“Yeah,” I said.
The man in the yellow jacket pulled out a thick envelope and slid it across the table, just like I had seen done in gangster movies. I was too terrified to pick it up, so I just left it there burning a hole in the laminate tabletop.
“They just called my number,” the man said, and he got up to retrieve the sandwiches. When he came back, he didn’t sit down. He tossed a sandwich down in front of me, grabbed the cooler, and walked out the door without another word.
When I got home, I finally opened the envelope. It contained $200 cash.
Maybe at tonight’s banquet, in lieu of a speech, I can tell the story of the man in the yellow jacket and the red cooler and the $200 cash. I bet they’ll get a kick out of it.
Except everyone at the banquet is already going to know exactly what was in that red cooler.
CHAPTER 4
YOU’LL NEVER GUESS what happened to me last night. I was standing over a plate of stuffed artichokes, thinking what a great speech I had just made, when a man walked up to me. He looked about a hundred years old, and his eyes were cloudy with cataracts. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“How’d you like the sandwich?” he asked.
It was the man in the yellow coat! He was wearing forest-green slacks and a camel hair jacket, and he had aged so dramatically that I didn’t recognize him at first. I had always imagined he had wound up dead in an alley somewhere, killed over the contents of the red cooler. As it turns out, he’s a biology teacher now.
He introduced himself as George Ainsley, and he told me he’s the oldest teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District. All these years we’ve been shopping at the same Whole Foods!
We agreed to have lunch sometime, at our old spot, he joked. I think he has a wonderful sense of humor for an old fart. I myself am surprised at how quickly a sense of humor can atrophy with age. I can’t think of anything more important to keep in tip-top shape than a sense of humor, especially after your knees and hair and sight and taste and smell and even little parts of your mind are gone. Even after most of the people you knew or ever could have known have died. Even after you can no longer pee in a straight line anymore, and instead you splatter the bathroom with urine in the pattern of a poorly aimed shotgun. It would all be so goddamned depressing if it weren’t so goddamned funny.
It was a trip reliving the old days with George Ainsley. George and I never crossed paths again after that day at Genova Delicatessen, but we have a lot of shared memories about SHEM, and it turns out George knew Greta, my now-deceased wife.
I told my daughter Eliza all this last night on the phone when I got home. She makes me call her every morning when I wake up and every night before I go to bed—to make certain I’m not dead. I told her that George Ainsley was about the funniest old-timer I had met in quite some time.
“Do you really think it’s a good idea to go on making friends at your age?” Eliza scolded. “It just means one more funeral to attend.”
The dry, mildly sarcastic sense of humor on which I reared my children manifested as cynicism in Eliza. Eliza got all the cynicism, I think. And Kendra Ann and Spencer got all the humor.
My son, Spencer, called me, too, to see how the speech went. He would have been there if it weren’t for the distance. He lives in New York City. His husband was in a biking accident Saturday along the Hudson River, and he needed to stay home to take care of things. Eugene is drinking through a straw, Spencer tells me. But he’ll be okay. They have two adopted children, girls.
We’re a family of girls. I had five sisters. I have two daughters. And now I have five granddaughters. Before Kendra Ann’s two little boys came along, Spencer and I were the only men in the family, which is, I think, why we are so close.
I had a thought. This would be a good place to draw some sort of family tree since there are so many names to remember. So here it goes:
There are no less than thirteen woman in our family tree if you count my mother, and only five men if you count my father. And now looking at the family tree, I realize the Frost family name is about as good as dead.
Good-bye, Frosts, forever!
I am Jim Lorenzo Frost, if that was not already clear. And my father was Jonas Frost. He was originally from Minnesota, but he moved to Los Angeles in 1972 with his best friend, Rick Milliken, to get into the automobile trade.
He and Rick collected old cars, restored them, and sold them at a profit to car collectors who then, in turn, sold them to other car collectors and so on.
Their business started in Minnesota. They had about fifteen cars holed up in a warehouse somewhere. In the summer of 1972, they drove all the way out to California in search of the best old car parts.
Why does Los Angeles have all the best old car parts?
No rust.
In 1972 Los Angeles wasn’t the dump it is now. Back then nobody was worried about all the water running out, and about the average temperatures rising four degrees, and about all the climate refugees. Back then people worried about getting a tee time or finding a nice pattern of wallpaper or choosing a bottle of wine. First World problems, my buddy Charlie used to call them.
And those were the kinds of problems my father had when he moved into a Motel 6 up in Sunland. He was worried about how he was going to find the best deals on car parts, beat the other guys to them, and then get the other guys to pay more for them. That was the nature of my father’s First World problems in 1972.
In those days they didn’t have cell phones or the Internet or a data cloud. They had a newspaper and a pay phone.
Every day Rick and my father received a 4:00 a.m. wake-up call from the front desk. They were on the road by 5:00 a.m. and at the Sun Valley Tribune by 6:00 a.m., where they’d get the first copy of the classifieds hot off the press.
