HOPE FOR CHANGE... But Settle for a Bailout

by Bill Orton

  Larry ordered for four people, speaking loudly, over the sounds coming from the shower.

  .

  December poured herself coffee, orange juice, and tomato juice, pulled a slice of toast from the basket of bread, and lifted the silver dome from her plate, revealing eggs, potatoes, fruit and steamed spinach. “Yeh baby,” she said. “Dat’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Didn’t you have anything at the coffeeshop?” asked Lori, pouring nuts and raisins into her granola.

  “I was busy,” said December, “had to do a Twitter check-in, and pardon me but I am done with FaceBook. Every page I start gets flagged. Done. Then email. It’s a lot.” She ate toast. “Only had coffee.”

  “So you have... a website?” I said.

  “And you have a bank, right?”

  “Well, I work at one,” I said.

  “I work at one too, not a bank, a site.”

  “Do you keep your clothes on?”

  “Mister,” said December. “Take a good look. Why would I have a website and leave my clothes on. Are you slow or something?”

  Lori smiled.

  “What about your future?”

  “You must be slow,” said December. “In my future, they’re always gonna say, December Carrera, Miss December, oh dere goes Miss December… and dat’s right now, and tomorrow and five years from now and fifty years from now. So why would I worry what anyone’s gonna say? God gave me gifts and I am gonna cash in on them, so long as the milkshakes keep the boys coming round.”

  “What if you get married?”

  December turned to Lori, “I can see why you dumped this guy.” She turned to me. “My husband’s gonna be the luckiest dude around. You know why? He gets me.” She looked to Lori. “Unless dey make it legal so I can marry some super hot chick.”

  “I want to go cash this thing in,” said Larry, pushing back from the table. Audible protests from all three at the table quieted Larry, who scooted his chair back to the table and picked at his food.

  .

  “How do we get in this place?” I asked, as Larry and I walked across grass, to a space between two bushes. Larry felt around, and pulled open an otherwise-invisible entryway to the glass building shaped like a ship. He led me into a room with more glass and mirrors, and a wide marble counter. A woman with very pale skin and long red hair greeted us.

  “Hello,” she said. “Oh, you were here yesterday.”

  “I have another ticket,” said Larry, casually. “The machine’s fine.”

  The women slid back part of the counter, revealing the scanner to check the bar code on a lottery ticket. Larry placed the ticket under the scanner, and WINNER appeared in red, digital letters at top. “Oh, my,” said the women. “You are, indeed, a winner.”

  The sound of a dot-matrix printer could he heard between the breathing of three people. Larry looked at the winning line and the ticket.

  “Oh, and you have already written your name and other information on the back,” she said. “Very good.” She reached under the countertop and produced a one-page form with large boxes. “This form is for all winning tickets in excess of $599 of winnings, which clearly applies to you.”

  “I have a pen,” said Larry. “The Governor gave me his, when he told me I had won.” Larry held up the Southwest Airlines pen.

  “Right,” said the woman.

  “Should I just sit? Or do I have to go somewhere?” asked Larry.

  “For what, sir?”

  “To get my big check and the money.”

  “A fitting question,” she said, clearly having to answer it many times before, “but this is an operation of the State of California.”

  “I know,” said Larry. “That’s what the Governor said.”

  “Right,” she said. “Payment is made by a check issued by the Office of the State Controller, after we verify the winning ticket, determine the exact payout and submit the needed advice to the Controller for the issuance of a check.” She pointed to the form. “Please complete this form and I can notarize it for you. If you would like a copy for your records, I can produce a photocopy for thirty-two cents.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t follow that.”

  “You can submit the ticket and claim form here. I can take that now,” said the woman with red hair. “But you should keep a copy of both sides of your winning ticket and of this form, as proof of your having submitted a claim.” The women reached under the counter and pulled out a thin book with a photo on the cover of two people, clearly ecstatic, leaping for joy in the air. “The ‘Winners’ Handbook’ will give you answers to many of the questions you may have.”

