahs.”

  —Philadelphia City Paper

  “Shining City is simply pedal-to-the-metal fun—sassy and knowing and irreverent. It’s much too much of all those things to be pigeonholed as ‘summer reading,’ but if you have room for only one entertainment this summer, let Shining City be it.”