Then they’d hurry over to the pay phone on the corner of Foothill and Oro Vista and phone up each listing for a dime apiece. And they’d butter up these folks who didn’t have the faintest idea what their cars were worth, and who couldn’t be more grateful to my dear old dad for taking them off their hands.
And right there on the phone, in just five minutes’ time, my dad would make them feel as if they’d known him for years. It was my dad’s way of marking his territory. Pissing on a fire hydrant, so to speak. If anybody else came along to buy the parts before my dad could get to them, the owner would say, “Oh, I got a call this morning from a buddy of mine out in Sunland, so they’re no longer for sale,” even if a better offer came along.
Nobody could refuse my dad. He had a voice like salted caramel, which he used to woo buyers, sellers, and feminine types. And he was handsome to boot. So people naturally trusted him. Handsome people never have to work very hard for trust.
After my dad and Rick ran through the classifieds, they had to map out where they wanted to go and how they wanted to get there. This they did on real maps made of compressed fiber from trees! None of this “Destination will be on your left” mumbo jumbo.
They brought the cars back to the Motel 6 in Sunland and parked them all over the lot. The spare parts, which were really what the business was all about, filled the drawers and tables and even the tub of the motel room. They paid off the cleaning staff to deliver clean sheets every week and to otherwise stay out of the way. And they lived like this, in the Motel 6, for eighteen months, buying and selling and buying and selling.
Whatever they purchased, they’d mark up 30, 50, 100 percent and pocket the profit. They were shipping all over Los Angeles County under the pseudonym Franklin Brothers Used Cars & Parts.
And boy were they ever making money. You wouldn’t know it, the way they were living day to day out of a motel, eating nothing but McDonald’s apple pies and Wendy’s burgers. But after about eighteen months, they must have had twenty cars out in the parking lot at any given time, and at least two shipments of parts going out every day. They were living out a phenomenon that used to be more common back then. It was called the American Dream.
Then one day my dad came back from another day living the dream and found a note from the motel manager taped to the door of their room. The motel manager, a middle-aged divorcee by the name of Harvey Lemming, wanted to see my dear old dad right away. He wanted to know exactly how many cars my dad had parked out in the motel lot.
In the manager’s office, there was a little electric fan whirring away on his desk, and behind him the thermostat was set to eighty-two degrees, and heat was being pumped in through a vent in the ceiling.
“That’s a sign of a man who doesn’t know what he wants,” my dad used to say telling the story at cocktail parties and weddings. “Doesn’t even know if he’s hot or cold. That’s the kind of a fella desperate to be told what he wants.”
So my dad told Harvey Lemming just how many cars were parked out in the motel lot. And then he told Harvey Lemming that he was just the kind of man who deserved to own one.
Harvey Lemming told my dad he couldn’t keep all those cars there anymore. And he told my dad to be out in a week. And then Harvey Lemming bought a 1962 Corvette convertible.
Rick moved back to Minnesota after that. My dad stayed in California and bought the antique shop. That was how it all went.
I was born after all of this, of course. My dad didn’t even meet my mom until 1975. And I had no idea until later that my father was a hustler. To me and my friends, he was just a washed-up car salesman with an affection for old things. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned my dad didn’t have a nostalgic bone in his body.
The day my mom and sisters drove me up to Berkeley, my dad stayed behind to rent out my room.
CHAPTER 5
MY SON has just offered to take me to Paris for the summer, along with his husband and kids. He has been invited to teach a summer course on kinetic power and engineering at the École Polytechnique. He is fluent in French, of course, because of his mother. She spoke it perfectly and spoke it often, even though I couldn’t understand a lick of it.
Spencer is invited all over the world to speak about kinetic power and engineering. In graduate school he invented an insert that can be installed in the bottom of a shoe to absorb all the kinetic energy wasted throughout the day walking around. The energy is then funneled into the main grid or into a generator to help power streets and homes. It’s a nifty idea, if you ask me. Now people all over the world hold walkathons to generate energy.
Meanwhile, Spencer generates cash.
His husband, Eugene, is a writer and can go just about anywhere anytime he wants. Paris in the summer? Why not?
The kids are in the second and third grades. They have heaps of time in the summer, too. And they speak French perfectly. And English. And Mandarin because of Eugene.
They have asked me to join them on this eight-week sojourn because I am retired, and I, too, have heaps of time, not just in the summer, but all year round. I do not speak French or any other foreign language, but I do speak second and third grader, and that is an invaluable skill in any babysitter.
Incidentally, Greta and I were married in Paris.
Greta was born Greta Van Bruggen in Antwerp, Belgium. Van Bruggen is a Dutch name. Her ancestors were from Holland. However, the Van Bruggen family left Holland centuries ago. Her only living relative is her brother, Duncan Van Bruggen, who continues to live near Antwerp. I’ve only met him once, and that was after Greta died. She wished to have her ashes scattered over the small farm where she was brought up, the small farm that her brother inherited from their mother.
I wrote Duncan Van Bruggen after Greta died. He knew that she was ill, of course—Greta and Duncan wrote each other almost every day. I told Duncan that Greta had passed away on October 5 (the year was 2025; Greta was thirty-seven). I wanted to visit Antwerp in December to scatter her ashes on the farm.
