Bonita Avenue

by Peter Buwalda

  Janis, I recalled, was a late sleeper who didn’t do well with short nights, so we drank tea and thumbed through the San Francisco Chronicle as a matter of form. Just after ten Boudewijn gave me a wink. “Why don’t you go wake them up,” he said. “They’ll appreciate that. I never like oversleeping at friends’.”

  I went downstairs and tapped gently on the garden-room door. I thought I heard movement, so I waited, then knocked again.

  “Sleepyheads.”

  Since there was no answer I cracked open the door. Daylight and fresh air streamed in. I stuck my head into the deep, low-ceilinged room. The beds were empty, the covers crumpled in a heap, one of the doors to the yard stood wide open. I went in, picked up a wet towel from the pinewood floor. The bathroom was deserted as well, the halogen spots above the washbasin were still on and tepid water trickled from the showerhead. While I scanned the wet floor for Timo and my sister, as though they had shrunk to the size of Q-tips, I realized they had been gone for hours.

  Although morning rush-hour traffic on Sunset Boulevard was lighter than usual, I still managed to nearly rear-end the Chevrolet in front of me a couple of times. The memories of Janis threw me off—but not as much as those of Aaron Bever. During breakfast I happened to check an old Hotmail address, an account I used to buy and sell shoes and dresses on eBay, and was flabbergasted to stumble on a three-week-old e-mail from Aaron. It gave me a real shock. There are certain people who are out of the picture for so long that it’s like they no longer exist. Aaron? Uh-oh. My first reaction was: trash it, so I sent the message straight to the wastebasket unread. I was never one for maintaining old contacts, but since that weird visit from my sister I had written off Enschede and all its ghosts once and for all. I left Holland in 2000, I didn’t follow the news, had no contact with Dutch people, and after leaving Boudewijn and Mike didn’t even speak the language anymore. My links to the mother country had been severed. And I wanted to keep it that way.

  So in that sense it was a good thing there was big news waiting for me on Coldwater Canyon Avenue. Even before I closed my office door behind me, reception put me through to Víctor Sotomayor’s assistant. What I was hoping for, what we all had been hoping for the past week, happened: the sale went through, there was a deal, for $16.3 million we could call ourselves the owners of the Los Angeles Barracks. Woohoo, party time.

  Rusty stormed in and kissed me like it was New Year’s Eve, and five minutes later we were standing there in the old lobby, all fifty of us, drinking a toast to our new premises. Rusty, who had nudged me up the staircase a couple of steps, reached over to refill my glass at least three times from one of the gold bottles of champagne we’d been keeping chilled all week. “Here,” he roared in his nasal West Coast Irish accent, “in return for all the sleepless nights you’ve cost me.” Then he drew everyone’s attention to me. “Friends,” he declared nervously, “a toast to us. A toast to the success of the Barracks. A toast to future colleagues. But first and foremost, a toast to Joy. This amazing woman here”—he shook my hip with his free hand, so that I had to grab the wobbly wooden banister for support—“has put us, shall I say, on the cutting edge.”

  He then nearly pulled me off the stairs and, in addition to two kisses, gave me the floor. Speeches still made him panicky, even after all his years as company director. It really was something, all those faces looking up at me. Cameramen, directors, make-up artists, the IT folks, a few actors in white bathrobes with half-made-up faces. Dedicated, loyal, eager, often decently educated loners, packed together into the wood-paneled lobby of our creaking Victorian manor house in the middle of Studio City (which Rusty, ever since I wanted to leave and he didn’t, insisted on calling “Hollywood”). I explained to them one last time why the L.A. Barracks was going to make the difference. I repeated my promise that a year from now we would be the world’s biggest player. And I have to admit: it felt like a personal triumph, I had pulled this off single-handedly, and for a whole hour I didn’t give Aaron’s live grenade a moment’s thought. I was tickled pink that I had managed to get not one, but two pig-headed men—Rusty himself, and then Sotomayor on top of it—to listen to me.

