Just after dawn, an equipped and skilled armada of hard-hatted, muscled Latino men arrived in bright orange pant- suits. They were also carrying orange cones, hydraulic shovels, picks, and drills. They drove bulldozers and dump trucks. The hard working laborers moved uphill, along the lazy winding street, positioning themselves, each according to their job task. They had come to tear up and to dig. And to plow, pour, move: loads of dirt, rocks, tar and asphalt. Gulping water, chewing gum, smoking, sweating and laughing, these honest braceros were here, to lay down new and repair old, Los Angeles Department of Water, pipes.

Today, the brown skinned, black-mustached construction crews were on shady, and winding Libbit Avenue in the frivolously affluent hills of suburban Encino where- through speculation, imagination and deceit- money had been made by many local residents in the arts of entertainment, finance, law and real estate.

Mandy Jacobs, a former studio executive and a resident of Libbit Avenue, was standing in the window of her kitchen, a kitchen that faced the street, inside a 1950s ranch house with diagonally paned windows, set back from the street on a curving driveway planted with native California trees, shrubs and perennials.

Her husband, Dave, was back in his den, the den where he had set up his online business and website, a business five years old, created when he lost his well-paying production job at Universal.

Lost under the sheets and pillows, down the hall, was Nolan, a long blond haired, 15-year-old boy who was spending the summer doing nothing and hanging out with his friends in various backyard pools around Encino.

“Turn on the air-conditioning Mandy!” Dave yelled.

“I’m not turning it on until it gets hot!” she said.

“Then what the hell do we have it for? Turn it on before it gets hot!” he ordered.

It was going to hit 99 that day, and deeper inside the San Fernando Valley, out in Calabasas, it was expected to break 105. Mandy opened her refrigerator and saw that the half-gallon, diet iced tea was almost finished. And they needed peaches, nectarines, seedless grapes, watermelon, bottled water, and cold beer.

Outside, the sun illuminated an asphalt dust cloud around the shadowy worker forms. There were men yelling, trucks moving, and the screeching of some gas powered leaf blowers, creating a cacophony of ear splitting annoyance painfully audible inside the house.

Dave walked into the kitchen. “I can’t work like this!” he said.

“You can’t work like this? What about those men?” she asked, pointing outside to the scorched road laborers.

He stood there and scratched his baldhead. He was a middle-aged man with a hairy stomach, a gray Boston University t-shirt, cotton boxer shorts and thick black glasses. He leaned on the counter, not having an answer, only an expression.  The outside events were not under his control.

Dave had once been the college boy love of Mandy’s life: a man so sensual, so sexual, and so aggressive.  He was up for anything in those days.

During college they had once even fucked inside the darkened Fenway Park bleachers during a rained out game. They had fucked on the Boston T. They had fucked inside her parent’s Radnor, PA master bedroom while her parents were downstairs eating breakfast.

Now, in the midst of their married life, they slept in twin beds, in the same room, five feet apart. He said it was because he snored, and she said that it kept her awake. But these were merely contrivances and excuses.

Since he lost his job, he was like a deflated balloon. Defeat had crawled into their bedroom and settled under the sheets.

“I’m going to wake Nolan,” he said.

“Why? Let him sleep. He came in at 2am this morning,” she said.

“Fuck it. I have to pick up James Earl Jones’ shoes in Beverly Hills and then swing by Florence Henderson’s to get her shoes. I think Nolan should go on those runs. I’m too old to sit in my car on the 405 picking up shoes”

This was Dave talking about his business. He sold used celebrity shoes online at celebshoes.com

He spent his day tracking down anyone who had been anyone famous.  He had the shoes of Ava Gardner and the mopping shoes of the maid Zoila from Bravo’s “Flipping Out”. His website had even been mentioned on TMZ:  “Ian Ziering’s 1998 Pumas Fetch $400.”

And some months were good, like the month he sold Jon Hamm’s black cordovans for $500 and Beyonce’s slippers for $1550.  Of course, he had to pay Ebay commission and sometimes pay celebrity assistants a secret payoff when they brought him stolen or borrowed or discovered footwear. But mostly, it worked out pretty well for the Jacobs family.

Mandy kept herself out of Dave’s online business. It was annoying having him around the house all day. She just wished he would leave. But he was there all weekend, and then Monday came around and he was there all week.

After 40

She was 41 years old, unemployed, and had lived in LA for almost twenty years. Radnor and the Main Line, Boston University and Boston, Universal Studios and Universal City, and now Encino and Gelson’s; her geography and her life had steadily progressed and then, suddenly, stagnated.

Once upon a time, she had hopped on the train from Philadelphia and rode into Manhattan and stayed up all night in the Village. Now she drove down Ventura Blvd to pick up pizza and drove back home to eat and then fall asleep in bed at 9:30pm.

Like most of her apparently rich, Jewish friends, they were out of money inside a big overpriced house, out of luck and aging in an indifferent city that venerated temporary youth and permanent affluence.

Mandy and Dave could barely take care of themselves. They hoped their parents, back East, would not get ill. They dreaded taking care of them.

But they looked with grim hope, and with much guilt, at so much inheritance money. The day the old folks died, the kids would finally be OK.

Mandy’s father had died in 2006, and her mother lived alone in Radnor, looked after by Mandy’s unmarried brother Charles, who went shopping and cooked meals and watched old Bette Davis movies with his mother. That was some comfort to Mandy. “Charles looks after your mother Mandy,” Dave said quite often. “You need to look after me.”

But Mandy was so very sick and tired and bored and restless. She wondered when…. she would find love, romance and adventure and get out of Encino. And she would certainly get away from Dave!

She thought about a drive up the coast and a stop off in Ventura for sushi. And she dreamed of driving more, near the cliffs and the ocean, on the road to San Francisco where she would live alone, in the fog, in peace. And she would abandon Dave and his celebrity shoes and maybe Nolan too. She wanted to run off and make love with a rich man who could get her what she wanted and what she really deserved in life.

“Mom, what the hell are you doing?” Nolan walked into the kitchen.

“What?” she asked.

“I’ve been standing here for like 5 minutes watching you zone off like a zombie. So weird. I’m going to the Skirball tonight, bitch,” he said.

“I told you! I told you I don’t think you’re funny calling me bitch!” she said.

Nolan laughed. “Sorry. I just think it’s funny calling you bitch.”

He walked over to the digital thermostat. “Fucking 80. Mom you have to put it at 72!”

“Leave it alone! Get showered and get dressed and go speak to your father! He has work for you!”

Nolan walked into the den where his father was slouched into a brown leather office chair in front of two large Mac desktop monitors.

“The bitch said you want to see me.” Nolan said.

Mandy poured a club soda with a sliced green lime in fizzy water. Lime calmed her. Citrus was her anti-anxiety scent. She sprayed Jo Malone’s Sweet Lime and Cedar perfume on her neck.

She picked up her small, leather, lemon yellow, Prada purse. And walked out the front door of the house- slamming the carved oak door behind her.

She actually looked forward to shopping at Gelson’s, an event that brought her out of her hellish family and into an air-conditioned, gourmet food store.

The Man at the Olive Bar

Just inside Gelson’s, an old workplace colleague from Universal, Stephanie Cohan, ran up and hugged Mandy.