His reply was brief. He said that it would mean a lot to him if I came. We would meet at last, the two men who loved her most in this life, and we would carry out her final wish together.
So I caught a flight to Belgium two days before Christmas. I left our motherless children in the care of my pal Charlie, who was living in the Mission District then, just a few blocks from where I live now.
I had to check the urn with Greta’s ashes at the airport. They had a form for that sort of thing, which I filled out at check-in. I had brought along the death certificate and a notice from the crematorium, and a copy of Greta’s last will and testament. I even brought along Greta’s passport for good measure.
And then, somewhere between San Francisco and Brussels, the airline lost the urn. At the baggage claim in Brussels, a frazzled airline attendant approached me hesitantly to explain that my late wife had been misplaced.
I have never been much of a subscriber to the theory of an afterlife. I have always believed when you’re dead, you’re dead. Gone. Kaput. However, when my dear Greta became a piece of lost luggage, I had the fleeting notion that somewhere up there, my dear old wife was pulling my leg.
You see, it was a case of lost airline luggage that led to my meeting Greta Van Bruggen in the first place.
It was her luggage that went missing so, so, so many years ago. And Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. hired me to find out where it had gone.
CHAPTER 6
HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY MESSAGE RUNNERS, INC. had me working upward of three jobs a week back then. Always a red cooler from a luggage carousel at the airport, either Oakland or San Francisco or all the way out in San Jose. I got around any way I could, riding the buses and trains, sometimes hopping on my bike or borrowing Charlie’s car.
The drop-off was usually a local deli or a park. One time it was at the back of a bus. And every time there was somebody there in a brightly colored hat or scarf or sweater to meet me. I never saw the man in the yellow coat again, not until recently anyway. Every time it was someone new, and little more than a few words were exchanged before I traded the cooler for an envelope of cash.
I never bothered to look inside the coolers to see what it was I was getting paid in unmarked bills to smuggle from God knows where to God knows where. I was too scared. And I figured I could handle not knowing better than I could handle knowing.
I was just a kid, and I wasn’t responsible for things I knew nothing about.
The first couple jobs paid $200 apiece, and then $300, and then $400. I quit my job at the museum and started seeing a girl I had known in college, Kate Drummond, who was really interested in cars, like my father, and who knew how to get the best pot in the Bay for a decent price. And that was how I wasted away the better part of a year.
I went home to Los Angeles for Christmas. My dad gave me a 2007 BMW 3 Series sedan that I drove back up to the Bay. I moved out of my apartment in Berkeley and into a studio in San Francisco to be closer to my sister Marilee, who had just graduated from the University of Chicago and had moved to the city for a job in corporate at Wells Fargo.
My other sisters were still living in Los Angeles.
At year-end I didn’t report my earnings since I had always been paid in cash, and as far as I knew, I had not signed a contract with anybody anywhere, so I was as good as unemployed. Nevertheless I had made about $32,000 in six months on deliveries alone. All my work orders still came in the form of e-mails from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc.
I tried not to question the integrity of any of it.
It turned out my sister Marilee wasn’t quite cut out for corporate, so after a year, she quit her job at Wells Fargo and enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute using the money she had made in banking, which, she confided to me later, had been her plan all along.
My father was outraged. He said that a person cannot hope to survive in this world unless they are in the business of exploiting fools. He said art was the Novocain of fools. He asked Marilee if she wanted to be numb and dumb her whole life. That was an expression my father used to use a lot on us as kids. Numb and dumb. He said most of the people who came into the antique shop in Malibu were nu
mb and dumb from too much sun and television and drugs. And art apparently.
My father turned out to be quite an ass in his later years.
Marilee stopped going home to visit our parents. Every few months our mom would come up for a weekend visit. She never brought our dad. And the three of us would have dinner at the Cliff House on Saturday night since my mother was accustomed to fine dining, and the beach, and paying too much money for food. She would go to church with my sister Sunday morning. And then she’d go back home to our dad and say nothing of any of it to him.
Those were the years I was closest to Marilee. By the time I was twenty-seven, we had both been in the city three years, and Marilee was showing her art at some of the local galleries. She made a name for herself decoupaging vintage furniture she bought off Craigslist. I think it was her way of sticking it to our dear old dad—the antiques collector—defacing all those valuable antiques with old newspapers and magazines and turning them into Novocain for fools.
In 2008 she collected thousands of clippings from President Obama’s election and completely swathed an army of antique lawn jockeys in them. That was the first piece that won her some critical attention. And after the earthquake in Haiti, she wallpapered a six-foot-tall American Girl dollhouse with images of crumbling homes and disfigured Taíno children. Suddenly galleries all over the country were calling her.
It was about that time that she took our mother’s maiden name, having completely fallen out with our father.
She called herself Marilee Lorenzo.
People magazine just ran a story about Marilee last week anticipating the fortieth anniversary of her death. It mentions me briefly, saying that I recently attended a banquet in my honor at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California, for my work on the SHEM Project.
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