  Of course, the whole thing still gave Rusty pause; $16.3 million was, even for Rusty Wells, a shitload of money, tenfold his biggest investment ever. “Joy,” he would sigh when, at the end of a workday, I launched into my umpteenth sales pitch for the Barracks, “do you realize how much I love Hollywood? And do you have any idea what it means for a boy from Belfast to earn his living a stone’s throw from MGM?” “You want a tissue?” I would answer, knowing full well we were not hurting for money. This old pile, built in the late nineteenth century by British immigrants who for decades had run it as a family hotel, had charm; its twenty-four irregularly shaped rooms were spread over three uneven, staggered, moldy-smelling floors. Jade-green lampshades hung in the hallways like floppy turbans, the reception desk shone like a Steinway, the lobby gave you the impression that Paul Newman and Robert Redford were somewhere upstairs smoking cigars in a clawfoot bathtub. Rusty had shelled out a million bucks for it back in 2001 and brought in a motley nine-man crew who sort of knew how to put a film together. But that was then. Nowadays the gray-slate roofs and blue-painted bay windows nearly caved in when all fifty of us turned on our PCs at once. It was time to move on, and Rusty knew it.

  “But why a feckin’ 200,000-square-foot fortress?” he asked. “And why for twice our feckin’ 2007 profit? Last year we earned just under eight million—eight, Joy, not eighteen. And why in feckin’ Compton, of all places? You want us all dead? Why a historical landmark? Why a listed monument? You want to spend your time squabbling with sixteen amateur historians? You want to start a fight with half of the goddamn city council?”

  When we decided to become business partners back in 2003, we made a deal: we can fight, we should fight, but with a twenty-four-hour limit. After that we’d get out and earn money again. About three weeks ago we rented a squash court out on Irving Drive, we do that now and again, with the agreement that for forty-five minutes we wouldn’t talk business. But this time we were at each other’s throats about the Old Barracks before the ball even got warm. The same old argument. Our CEO and founder stood there in his faded Guinness T-shirt, milk-bottle legs spread, clutching his racket like a dagger in his freckled fist, hollering: and I’m damned if I’m gonna shell out twenty million for a cinder block spook house, and I don’t need my face in the L.A. Times, and I didn’t sell you shares only for you to turn around and bankrupt me. It was the first time since we’d teamed up that we were on totally opposite sides of the fence.

  Although I had seen the eruption coming, I was still taken aback. The often costly changes I’d been allowed to make over the past few years attested to Rusty’s confidence in my business sense. I had taken the initiative to shift us from one large to six more specific websites, gradually of course, but with resounding success. I was the one who insisted on buying better cameras and investing in faster connections, so our film sets were now technically on a par with the big Hollywood and Burbank studios. He had given me carte blanche in recruiting personnel. And not only the creatives: when I suggested hiring marketing people, a controller, and even a personnel manager to draw up pension and health care plans, he didn’t flinch. Since then our profits had risen from a piddly under three million to last year’s eight.

  Squash courts are ingeniously designed kill traps: you can’t get out, no one hears you, the light is merciless. I needed to find his weak spot, and in his case that was Europe. “Wells,” I said, no longer as restrained as during the past month of arranging my arguments like a floral bouquet, “you are so conservative, you are so slow, you have no guts—what are you, a European?” Rusty enjoyed taking the occasional fifteen minutes to lambaste the big multinationals from what he called the “olde worlde economy”: Shell, Barclays, Renault, Total, the same old list from his days at Goldman Sachs, and the same old pseudo-intellectual explanation that probably was based on some
or other rule of thumb and that he presented with such aplomb that you didn’t know if he was serious or pulling your leg. Rusty, sitting on the edge of his desk like a guru as he raked the European business world over the coals.

  “The classic CEO just doesn’t get it, Joy. A wimp like him thinks: I have to be innovative, I have to be sustainable, I have to go green, I have to do this, that, and the other. He opens up a can of managers and realizes a year later that those feckin’ morons thought up something totally different than what he meant. So he says: whoa, let’s wait it out a bit. Stupid.”

  “What do you want,” I asked him that day on the squash court: “to go back to Belfast, or tack an extra zero onto your year-end profits? In two years we’ll either be making fifty million, Wells, or we’ll be broke. What we’re doing now, anyone can do. It’s got to be better. It’s got to be bigger. Different. And you know it.”