“Oh, my God! So great to see you! You look amazing!” Stephanie said.

“Are you still working at Universal?” Mandy asked.

“No! I got laid off. But Jeff still works there and we moved from Calabasas to Encino so the commute isn’t that bad! How is Dave doing?” Stephanie asked.

“Wonderful! We love it because we are together all the time! He has an online company that TMZ talks about and my son Nolan just finished his first year at Campbell Hall. He’s an honor student and he works for Dave and they hang out and go to ball games!” Mandy exclaimed.

“Mazel Tov!  Well my eldest son, Shawilder, just graduated from Yale, and he majored in Comedy Business Management. And he has this crazy idea, some people he knows in Silicon Valley, to get this online comedy company together and he is all into the Internet…”, Stephanie said.

“They all are,” Mandy said, eyes wandering into the detergent aisle.

“I know,” Stephanie said.

“Cause we’re old now,” Mandy said.

“You’re not old! You look amazing!” Stephanie said.

“So great to see you!” Mandy said.

“Oh, you too! We should definitely try to meet up! I’m on Facebook!” Stephanie said as she pushed her cart towards a pile of cheese.

Stephanie Cohan had been an Asst VP of Digital but knew not how to send an email or use Google.

Her chief assets were her outstanding smile and strategically aware pussy which positioned itself early on, as a young woman, and ensnared some of the top male executives at Universal who gratefully promoted her up the chow line. She had a reputation as an easy, eager, ambitious dumb whore.

But now she was a mom. Her virtue reasserted itself in the honorific title. Her joblessness robbed her of some income but restored her reputation.

Mandy could only think bitter thoughts.

Of life, work, children, Dave, times past, California, the Studio and Stephanie.

But that was then, and this was now, and this was Gelson’s:

A noble place, where every canned vegetable was lined up like a military honor guard awaiting inspection. It cheered her to look at the neat and well-tended aisles.

And Gelson’s had its olive bar! An olive bar near Wolfgang Puck’s open fire pizzeria, where black Greek Kalamatas, French green Picholines and stuffed Spanish Manzanillas cavorted, seduced and socialized in the open oils, a place where hairy armed men stuck their bare fingers into the trays and pulled out ripe and luscious, salty and meaty fruits, which they dropped onto their tongues and swallowed secretly, because Gelson’s did “not allow” sampling at the olive bar, but it was done anyway, because the patrons were rich, selfish, hurried and hungry and didn’t care about sanitation or human consideration.

Mandy passed the olive bar, her eyes on the watermelons, but at $11.99 a pound they were too expensive. Only Gelson’s would charge that much for watermelon in the middle of the summer. Of course, the watermelon was organic, imported from France, and wrapped in blue and white, and printed cotton toile fabric.

“How do you know if they are ripe?” a man asked Mandy as he picked up one of the cotton encased watermelons.

He was solidly built, gray-haired and stubble faced, in black dress shirt and black khakis. His sincere, strangely hypnotic, dark eyes focused right on Mandy, with a quality characteristic of a professional actor who spoke every word with full theatrical commitment.

“I really don’t know, sir. I think you have to pick one up and smell. If it smells sweet it’s ripe,” she said, in her own trance like rhythm.

With his large hands, he picked up a cotton-wrapped melon and offered it to Mandy for smelling.

“Yes, yes. I think that one is ripe,” she said.

“Good. Because I have to bring a gift to a house party and the host is a real ass hole,” he said. “Do you know where Hayvenhurst is?” he asked.

“Yes. We are on Hayvenhurst,” she said.

“Oh…so we are! I never come to the Valley. I get lost when I go north of Mulholland. You must be a native,” he said.

“Well sort of. I live in Encino. But…”

He stuck his finger into an olive tray and pulled out a couple of green ones. He opened up the palm of his hand and offered it to Mandy.

“No, no thank you,” she said.

“I don’t blame you. I got food poisoning from an olive bar in Rome.  I threw up all night and had chills and fever and it was not pleasant,” he said.  He shoved two olives in his mouth and swallowed them. “Delicious!”

“Well have a great day!” he said and he walked off to the Express Line checkout with his shopping cart and toile-covered melon.

Mandy watched him pay and leave the store.

She pushed her cart into the same Express Line where she knew Rita, an always properly made-up cashier with coral lipstick, penciled eyebrows and powdered cheeks.

Rita leaned over to Mandy.  “We had a celebrity in the store today! I just saw him!” she said.

“Who? Who was it?” Mandy asked.

“George Clooney! He just bought a watermelon from me!” she said.

Rita showed Mandy a receipt. “He signed it Danny Ocean!”

Love and Shoes

Mandy was unpacking her groceries when Dave walked into the kitchen, dressed nattily in a navy and white-striped sweater, khakis and suede shoes.

“Well,” she said, admiring his rare elegance, “you should dress like this more often. Where are you going?”

“I am going to get, you will not even guess, the most famous American designer’s hiking boots on my website!”

“Who? Who?” she asked.

“You have to guess. First of all his name is Jewish, and he was born in the Bronx and people think he is a WASP,” he said.

“Your father Jerry?” she asked.

“So stupid. No! Ralph Lauren!” he said. “I just got an email from his ex-gardener Emmanuel in Westchester County New York. He was fired because he was watering the lawn and some of the water spray got on the hood of Ralph’s Black 1960 Jaguar Coupe. Just when Ralph was inside the Jag and about to drive off to a car show!”

“Do you know how much the gardener made a year? He was one of eight full-time gardeners who just cut the grass. $150,000 a year and he is from Mexico with seven kids and Ralph fired him, just like that.” Dave said.

“Do you think this is all true?” Mandy asked.

“I’m not a sucker Mandy. It was all in the email. He even sent me pictures of Ralph’s walk-in closet in the garage where he keeps his hiking and driving shoes. So I am getting Ralph Lauren’s actual shoes! And there is nothing Ralph can do about it!”

“Do you know who I saw at Gelson’s?” she asked.

He bit into a ripe peach. “What did you say?” he asked.

“I saw George Clooney at Gelson’s. He spoke to me. He asked me about watermelons!” she said.

“Oh, come on! You are ridiculous. That never happened,” he said. “Clooney has assistants who do his shopping!”

“How can you doubt me?” she asked.

“Because Mandy, you think you see celebrities all the time and you are obsessed with them. A famous name means all the world to you and you actually never have seen one at all!” he said.

“You are really insulting,” she said.

“You just wanted to outdo my Ralph Lauren story. So you pick the biggest male movie star to try and prove that you have the bigger dick!” he said.

“I believed you and your Ralph story! Why can’t you allow me to have my pleasure and my famous person story?” she said.

“Because your story can’t sell on the internet! My Ralph shoe story is worth possibly thousands. And yours is a stupid I saw George Clooney buy a watermelon at Gelson’s useless tale of nothingness!” he said.

“Fine! Just take your fucking shoes and fucking shove them up your ass! You don’t care about my life. You only care about your shoes!” she said, storming out of the kitchen and into the bathroom where she sat down on the toilet and cried.

Two Weeks Later

Marcia Cross, Heather Locklear, Xzibit, Susan Lucci, Sinead O’Connor, Piers Morgan and Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi, all had used shoes online on Dave’s site, and yet, no customer had bought anything in two weeks.