  Larry began filling out the form. He carefully spelled out his name, gave his address and searched for numbers on the ticket, asking the woman several times what information to place where. When it came to prize claimed, Larry wrote in the figure at the top of the money pyramid on the winning line printout: $285,850,920.

  “Let’s get this notarized for you, Larry, and you’re ready to go,” said the woman.

  .

  “Tak, Farmor,” said Larry, finishing his call to his grandmother.

  “She must be blown away,” I said.

  “She’s happy Lori found someone nice,” Larry said, absently, as we drove through Sacramento. “She wants to meet December.”

  “Didn’t you tell her about the money?” asked.

  “Lawrence,” said Larry, with impatience in his voice, “it’s just money. It’s not like my grandma doesn’t have any. What? Am I supposed to shake my bootie doing the money dance in front of her? She wanted to talk about the movie thing. She gave me a number for the director, who’s visiting San Francisco. Thought we could drive over to meet him.” Larry rolled down the window.

  “Larry, I know I said I would help you, but….”

  “You gotta,” said Larry, in a tone of panic. “I’ll pay you double.”

  “It’s not the money,” I said…, though… double…. Double!

  “Triple,” Larry countered.

  “Oh, man,” I groaned.

  “Triple and you tell me what you need for benefits and all that stuff... social security… all that…. But I need someone I can trust.”

  “I don’t know this stuff,” I told Larry, who seemed preoccupied. He had put his hand out the window, and was busy aiming the thumb up so his hand glided up and then aiming it down, so his hand went down.

  .

  Lori and December were in the hotel bar, surrounded by what must have been every male in the hotel for business travel. Had they not called us to give us their whereabouts, we would have missed them in the circle of bodies at the bar. Lori, in a short tee that exposed her belly, was leaning against the bar, sipping a clear drink with a cherry. December had a tall glass with fruit and paper umbrellas in it and a tall, windy straw.

  As we walked towards the bar, December hooted and waved. A chorus of “gotta be kidding me” rose from business class, as December trotted to me and Larry. One gazelle having fled, the men at the bar turned to Lori, who put up a hand, and carried her drink over to join December, me and Larry. “Take care of your business?” asked Lori.

  “Yep,” said Larry.

  “Right on,” said Lori. “I’m happy for you.”

  “So you really won?” squealed December.

  “Yeh,” said Larry, with a little laugh.

  “How much, hunny?”

  “$285,850,920.42”

  December laughed with both excitement and nervousness. “… And forty-two cents.”

  “It doesn’t come right away,” said Larry. “Six weeks or so.”

  “Hey, that’s okay,” said Lori. “You got a pretty stable thing going at home, so you just gotta hang tight for a month or two.”

  Two of the men from the bar migrated to our group, and as Larry and Lori were talking, they asked December if she would sign their conference badges. The second asked her to sign his arm.

  “And Larry’s gonna be my banker,” said Larry, pointin
g to me. “I mean Lawrence.” Larry’s face brightened. “You can all work for me. You don’t have to, like, do stuff, but you can all work for me and I’ll, like, just give you money.”

  Three more men came over, asking December for autographs. The first asked her to sign his bald head. She used a marker the second one had to write out “D.C. missmilkshakes.com” as he leaned in close to her, before a bell staff worker approached and shooed him and his friends away from December.

  .

  “Where’s Lori,” Larry asked, back in my room.

  “Down swimming,” said December. “Been down dere forever,”

  Larry took a towel from the bathroom and headed out.

  .

  Lori was wearing the swimsuit combo from Harris Ranch and paid no notice to Larry, as he dangled his feet in the pool. Lori swam another twenty minutes before joining Larry at the pool’s edge.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “You okay, buddy?”

  “Just worried.”

  “I’d think your worrying days are over,” said Lori, hopping up, out of the pool. They sat together on the edge of the pool. She had wrapped the towel Larry brought around herself and reached to hold Larry’s hand. “Why’re you worried?”

  “Everyone in my family who’s got money,” said Larry, “it fucked ‘em up.” He kicked at the water. “I don’t want to end up like my dad.”