  “That’s pure ballax,” he retorted. On the rare occasion that he lost his velvety patience, his English turned thick Irish. Rusty Wells: if there was anyone who wanted to obscure his background but couldn’t, it was Rusty. He was raised in Belfast in a moderate Catholic family that spent the whole of the 1980s scared to death of the IRA; not because the terror in any way touched the family itself, but because the terror appeared to be carried out in their name. He once mentioned the nervous loathing and misplaced guilt that had colored his youth. From then on I thought I had that incessant smile of his figured out. At rest, his face betrayed subtle wrinkles that encircled his lipless mouth, folded around the corners of his mouse-gray eyes—wrinkles that, strangely enough, vanished when he laughed, which he did effortlessly and at random, so often that the smile was in fact his face’s default mode.

  “I can’t do it,” he said with the pinched voice of some B actor trying to emote. He let his spine slide down the wall until his little Irish tush hit the floor, the back of his head resting against the whitewashed cement under the red stripe.

  “Rusty, am I hearing you right?”

  “I. Can’t. Do. It.”

  “What can’t you do?”

  “Take such a big risk.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “And what about your real estate larks?” For years he’d been playing the big shot with his gangster house in Bel Air, alongside a handful of other properties he’d picked up on spec, all of them in Beverly Hills or on Sunset. Thanks to a sweet bonus deal I was able to buy a fabulous house from him at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard—a Frank Lloyd Wright clone sticking halfway out of the cliff and supported by tall pillars—that Rusty wanted to “keep in the family.” “And your pet Rembrandt?” He like poking around art auctions. In the Dutch Masters section of the Getty there is a tiny painting, a bathroom tile, no more than that, but it was a Rembrandt, a gen-u-ine Rembrandt, and that genuine Rembrandt was the property of Rusty Wells. A risk-taker? Rusty burned dollars.

  “That’s different,” he said. “It’s private.”

  Around 2000 he got rich overnight by selling off a dating site just before the dot-com crash. He likes to tell the story of how, right after signing the papers, he walked out of his poky two-bedroom apartment in Redondo Beach, got into a taxi and told the driver to take him to Mulholland Drive, and step on it, man, let’s see some trees, but slow down at For Sale signs. When he saw the villa he wanted, he got out and offered the owners fifty percent above their asking price—you’ll have your money tonight—on the condition that they clear out on the spot. He never set foot in that dump in Redondo Beach again, hadn’t even taken the trouble to sell it, the sink was probably still full of dirty dishes. Probably all bullshit, just like what he was telling me now.

  I squatted down in front of him and looked hard into his pale irises. “Where’s the daredevil who only needed five minutes to wheedle me away from McKinsey?” I whispered seductively. “What happened to Wells the go-getter?”

  He blinked nervously. His blond eyelashes made his eyelids look too short.

  “How do you think they got so big at eBay? At Amazon? By shitting in their pants?”

  Instead of chewing me out, which maybe I deserved, he fed me that story about his father. “If you must bring up Belfast,” he said, “my old man …”

  I remember thinking: if there’s one thing I do not need to hear, Rusty Wells, it is some sob story about your father. In San Fernando Valley people don’t have parents. Forget them, I wanted to say, that’s what I did—but I restrained myself.

  “My pa,” he mumbled, and I still thought it was all an act, “worked on the payroll for twenty years, he was a traveling linoleum salesman. Iceland. New Zealand. Indonesia. Linoleum roller-skating rinks—it’s what he said to anybody who would listen. When he was home, that is.”

  I have to say that I wouldn’t have missed this story for the world. Until that moment Rusty was like an ancient Egyptian on a roll of papyrus: a total badass, the whole package, but two-dimensional. He stepped off the page by telling me that his father had one great “passion,” and that was magic. Magic—the word said it all. For half of Rusty’s youth, his father sits up in his attic fiddling with marked cards and pulling rabbits out of a hat, spends the spare hours of his business trips scouring hole-in-the-wall magic stores on the outskirts of town. At age fifty-two, a coronary bypass already behind him, he makes a decision. The man who, according to Rusty, has spent his entire life vexed, no, infuriated that he has a boss, turns his back on linoleum. He borrows 400,000 pounds from the Bank of Ireland and falls for a small theatre just outside downtown Belfast. A small but pricey theatre.