It was the end of August and many bills were coming due: $30,000 for Nolan’s private high school tuition, $4,800 for the mortgage, and another $2500 for quarterly property taxes and $1600 for two car payments.  There were other expenses, such as $400 a month for mobile phones, Internet, cable, DSL and burglar alarm monitoring.

There were so many expenses and so little money coming in.

Selling the house was out of the question because nobody could sell a house in the bad economy.

Mandy called her mother in Radnor and asked if she could send $2,000.

Dave called his father in Boca Raton and asked if he could send $3,000.

Mandy told Dave that she was going to start looking for a job and she actually said that she might even consider becoming a cashier at Gelson’s.

Dave told Mandy that he had some very bad news.  He handed her a letter from a New York City law firm.

The legal document, signed and notarized, originating from Wall Street, warned Dave that he was to cease and desist from advertising Ralph Lauren’s shoes on the website.

“If I take down Ralph’s shoes, what is to prevent anyone else from asking me the same? Who’s next? My Marcia Cross slippers or my Heather Locklear boots? This is a nightmare. An absolute nightmare,” he said.

Rita Calls

September came and Nolan went back to school.  He was out of the house, a relief, but he still came back at night, moody, sullen, and angry.

“Bitch, I’m not wasting my life doing homework,” Nolan announced after a dismal dinner of packaged pre-made pasta and julienne vegetables boiled in a buttery bag.

“Get up and get into your room and study! Your tuition is costing us 30 grand a year and I will have your ass out of this house unless you pull at least B+ in every single class! Do you understand me?” Mandy said.

Dave walked into the kitchen.  “The internet is down. Or maybe it’s slow.”

“Your son calls me a bitch and says he is not doing homework!” Mandy said.

“Nolan, listen to your mother! Get to your room and study!” Dave said.

“How come I have to study? I don’t have anything left to learn. You do all right with your virtual celebrity shoes! And she still shops at Gelson’s! You live well, in a nice house and you want me to be a fucking slave!” Nolan said.

“We are your parents! We know what’s important. We have lived a few more years than you! You think it’s so easy? That we just live for celebrities and the Internet! What garbage is in your mind?” Mandy said.

Mandy’s phone rang.

“Hold on. Hello. Who?”

It was Rita, the cashier from Gelson’s.

“Oh, yes. Hi. Who? Oh, my God! Did he just walk in? How long ago? Oh, just now? Oh, my God! OK. I’m sort of in the middle of something, but let me try and get to the store! Thank you so much. God bless you!”

“Who the hell was that?” Dave asked.

“That was Rita at Gelson’s. George Clooney just walked into the store. I think he might live in Encino now! I have to go. Nolan, don’t argue and get in your room and when I get back I am going to punish you if you don’t study!”

“You’re going to jump in the car right now and drive to Gelson’s?” Dave asked.

Mandy put lipstick on and inspected her face in the stainless steel spatula. She sprayed herself with cool and calming lime and cedar.

“I’ll be back in a bit. Wish me luck!” Mandy said.

“You better drive carefully. Don’t rush there! You don’t want to have an accident,” Dave warned her.

Nolan stood in front of the door. “You ain’t going out to see George Clooney, bitch!” he said laughing.

Mandy slapped him hard across his face, stunning him.

She slapped him again, harder.

He started to cry. Tears poured out of his eyes. “Why did you hit me? I didn’t do anything? Why did you do that to me? I didn’t mean to do anything bad!”

He ran down the hall and into his bedroom.

“Are you still going out?” Dave asked.

“You handle him,” she said.

She walked out of the house, into the night air, and drove down Ventura Blvd. to Gelson’s to see George Clooney.

END

At Oxnard Fitness in the San Fernando Valley, I see the same people doing the same dumb things for several years.  If there is a badly conceived exercise, they still blindly do it and never cease doing it.

I must control myself from criticizing. I say, as my Abuela once said to me, “Luis just shut-up. Leave the people alone. Just mind your own business. Agua que no has de beber, déjala corer”

I think of Carla Shamir, a middle-aged woman with a mass of curly blond hair and a big, lumpy ass packed into tight pink sweats. She speaks Hebrew and English, and carries one of those enormous king-sized bronze leather purses that she hangs on top of the treadmill.  Her wrists are encircled with half a dozen gold bracelets and she wears some oddly shaped and expensive eyeglasses.

She dresses for the gym as if she were meeting friends for baklava and coffee.

Carla gets on the treadmill. She takes out her cell phone, punching in some numbers to start the machine. She then places her feet off the belt and talks, while the moving belt automates under her triangulated legs.

Mind your own business Luis.

Then there is old Rabbi Len Hoffman, who has been coming here since 1998. 73-years-old, he spends five hours a week on a recumbent bike, and looks like he is eight months pregnant. He never pedals fast enough to sweat, but always has enough breath in his lungs left to condemn President Obama.

Let him be Luis.

Nina Navarro, another member here, is 22 and we both are graduating from Pierce College this year. She lives in Van Nuys, right near Columbus and Victory. She is in the gym every morning at 7am. But I don’t know what she eats when she is out of the gym, because she weighs close to 200 pounds.

But she has a pretty face.

In the last ten years, I have noticed that women in the San Fernando Valley have gotten shorter. Especially among my favorite Latinas, the body type most evident has no real ass- but what ass they have- is very wide, hung low, and as flat as the back end of a minivan.

These gorditas tend to wear spandex pull-ons and knit tops that outline their generous rolls of fat like inflatable life preservers, floating around their middles.  In my gym, these hefty girls are always harnessed into the Adduction/Abduction Leg machines, the ones that open and close female thighs in motions resembling fluttering butterflies in heat.

“It develops their pussy muscles,” Hector says.

I would be remiss if I forgot to mention brothers Hector and Ricardo Gomes, my buddies here in Van Nuys who also go to Pierce College.

Hector is 6’1. He has the face of a 20-year-old who has never been in pain or found the sun. He is smooth skinned, with light hazel eyes that seem to beg for forgiveness. He has broad shoulders, muscular elongated arms, and a vast chest; but his legs are scrawny and the lower half of his body disappears like the smoke of TV’s magic Jeannie as she descends into her bottle. He always wears the same Lakers jersey: Bryant 24, yellow, purple, and sleeveless.

Ricardo is short, dark, compact and masculine. He has close-cropped hair and wears a silver crucifix. He only works his chest, but does it five days a week.  He is engaged to Nina and they plan to marry after they both graduate.

When Hector and Ricardo leave the gym, they both walk up to me, and each man makes a fist handshake. Our fists touch and we say, “Hey, take care” and then they are out of there, riding back home in their red Mustang.

Clarence Farrow

“If you eat whole-wheat toast with Irish butter and sprinkle some Tumeric powder on it, you will reduce the fat and speed up your metabolism”

“Drink green tea, but only do it before 3pm because your body will use it as an anti-oxidant in the afternoon and then it turns into a fat three hours before dinner.”

“Most people think that if they run faster and burn more calories they are burning more calories. But you have to actually eat more and then exercise less to burn fat.”

I am on the Abs machine and hear Clarence Farrow’s fitness advice. He is the guru of the gym: a 35-year-old gay black man, an actor, a motivational speaker, a film director, a real estate agent, a chiropractor and an ordained minister of dubious denomination. He was born in Anniston, Alabama “in Cal-houn County!” and is famous in our gym for his 2007 guest appearance on “Entourage”.