  “Well, just have Lawrence take care of all that business and you’ll be fine,” said Lori. “He’s good with that shit. Just give it to him. You can be like your grandmother. She’s not messed up over money.”

  “I suppose,” said Larry.

  “I gotta go back, tho,” said Lori. “I love you, but I gotta get home and return this car. I may not have a job when I get back, but I’m not gonna get tossed in the klink for theft.” Lori stood, and Larry did as well. She put the towel on a lounger and slipped on a pair of cut-offs and a tee-shirt. “And please take December with you guys.”

  “She seems to like you better,” said Larry.

  “She likes the orgasms,” said Lori, “but I don’t like being a sex toy.”

  The two began walking back to the room.

  .

  December sorted through the items in her suitcase, counting swimsuits before putting them in. She occasionally glanced over to Lori, her eyes lingering.

  “Oh, I just have my card,” said Larry. “I don’t have any actual cash, so I can’t give you anything to get home. They gotta have an ATM here.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Lori. “I have enough to get home. I just want to get back. Hotels and fancy eating are tripping me out. This all feels really foreign to me.”

  “I’m going with Blondie,” said December, packing the last of her things, and zipping and locking her suitcase. “I got business to take care of and this is seriously throwing off my timing.” She looked at Lori as a sailor would look at a girl on a beach. “Besides, I’m going where the fun is.”

  “Fine,” said Lori. “If we just drive, and get there... that’s fine. I just wanna get home.”

  “Oh, I’ll take you home, Blondie….”

  Chapter Eight

  Astrid’s Travels

  Emma Mathilde van der Bix carried a leather-bound album across to the dining room table and sat, the morning sun streaming in through beaded crystal panes and breaking into the colors of the rainbow.

  Pushing aside a plate with toast and cheese, she opened the heavy leather flap and lifted up a large magnifying glass that had sat next to her glass of orange juice. She looked closely at each of the six photos on the front page, of her tall, thin, elegantly-dressed, blonde mother, clearly engaged in pleasure travel.

  “Astrid, San Francisco, 1931, w/ Harald Lander,” read her father’s handwriting on an image of the two riding a cable car. Next to it, another image, of a deeply-wrinkled Chinese man playing a single-stringed instrument.

  Emma opened the book to the back, and pulled out a faded envelope holding several dozen pages of onion-skin typing paper. At the top of the page she read from were typed the words “First Tutor”:

  “Oct 1927 – Emma’s first tutor stayed with us only a short time. The child is a niece of A’s colleague from the Royal Troupe and quickly took up the role of older sibling, with Emma too small for book learning and the child little able to offer much beyond companionship. She proved helpful until she would wander off to the seashore or the Pike and its pleasure zone. When we motor across San Pedro bay to the Seafarer’s Church, the tutor lay on the foredeck of the skiff – the sons of the Swedes and the Norwegians watching our approach with great interest. She rode without a word in the Vanderlip’s buckboard, alongside their stable hand, as we climbed the Hill by wagon, to reach Nansen Field for Constitution Day festivities. While adults listened to speeches, she and the stablehand ate cookies and danced. The families brought all variety of home-brewed beer, saying Astrid should move from backward Long Beach to the Hill, where people could drink beer with less fear. The tutor was not shy there either. She spent many long afternoons riding in the buckboard. Her marriage to the Vanderlip’s stable hand soon brought on the need for a new tutor.”

  Emma delicately pulled her finger across the typed words, creating a tiny smudge.

  .