  “So you’ve got showbiz in your blood,” I said. “What was it called?”

  “Wellington’s Magic Venue.”

  I attempted a smile, tapped my racket against his pointy knee, but he did not react.

  “The place was a dump. And expensive. I had just started working in the City, my job was to evaluate investment plans, and so I flew my dad over to London to go through the whole enterprise with him. Buy or rent, he asked—buy, I advised. What could possibly go wrong?”

  “Don’t tell me,” I sighed. A chill started coming up through the floor. But Rusty, never at a loss for words (particularly during meetings), kept on going. He told me his father spent two solid months polishing his act, had double-sided color pamphlets printed that he and his wife distributed all over Belfast. The act opened four months after he’d turned in his notice. I didn’t dare ask how it ended. “Three years later, my mother sat on a hard plastic garden chair in that stripped-down barn, still shuddering from the public auction. They even ripped out the velvet theatre chairs. My folks tried everything, but they couldn’t get it off the ground. Not far enough, anyway. Magic is a tricky business.”

  “Whew,” I said. “And your father?”

  “Dead. Heart attack. Mortgage stress. Millstone cancer of the heart. You get my drift?”

  I didn’t get his drift, none of it. I had never heard such rubbish, the Barracks had little to do with Rusty’s late father’s Magic Venue, absolutely zilch, to be precise. It started to dawn on me that my business partner had more of a sensitive side to him than I suspected. Under Rusty’s tough, jovial, rebellious exterior he was all white meat, squishy and irrational. What he did not know, not in detail at least, was that I had been working on Sotomayor for some weeks already—according to the L.A. Business Journal, the most powerful real estate baron in the South. He owned the L.A. Barracks and was itching to get rid of it, this was common knowledge. Everyone knew that for four years Sotomayor had been trying to peddle the former National Guard Barracks to a whole parade of real estate developers, up to and including a pair of Hungarians. Everyone also knew that it was first supposed to become luxury apartments, then a social housing project, after that a rehab clinic, then a parking garage—but neighborhood committees managed to scuttle one plan after another. The highest bid he’d been offered was fourteen—everybody knew that too. We’ll top that, I promised him, and quietly arranged a preliminary and non-binding tour of the premises
, just me and one of Víctor Sotomayor’s little helpers in that enormous brick fortress; it was terrific.

  “I understand, Rusty,” I said. “But you could at least go have a look.”

  I finally got around to taking him over to the Barracks the week after that squash game; until then all he’d seen were site plans and photos. Accompanied by yet another of Sotomayor’s girl Fridays, we drove for nearly an hour straight through Los Angeles, heading for what not only looked like a medieval fort, but also was a medieval fort. The Barracks, built in 1916, mimicked, in a grim, evil way, a Moorish fortress. For some sixty years the National Guard insignia fluttered above the thirty-four-meter-high corner towers; Sotomayor flew the Stars and Stripes as well as a single Cuban flag. Behind the battlements, cadets were trained and the lead-reinforced vaults had stored ammunition and matériel. The façade had a rough, unpettable brick skin: for every five normally laid bricks was one that stuck out from the wall, sometimes at an angle, sometimes half broken off. The drill court, covered by a large arched roof, used to be the place, in the ’30s and ’40s, where boxers faced off: “Joe Louis and Max Schmeling,” I told Rusty, who promptly broke into shadow boxing. The Army pulled out in ’78, leaving behind 160 empty rooms—cinder block dormitories, walnut-paneled dining rooms, oak ballrooms, massive staircases, an industrial kitchen, swimming pool, indoor shooting range, bathrooms, engine rooms, basements, dungeons. All for Rusty.

  It paid off. I noticed his transformation as we rambled through the labyrinth, an hour-long hike through the Barracks’ filthy corridors, offices where half-disintegrated files lay stacked on sagging shelves, officers’ quarters with forgotten regimental tunics draped over dusty chairs; his footsteps began to echo, his expression turned greedy, he became more and more chatty with Sotomayor’s bimbo. When we got back to the covered drill court, the size of four ice hockey rinks, she said: “This is where George Lucas shot the outer-space scenes in Star Wars”—and at that moment, on the ceiling of Rusty’s head, a fluorescent lamp sprang on.