From the moment he gets into the gym, until he leaves two hours later, his mouth, his autobiography and his suggestions are broadcast to everyone.

Listen to him and you will learn that he lost his virginity at Garet Lake; that he once sung at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, and his mother owns a restaurant next door to WDNG Radio.

“I was 291 pounds when I came to Los Angeles. I was the fattest person getting off the plane at LAX. It was the most humiliating thing I ever experienced and I went straight to Venice Beach and prayed at Muscle Beach when the sun set. And from that day forward, I spoke to Jesus and says that the Lord didn’t make no fat people and I wasn’t going to be fat no more!”

Hector, his youth and muscle, stands in awe of the older, fatter man.  “Clarence, I ate six pancakes today but then I ran on the treadmill for like 20 minutes,” Hector says.

“Oh, that ain’t good kid. You need to go home and drink some goat milk and then I would eat nothing until tomorrow morning,” Clarence says.

Carla, the Israeli walks past, reeking of fruity patchouli Angel. “You still think you are the professor of the gym?” she asks.

“Professor? I am the King!” Clarence says.

“So,” she says sticking her sweating face and moist curls into the drinking fountain, “why I still got this fat?”

“Cause you don’t listen to me girl! Get off the treadmill and do some bench presses and then I told you to start eating an all yellow diet. Cauliflower, bananas, grapefruit, lemons, yellow onions, polenta, even lemonade!”

“Really? I don’t believe you!” Carla says.

“Honey, I just was on KPCC last week and I am podcasting too. I just self-published a book on fitness and nutrition and Perez Hilton put me on his video webcam!” Clarence says.

“Oh, I love Perez. He is so great. I read him everyday. Do you know Andy Cohen on BRAVO? Another hero of mine!”

“Perez got ten million followers. That’s almost like Google size!” Clarence says.

It’s now 8:45am. I’m doing the incline chest. Hector and Ricardo walk up to me. I put the bar back up in the rack, make a fist and touch each of their fists.

“So long man. Have a good day Luis!”

Hector looks back at me. “You looking good man. Layin’ off the chimichangas? Good stuff,” he says.

Hector noticed me and sometimes I notice guys. I don’t mean in a sexual way, but I do compare myself. Especially to the ones who think they are better than me. Like Clarence.

How can I (charitably) describe the physical attributes of The Fitness Guru of our gym?

He has broad shoulders, but his pectoral area is a bosomy and gelatinous formation of man boobs.  Rolls of fat protrude around his belly. His ass is wide and his whole physique is bell shaped.  He definitely is not ripped, but one can see, in his fleshly failure, the determination and drive of an imperfect winner.

When he walks, his knees kind of knock and he sweats a lot and looks a bit silly in those webbed, amphibian-like shoes.

I saw him once in the locker room.

It’s sort of embarrassing to talk about it.

He had stripped off his red nylon shorts, revealing a thick and long black cock with large balls and a generous carpet of curly pubic hair.

I pretended not to notice as he walked, without a towel, into the green tile shower. There were no curtains, so I could see him as he soaked himself under the hot water, soaping up his scalp and pumping up suds with a bar of Ivory.

I sat down in a plastic chair, just beyond the shower area, and pretended to tie my shoes. And then Clarence started to sing, loudly.

His mighty Alabama accentuated baritone poured out a heartfelt rendition of something I had once heard on “American Idol” The song is “Ol Man River”:

He don’ plant taters,

He don’t plant cotton,

An’ dem dat plants’em

is soon forgotten,

But ol’man river,

He jes keeps rollin’along.

You an’me, we sweat an’ strain,

Body all achin’ an’ racket wid pain,

Tote dat barge!

Lif’ dat bale!

Git a little drunk

An’ you land in jail.

Ah gits weary

An’ sick of tryin’

Ah’m tired of livin’

An’ skeered of dyin’,

But ol’ man river,

He jes’keeps rolling’along.

He could sing. His shower performance almost made me shiver. The glass partitions steamed up too.

I ran out of there before he, or anyone else, saw me.

The Plans We Make

I am not planning to stay in Van Nuys. I will state that right now.

I grew up here. And I am sick of the people, the traffic, the LAPD helicopters, the crappy restaurants, and the slummy apartments.

Why do people throw out old sofas and leave them on the curb?

My parents have a little two-bedroom house, on Cedros near Vanowen, that they have owned for ten years and there are five children and two adults crammed inside.

I can’t say where I will go, because I have never traveled east of Las Vegas, but I hear, and people tell me, that New York City is for me.

I think if I lived in New York, I would have an apartment in Greenwich Village and write poems and drink espresso and sit along the Hudson River and plan my creative conquests.

I would not own a car. I would get around on foot, like James Dean once did as he walked with his red windbreaker around Times Square.

And if I lived in New York, I would never, ever eat Mexican food again. I grew up Mexican, and I ate all that bean, burrito, orange soda, chips and salsa shit and I am fucking sick of it.

I think I deserve to live in New York. And I don’t know what I will do to get out of Van Nuys. But Jesus is watching out for me and planning some great things. So I am putting my trust in him.

EMT

Hector is studying to become an EMT. He says it’s solid work and that they have good pay and benefits. He tells me that you get big and strong carrying gurneys. Plus, many of the patients are real overweight, so the people who lift them get a great workout.

I see him at St. Elizabeth’s on Sunday morning. Just like me, he goes to the 11 am Spanish Mass with all the other overtired and hung-over people who sit, stand, kneel and pray in the pews in a half-awake slumber. The church air smells of Dos Equis, Tequila and holy incense.

And on this May morning, a special day, Hector and Nina are together, in church, just as they are together in school and in the gym.

“We just got engaged!” Hector says on the steps outside wrapping his arm around Nina.

I kiss Nina, hug Hector, smile and act happy. But somehow I feel sad.

These two have written their epitaphs at 22.

My friends know what they want and their world will remain within a five-mile radius of this church.

They will marry and buy a little house, probably up the street, and have plump little children who will come to St. Elizabeth’s where they will be baptized and christened.

Hector will drive an ambulance and Nina will drag her kids on foot to buy food and she will get fatter and live hoping that her own offspring will end up just like her.

“Where is Ricardo?” I ask.

“He went to breakfast with Clarence,” he says.

“Clarence, the dude from our gym? Are they friends?” I ask.

“Apparently so. Clarence is taking him to brunch in West Hollywood,” Hector says.

Nina rolls her eyes and twists finger in her hair. “I don’t know, you better keep an eye on your brother!”

The Rabbi and the Harlot

On Monday morning, we are back at Oxnard Fitness. The whole gang is here.

Carla Shamir, dressed in purple and black tights, like a Sepulveda Boulevard slut, is arguing with Rabbi Len. She stands on the treadmill and is refusing to get off.

“You are a very selfish woman!” Rabbi Len says.

She smiles and stands with her feet planted on both sides of the machine as the belt moves.  She is laughing and spraying herself with perfume.

“I’ve seen you on here for one hour woman! You don’t use the machine and you are selfish! Get off!” the Rabbi yells as he swings his arms to disperse her overpowering scent and unyielding obstinacy.