  The Old Man afforded no display of interest in Carl’s childhood, asking no questions when the boy would ride his bicycle to watch local aviator Earl Dougherty land his aeroplane on the shoreline. The boy’s love of flight merely made it easier for the Old Man to force Carl to join him in taking the Pacific Electric Red Car to the Dominguez hills every morning for ten days, to pass out fliers advertising home sales in Long Beach to the vast crowds gathered for the great air show of 1910. Carl marveled at a sky filled with all manner of flying craft, as he sat at a folding table bearing a sign for “v.d. Bix Land Co., Long Beach, Ca.” The Old Man scoffed when later that year Carl tried to enlist in the army, but said nothing when, just after his 17th birthday, Carl was visited at home by a colonel, who told the Old Man that his son would rise quickly through the ranks, as there were very few soldiers with any background in flight. In 1912, Carl van der Bix, then 18, was commissioned a lieutenant and assigned as a mechanic at the army’s air field in Los Angeles and, later, San Francisco. When America went to war, in 1917, and Carl’s unit was deployed, he made captain, at 23. He was in the air, training a pilot, when word came that Congress had promoted Carl to major, at 24.

  Carl met Astrid Ullagård – the Scandinavian dancer – after the Armistice had been signed, ending the Great War. The tall Yank who carried a ukulele and could sing and dance like a stage performer traveled the Continent and sent letters home, with addresses of where to wire cash. Soon came mentions of a ballerina in a royal troupe he had met in Paris at a benefit for the wounded. “Don’t worry about me,” Carl wrote from Brest, where unreported in the letter, he had proposed marriage to his ballerina, several years his junior and considered a likely Principal Dancer with her Royal Troupe. “War damage profound,” wrote Carl, on a card from Amsterdam, where perhaps space did not permit mention of the points that Carl and Astrid were negotiating, if she were to forever forego the possibility of attaining a rank in this troupe – older then America itself – which five generations of her family had not reached in dancing on the same stage. In Carl’s last letter, from Stockholm, where the couple stayed with her friends, he wrote expansively, with suggestions of a life in Europe for himself, and asked only for money to last til spring in Copenhagen, where holidays and the royal audience ensured remarkable productions with the woman he intended to marry. No cash came from America. Only a telegram, reading: “SINGLE PASSAGE AWAITS SOUTHAMPTON.”

  Upon his return, Carl fought the Old Man’s insistence that he join the family business, but soon shifted, accepting a shingle, insisting that Astrid’s arrival would bring prestige within the community and credibility to the family.

  Long after the Old Man said yes, Astrid he
dged, saying her Artistic Director was keeping alive talk of her becoming Principal Dancer, though he made no moves to alter the troupe’s assignments. Carl promised a private suite constructed atop the three floors, made of the finest European materials and designed by an architect of her choice, with a dance studio suitable for recitals that would honor a visiting maestro or visitor. She would enjoy sunshine virtually every day and Long Beach was now a city 30 years old, and had its own pleasure zone, municipal airport and seaport, as well as elegant hotels and department stores, and the Red Car trolley line that linked the town to Los Angeles and Newport Beach, each less than an hour away.

  In 1923, Astrid arrived to fanfare – a prominent dancer in an ancient royal European troupe, arriving by ship from Copenhagen, to marry the sole legitimate heir of one of the most powerful land dealers in town. She stood on the deck of the steamship, waving a red-and-white Danish flag, waiting to join her army aviator to live in a suite designed by the noted Norwegian architect, Tim Olson, and constructed of Italian stone and Baltic lumber, built above the van der Bix mansion. An elegant, enclosed grand marble stairway – complete with an electric, mechanical gliding chairlift to ascend the four flights – led to a main entry that centered itself upon the most spectacular gift of all: a friend of the bride’s father had given the wedded couple an alabaster female nude carved by the Danish master sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen. Sunlight streaming in caused the pink alabaster to glow, like human skin illuminated in a spotlight. So far as anyone knew, it was the first Thorvaldsen on the west coast, perhaps in all of America.

  .

  She dug randomly with her fingers into the scrapbook. Looking with the magnifying glass to a page containing six photos, five of Astrid Ullagård and a group image, Emma spent a moment with the group shot and turned to the next page.

  She placed a finger on the chest of her father, in a third picture, he standing with his wife and Harald Lander, in front of San Francisco’s grand Opera building. Written on the edge of the photo was, “1931.” Two years later, Lander – a fellow dancer who rose to become the new Artistic Director of the Danish Royal Ballet – sent for Astrid, asking her to return to the stage as Principal Dancer.