She looks down at the Rabbi. “Who are you to tell me that I am selfish? You sit on the bike all morning, davening, and now you want to take the treadmill too!”

His face is lox red.

“Because you can’t read the sign! It says 20 minutes limit! If you don’t obey the rules I am going to tell the manager! There are rules and laws in this establishment!”

The whole gym is amused. Neither one of these members is very well liked. To see them at each other’s throats is quite satisfying.

Clarence, sweating, headphones on, finds it…. all so entertaining.

“Ooh, the Jews is arguing. They got a beef… and it ain’t Kosher! The Rabbi is mad. Mad as hell. I think it’s cause I told him he had to cut out sugar. Now he’s hungry. And Carla is on the yellow diet and she lost some weight so she has a mood too! My work is everywhere in this gym!”

The Rabbi marches over. “Did you see that woman over there? The Harlot from Haifa! She won’t get off the machine!” he says to Clarence.

“Don’t you worry Rabbi. She is my friend and you are my friend and as long as I am here there ain’t gonna be no arguments. She is irritable because I put her on a yellow diet and now she is taking it out on you! It’s medical. Nothing else Rabbi,” Clarence says.

Carla finally pulls her purse and her nylon jacket off the treadmill handles. She ties her hair back in a bun, looks at our group, and walks over without any hesitation.

“I suppose you all are talking about me!” she says.

Clarence puts his hands on his hips and leans back in disbelief.  “Are you kidding? Do you think you are the star of this gym honey?”

Carla laughs. “Maybe not the star but public enemy number one!”

The Rabbi looks at her sternly. “I hope you are happy now. You stood on the machine for an hour and got ten minutes of exercise!”

“Tipesh! Stupid! That is what you are!” Carla says as she points her fingers at the Rabbi.

Clarence reaches over to Carla and clasps her arm. And puts his other arm over the Rabbi’s shoulder. “I ain’t havin’ none of this hatin’. Say you’re sorry Carla. And Rabbi, I learned this in Mt. Zion Bible Study class: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”

Dry Heat and Divine Revelation

I go back into the locker area. Ricardo is walking into the sauna.

He doesn’t see me or maybe he does. I decide to follow him in.

He is sitting in the corner of the sauna, wrapped in a towel.  “Hey buddy. How is it going?” I ask.

“Oh, cool. I just am chillin’. I don’t feel like workin’ out,” he says.

The sauna is un-sauna-like. It does not seem to be heated today. “Do you notice it’s not hot?” I ask.

“Yeah. That’s OK. Just hang here for a bit. Then I shower and get out of here,” he says.

“Are you doing anything this weekend?” I ask.

“Yeah. I’m going to a beer festival in Eagle Rock,” he says.

Just then, the door swings open, and Clarence, completely nude, man boobs and big dick flopping, enters the sauna. I’m still dressed, Ricardo’s half dressed, and now we have a naked man.

“Oh, hey there Luis. I didn’t know you come in here!” Clarence says.

“You’re right. I won’t come in here!” I say, not realizing I’ve spoken in double entendre.

“I bought the beer tickets on Goldstar,” Clarence says to Ricardo.

“Oh, cool. Let’s talk about it later,” Ricardo says.

“What’s to talk about? I’ll pick you up and we’ll drive down there Saturday,” Clarence says.

“Are you going to New York next month?” Ricardo asks.

“Yes I am! Going to stay in Soho with my pastor’s son, and I will be eating like a goddamn pig!” Clarence says.

“I wish I were going to New York,” I say.

“It’s the finest. I mean if I get into school in Brooklyn, my cooking school, then I will be leaving Van Nuys for good this September!” Clarence says.

“Leaving Van Nuys?  I thought you moved from Alabama because you love LA. Now you are getting out of here? Cooking school? I thought you were a fitness trainer or a chiropractor or something in entertainment,” I say.

“Honey, LA is for suckers,” he says.  He stands up and opens a bottle of baby oil and pours it over his chest and rubs it in.

“How so?” I ask with a mixture of curiosity and defensiveness.

“People believe in a bunch of make believe here. They think that idiots are experts, that people who don’t know what they are talking about know everything! I pity anyone who worships the so-called experts in Los Angeles- the ones who dispense advice and make money off of suckers. The lack of integrity, of honor, of scientific knowledge, it just seeps out of the phony skin of this city!”

He wipes off the oil, takes a towel and places it on the wooden slats of the lower sauna bench next to Ricardo.

“You’re young. I’m young. You have a moment when you can move and progress in life. I want to seize it and go somewhere in America where people are real,” he says.

I listen to what he says and I try to disassociate it from the quackery he has always dispensed.

Clarence looks over at Ricardo. “You want to use this oil?”

Ricardo takes the oil and pours it on his smooth pectorals.

He opens his towel, exposing himself.

“I need to get going,” I say.

I take my hand and curl it into a fist. Ricardo makes a fist as does Clarence. And I fist/shake them both and walk out of the sauna.

And I go to the sink, turning on the water, rinsing my face, washing my hands, and drying off. Looking in the mirror, I take some pomade and rub it in my hair. In my backpack, I pack the pomade, zip up, swing the door and exit the locker area, running downstairs and out the front door. And once more, leaving the gym where I shall return tomorrow.

THE END

Cory Brusseau by Andy Hurvitz

The Neutrogena Man
by Andy Hurvitz

Twenty years ago, when he was in his 20s, Caspar Van Zeelt, 6’1, 170 lbs, cross-country runner, had modeled professionally and earned enough money to buy a small studio apartment in lower Manhattan. Those were fast, exciting, giddy years when all he had to do was smile or scowl, squint and flex, and watch adoring strangers gaze back at him.

The Ridgewood, NJ native had worked in Milan, Paris, London, Tokyo and Barcelona. He had to watch everything he ate, but he ate well. He would fly out to LA, work with photographers, then sit by the pool, get tan, and fly back to New York. And the checks came in the mail: frequently and copiously.

His parents lived in a little, white, Dutch Colonial house on Prospect Street and viewed his career as something flippant and somewhat suspect. His father, a magazine publisher, worried about drugs, sex, exploitation and their son’s general moral corruption. His mother, an Economics Professor at Farley Dickinson, hoped their only son might marry and produce a grandchild.

Headache Remedy

When he visited Ridgewood, Caspar got headaches. He blamed it on the humidity and stress. His mother blamed coffee and red wine.

She told him to take aspirin or ibuprofen, so he went into bathroom medicine cabinet looking for a bottle of pain reliever.

But next to the Bayer, behind the Ban Roll-On: a white tube of Neutrogena Oil Free Moisturizer. He grabbed the tube, uncapped it, and squeezed a moist, white, thin ribbon of cream into his palms and spread it over his forehead, cheeks, neck and on top of his hands.

His headache disappeared. He calmed himself under the lubricating lotion.

With Neutrogena, he could stop his pain. And right there, the march of age. And what if he could stay exactly as the same smooth, headache and wrinkle-free man until the day he died?

Work

A Manhattan based fashion magazine, STYLE PROJECT, was looking for a young, good-looking, aggressive salesman to sell advertising.

On a lark, Caspar interviewed and got the job. He would now be pounding it, metaphorically and physically, as he seduced potential clients from the fashion world into buying advertising space in the magazine.

On the job, he met 27-year-old Cat Kinderkamack, another advertising sales person, and former fashion model, from Oradell, NJ. They dated, for a year, married and moved into Caspar’s apartment.

The Grind

They were young, tall, good-looking, fashionable, athletic, and stylish. They went out five-nights-a-week. They rode downtown and ate in crazy expensive places in Soho and Tribeca. They had expense accounts and lots of money.

And they were miserable.

The grind of grinding it out, the stress of pretending to care about shoes, jewelry, designers, shows, stores. It was exhausting. Rhinestones, restaurants, hotels, bars, vodka, cigarettes; dieting, running, crashing, posing, selling, flirting, seducing.

And then Cat got pregnant.

So they decided to quit their jobs and move to Bergen County, near his parents and near other young families; and away from the artifice and culture and sophistication and urbane vices.

Park Ridge, NJ

Fourteen years passed and the young Manhattanites became the middle-aged suburbanites.

Cat had adjusted leaving her friends in the city and living in the quiet, leafy, dull small town. She planted flowers on her back deck. They barbecued,rode bikes, went to soccer games,ate in the diner on Friday night, and followed world events from the perspective of the Bergen Record. Nothing unexpected ever happened in Park Ridge, except for the occasional deer who popped up on the front lawn and then ran off.

Samantha was a sophomore at Park Ridge High School. And Cat went to work out, three days a week, at The Gym in Montvale where all the women drove oversized SUVs and complained about how fat they had become.

And Caspar now worked, selling advertising, for a start-up magazine (Lohtech) in Armonk, NY owned by a Hong Kong born entrepreneur, Tony Loh.

Detour in Nyack

One late May afternoon, driving west, over the Tappan Zee, coming from that Friday meeting in Armonk, Caspar stopped off in Nyack and parked along North Broadway.

He walked along a street where the noble, historic, old houses distracted him from his own aimless and empty workday.

He kept thinking of his 27-year old co-worker, Tara Altoonian, a Boston College business school graduate from Watertown, MA. She was brown haired, thin, smiling, energetic. She knew how to flirt, how to work hard, how to please the boss at the magazine.

Tara’s young eyes got online faster. She produced contacts quicker. She made sales and got noticed. She brought in 10 pages to the magazine in just two weeks. And Tony Loh–that robotically unemotional, driven-to-succeed, Hong Kong native boss–liked her.

Caspar was once 27. And his 27 had been better, in every respect, than stupid Tara’s 27. He had been an International Male Model. Wasn’t that some sort of achievement?

And Tara didn’t protect her skin. She didn’t use sun block or moisturizer. And it seemed wrong. She had youth and it was wasted on her.

Caspar needed glasses. And he worked slowly. And he stayed out of the sun. And he was once young, but now it was a full-time project: not getting any older. He knew more about life but he really didn’t understand.

Why did he work for a magazine? Why did he choose to live in NJ? And why was he here, in Nyack, walking and searching and looking?

Didn’t Nyack have a drugstore where they sold Neutrogena? That was his real reason for stopping off here. He was going to buy some wrinkle reducing eye cream.

In his 45th year, after starting out young and excelling in what seemed to be the hot and smoldering center of the earth, he had woken up and suddenly become obscure, directionless and boring.

He walked up North Broadway, past white houses with white picket fences, rose gardens and those shady pockets of rhododendron and pachysandra. He passed so many trees: Elm and White Birch; Hickory, Dogwood and Ash; Holly, Spruce, Pine, Hemlock and Aspen.

Who planted the trees? Who picked the trees? Who placed them?

An elderly, smiling and red-faced male crossing guard in a yellow slicker was directing school age children across the street.

Caspar thought of how it might be to work as a crossing guard. It was a daily sacrament and duty; humble and life affirming. You woke up everyday and went to watch over little children and keep them from harm.

Who made these children and who brought them to life? Who decided that they should live here? Who dressed them and fed them and raised them?

Small life choices made daily.

His phone rang at School Street and he was pulled out of his dream stroll near a two-story, glass front, 19th Century wood building.

“What time are you coming home?” Cat asked.
“I don’t know. I’m in Nyack right now,” he said.
“What are you doing there?” she asked.
“Walking,” he said.
“Are you walking for a reason?” she asked.
“I just came off the bridge. I wanted to get some air. I needed to walk,” he said.
“We need to eat dinner. Baumgart’s in Ridgewood. What time is good for you?” she asked.
“Eight,” he said.
“OK. See you soon,” she said.

CVS/Neutrogena

In Montvale, a town of sweeping office campuses and large homes on rolling hills, near the intersection of Chestnut Ridge Road and Grand Avenue, he pulled into the parking lot of a CVS Drugstore.

He would often come here, several times a week, just before returning home, and walk along the aisles full of illness and age-fighting products. He marveled at the choice, potential and promise.

And like a pilgrim at a holy shrine, he stopped at one place in CVS to kneel and to contemplate.

CVS had a Neutrogena section, a beautifully and artfully designed display of all the latest skin care products.

He focused on one Ageless Essentials Continuous Hydration Moisture SPF 25, a heavenly blue and angel white tube. There was a tester open, and he squeezed out some liquid and rubbed it on his face.

Silky, buttery, tactile, tingling and tightening: chills ran up his neck as he applied the non-comedogenic moisturizer.

A group of noisy teens came pushing down the aisle. He stiffened up, and put the tube back on the shelf. A sense of shame came over him.

A young girl walked up to him. “Are you Samantha Van Zeelt’s dad?” she asked.

“Yes, I am. Who are you?” he asked.

The girl giggled. “Rachel Cappelli. I go to school with her. Tell her I said hello.”

“Of course. Have a good night,” he said.

Was he caught? Was he ridiculous? Did he do something wrong? Was he inappropriate?

Why had he come to CVS? Why was he obsessed with Neutrogena? What other man cared about such utter nonsense?

He was late going home. He had stopped and wasted time. There was no excuse for it.

Prospect Avenue

“Dad, how come we live on Prospect Avenue just like Grandma and Grandpa?” Samantha asked as she sat atop the kitchen counter that evening.

“Just happened sweetie,” he said. “We were looking for a house in Park Ridge. And then this one came up. Oh, your friend Rachel was in CVS tonight and said hello.”

“What were you doing at CVS again?” Cat asked as she walked into the kitchen with a laundry basket full of freshly washed and fragrant scented clothes. She leaned into Caspar and kissed him. “You smell very nice. What is it?” she asked.

“Am I not allowed to go to CVS?” he asked.

“No. You just seem to be there a lot,” Cat said.

“Your daughter wants to know why we moved to a street with the same name as her grandparents’ street.”

She put down the basket. “Because your father needed to recreate his childhood and we couldn’t afford Ridgewood,” she said.

“Are we ready, to go out and get something to eat? In Ridgewood,” he said.

After Dinner

After dinner, they took a nice evening stroll down East Ridgewood Avenue.

“What a beautiful old theater,” Samantha said looking upon the Warner Theater: 1930s streamline, limestone faced.

They passed Rite Aid. Caspar stopped.

“I want to go in and get some gum. You two want to come in or stay out here?” he asked.

“Go in. We’ll wait,” Cat said.

Inside the fluorescent-lit drugstore, Caspar ran to the Neutrogena section. He was working against the clock. He knew full well that his wife and daughter were outside, waiting.

He wanted to buy Neutrogena. The chewing gum was just an excuse to get inside the store.

It was all so overwhelming. Rite-Aid in Ridgewood had too much Neutrogena, much more than CVS in Montvale.

Sensitive skin, anti-acne, razor protection, grapefruit body wash, Triple Renewal Hair Moisturizer, Deep Clean Sport, Deep Clean Invigorating, Deep Clean.

Wipes, pads, towelettes. Gentle scrub, relaxing nightly scrub, Visibly Even Foaming Cleanser, Wave Spinning Sonic Cleanser, Toners, Treatments, Cleansing, Blackheads, Skin, Stress, Aging, Acne, Makeup.

He looked at one product, seemingly a tentative title for his future autobiography: “Foundation and Remover”

His neurons fired. Shelves tilted into crazy Dutch Angles. Lights were bright and blinding.

The addiction and pleasure and thrill of seeing so much Neutrogena in one place froze him, made him sweat, made his heart beat fast.

Rapid breathes. Dizziness.

He ran out of the confining store into the openness of the dark night and cool air and comforting embrace of his wife and daughter.

“What’s wrong?” Cat asked.

“Daddy, are you all right?” Samantha asked.

His ashen face seemed to betray any sense of normalcy or control. He looked at both of them.

“I can’t help myself. I don’t know what is happening to me. I think I am honestly terrifying myself,” he said.

Cat took his arm. “Just close your mouth and breathe. We are going to walk up the street a bit and sit down in the park. Look around. It’s a beautiful evening. The stars are out. The wind is gentle. Samantha is here. I am here.”

They were in the park now amidst the quaint town with its low buildings and churches, tall trees and decorative lampposts.

This was his Ridgewood and his family was here. His wife and his daughter. The architecture was traditional, rational, reassuring. The United Methodist Church, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, Van Neste Square.

The moment of panic vanished.

Caspar put his hands over his face and sunk down into the bench. Samantha and Cat protected him. He started to cry.

“I can’t take it. All the choices and everything I do. It’s my fault. Every decision, why do there have to be so many choices? What happened to just one choice? I don’t know how to make up my mind any more. Who am I? What should I do for work? Where should I live? What should I buy?”

“Daddy, don’t cry. You aren’t weird or strange. I have the same crazy thoughts,” Samantha said. “Everyday I go online and then I have to read 300 Twitter messages and I have 400 friends on Facebook and I get bored and I want to pull my hair out and there is too much for me to handle.”

Cat took her husband’s hand and clenched it tightly. She rubbed and caressed and gently kissed his neck. “You know your hands are dry,” she said. She opened her purse and pulled out a bottle of hand cream: Neutrogena Fast Absorbing Hand Cream

“This is good stuff,” she said as she unscrewed the cap and poured the cream onto her husband’s hands, rubbing and massaging the lotion with womanly tenderness and love.

“Close your eyes darling,” she whispered.

“My eyes are closed,” he said.

And the three of them sat there in the moonlight in a park in the center of the square for quite some time.

She was on Olympic Blvd., a crowded road, driving fast, through the blinding light, headed to the ocean, the waterfront location where the yoga class was due to start at 6pm.

She controlled the dark green S.U.V., so fast, so well equipped, with its satellite directional system, filtered air, Bluetooth phone, DVD player, tinted windows, and heated seats. Air bags surrounded the driver, ready to inflate in 1/1000 of a second, a life-protecting pillow. A song by Sonic Girl Nation, her favorite artist, was playing. The lyrics spoke to her:

Now you know, you have it all
The love, the freedom, the life
When you lose it all, you won’t know
But you will lose it girl, yes you will.

At Lincoln and Pico, she ran through a red light, but of course, nobody collided with her. She had ran through many lights, the same way she ran through so many stories. They were made up quickly, improvised, without much thought, and just passed out to whomever was listening.

“We can’t make it tonight. I have food poisoning.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. We are going to another birthday.”
“Josh bought tickets on that night. Sorry about missing your wedding.”

Cipriana LaMonica was a lucky lady. She was from an island, not far from Italy, and her poor family had come to America and settled in Boston, opening a grocery store and ice cream parlor that soon became a destination for both tourists and locals. Her parents moved to Concord, into a large house on two acres. She went on to Harvard, the first in her family to attend college, and she got into the best one.

Cipriana pulled her S.U.V. into a handicapped parking space. She hung a blue “wheelchair” card onto the rear-view mirror, grabbed her yoga mat, and ran into Venice Green Girl Yoga. She made her class, just in the nick of time.
A new hour of physical and spiritual enlightenment.

Josh at Home

Josh Rubenstein.
Everyone loves Josh Rubenstein.

How could you not?

Josh is married to Cipriana, and they have one 5-year-old girl, Linda Vista Rubenstein.

At 6pm, just as his wife was starting her yoga class, he was at home, slicing onions and garlic and frying them in the pan with extra virgin olive oil. He was in a hurry to make a tomato sauce, and get Linda fed.

Josh is someone you may have seen before, if you’ve lived in Los Angeles, west of the 405. He is dark haired, which he keeps closely cropped. He doesn’t shave, but if he did, he might shave every three weeks. He drives a Prius, and wears baggy, slouchy jeans. He spends most of his day looking at his Blackberry or his MacBook Pro. He does something really successfully, which involves the web, TV, online games and offline finance.

He has a closet full of graphic print, cotton t-shirts and many pairs of cool, colorful sneakers. He wears tiny glasses that cost $450. He has three pairs of them.

Josh grew up in Scarsdale, NY and went to school at Harvard. He majored in English, with a minor in computer science. He met his wife in college, moved into an apartment in Cambridge with her and then after five years, they married and settled out in Santa Monica, CA.

How could you not relate to this story? It’s universal. And so easily understandable and wonderful.

The Connections

I knew Josh and Cipriana because Mark knew Josh and Cipriana. Mark Ripofsky was my boss at Gee-TV when I was working on the show “Whorse Race” for Fox.

Do you know “Whorse Race”? That enormously popular, highly rated, phenomenally successful reality show was created by Mark Ripofsky and the premise is this:

Six young dudes and six young ladies.

The dudes place bets on young ladies, who are taken out to a race track, and must run races. The winning girl and the winning bettor win a million bucks. The girls must run around the track, like race horses, and undergo a humiliating obstacle course of mud, animal feces, climbing walls, and weigh-ins. They are treated like animals and only the strongest survive.

Josh Rubenstein was brought on in mid-season to EP (that is Executive Producer, for all you non-Hollywood peeps).

The show was exhausting, because of what Josh called, “all the bullshit.” Josh was so straight on in his personality. He just tells it like it is. Very rare in Hollywood, where most everyone is not full of so much integrity and good-will the way Josh is. He almost makes you feel like the job you do is the best anyone could ever do. He will build you up to be great, especially when he is your boss. Which is so cool.

Freckles McFarley

Freckles is a 35-year old woman, with freckles, of course.

She has red hair, pale skin, a hoarse voice, and really muscular legs. She played soccer in high school and college. She lives in Manhattan Beach and swims, runs, plays volleyball and does almost everything athletic that a person can do. She is also one of the most aggressive and annoying friends of Josh, but I should keep my mouth shut, because she is quite powerful.

Her first offense, in my book, is that she came into “Whorse Race” and was made into a co-Executive Producer. Secondly, she socializes with Josh and Cipriana and says that “Linda is the child I would want if I had any child in the world.” She has also said that Cipriana is the most gorgeous woman in Santa Monica and that Josh, “is probably the sharpest mind in reality television today.” She is a brown nose, but she does it so cheerfully and so eagerly, that the object of her compliment will never feel patronized.

Freckles is not always in top form though. At a large party, which Josh threw for Cipriana last year, Freckles ate too much curry chicken and ended up barfing on Josh’s laptop.

Freckles was humiliated, but Cipriana insisted that she sleep over. In the morning, Josh said he would simply go out and buy another $2500 Mac Book Pro and he forgave her.
The Birthday Party

I was in my little cubicle inside my little office on Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, just wrapping up my shoot schedule for the day, when Josh and Mark Ripofsky walked over.

“Dude,” Josh said, “You know about Evite and sending out invitations right?”

“Sure,” I answered.

Mark put his hands in his pockets, uneasily. “We got a little problem. Maybe you can help,” he said.

“My little girl, Linda,” Josh said, “She is turning six next week and we want to have a little party for her in a park in Santa Monica. Just something casual; like cupcakes, hanging out at the sandbox. Nothing big. Very low key.”

“Cool,” I said. “How can I help?”

“We don’t want everyone to know about the party. My wife is very busy. She doesn’t want to stress herself. So we need you to send an email to some people who won’t tell other people about the party. It has to be very hush, hush,” Josh said.

“Here is the catch: We need you to craft, or make-up a fake name and identity and then send out the invitations so nobody will know who you are,” Josh said.

“Anybody who is rejected will email you,” Josh continued,”if they find out, cool, but since you don’t exist, we won’t have to deal with the hurt feelings. Isn’t that cool?”

“You guys need me to lie then?” I asked.

“Basically, yes!” Josh said with a wide mouthed toothy grin.

They promised to email me the location, time and guest list. It was billed as “Cupcakes in the Sandbox” or a little girl’s Hollywood birthday party with a guest list winnowed down and edited like a bad b-movie. Characters and non-speaking parts would be eliminated so the executive producer could have total control.

Wanting to keep my job, I got to work immediately.

Checking In…

The guest list for the little six-year-old girl’s birthday party included 30 adults and no children. Attendees were asked to bring wine or beer and they would meet at Abraham Lincoln Park on Calle Perros de Mentira in Santa Monica Canyon at 3pm Sunday.

An email arrived with a plunk. Cipriana wrote:

Thank you so much for your help! I’m just checking in and touching base. Josh said you are doing a wonderful job. We appreciate it so much! Since we are so BUSY… Can you run by Pink Lady Cupcakes in Santa Monica, and pick-up our dessert? Also, please do not tell Freckles that you are coming to the party.

Thanks again!
Cipriana

I closed the email and checked the time. It was 4 o’clock on Friday, and I was looking forward to my time-off. I got up from my chair and walked over to the bathroom and bumped into Freckles… coming out of the men’s room.

“They are cleaning the ladies’ room,” she said.

She wiped her hands with a paper towel and then reached to shake my hand. What could I do but maintain my sanitary demeanor?

“Do you know where Josh and Mark went?” she asked.

“No,” I answered.

“Oh. I was supposed to screen the rough cut with them at 4 and now I can’t find them,” she said.

“No. I absolutely don’t know anything about Mark or Josh’s whereabouts. They tell me nothing. Nada,” I said.

She pulled at her blue and red nylon hockey jersey and adjusted her barrette to reveal a reddish, horizontally lined forehead that had spent much time in the Southern California sunlight.

“I think something is going on,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know. Stuff. Hidden agendas,” she said.

“You probably know more than me Frecks. You are the co-EP. I’m a nothing AP,” I said.

“Josh and Mark are very secretive. Which is cool, because people need to be discreet. But if they think they are going to add a seventh girl and seventh guy to the show without consulting me, then I am going to be very angry!”

She walked away.

Something utterly important to her, had been revealed to me, and it had absolutely no interest or value.

I wonder if she realized that the real deception played on her was actually coming from me? I do believe that female intuition is not a myth.

The pussy knows what; the brain has yet to acknowledge.

Linda, Little Linda

I don’t know if I will have children yet. I’m only 28-years-old and the prospect of having to provide for mouths other than myself is not too enticing.

But I have to echo that banal and cliché ridden mouth of Freckles, who spoke so truthfully about the wonder of little Linda, the violet eyed beautiful daughter of Josh and Cipriana. Linda would be the ideal child if one could clone their boss and wives’ DNA.

Cipriana had instructed me to pick up the cupcakes and then swing by her home. She had also asked Zyrtecah, the elderly Armenian nanny, to accompany them to the park to assist with placing the cupcakes and blanket near the sandbox in preparation for the adult arrivals.

After fetching the desserts, I drove up Montana Avenue and turned right on 20th, the affluent and eternally spring-like section of the rich people’s Santa Monica.

The Rubenstein/LaMonica home was a white stucco French maison, with a mansard roof, casement windows and black shutters. It had an opaque glass door, anchored by two clay vases full of white geraniums. The lawn was immaculate and even the dirt had been recently combed with steel rakes. Not a leaf or branch dared cross the line separating sod from shrub. I rang the bell and Zyrtecah opened the door with little Linda holding her hand.

They had dressed Linda in some kind of marvelous, expensively casual, muddy green and rosy pink cotton dress, the kind of garment that is pre-wrinkled and pre-washed, and seemingly dipped into herbs and fresh violets, for when it was worn by the six-year old girl, both the dress and the child seemed in happy holistic harmony.

“Hello birthday girl!” I emitted in my best faker enthusiasm. Fucking little girl’s party interrupting my Sunday football couch time.

Well, who was I to hate little Linda for hitting the genetic and financial jackpot?

“You come vit us?” Zyrtecah asked.

“Yes. I have the cupcakes. So you just tell me where the sandbox is and we can get the party going!” I said. If there was any time to be sarcastic, this seemed to be it. With the Armenian nanny and the child, that is.

Cipriana appeared in the doorway, her black hair, miraculously oiled down with something that smelled like bergamot and lime.

“Hello there! Oh, you brought the cupcakes! Fantastic! Thank you!” she said.

She turned to Zyrtecah. “Let’s get Linda into her car seat. Josh is at work and he is meeting us at the park.”

“What time are the guests leaving?” She asked.

“Leaving?” I asked.

“Yes. I know they arrive around 3pm but I have a massage appointment at 5pm so I want to get everyone out of the park so I can get going. We can sing Happy Birthday, pour the wine, and then socialize. I think, basically, that sounds like a plan. Let’s just get it over with!” she said.

She dialed her mobile phone. “Hi, Josh, it’s me. Just touching base. Please try and start clearing out the party around 4:30, so I can leave. This is confidential, of course. Thanks.”

The Party

We drove up to a park with two large playing fields, and a shaded area with two sandboxes, comfort stations, playground equipment and benches. I had been drinking bottles of iced tea all morning, so I was eager to eliminate, quickly.

I dropped off the women, Cipriana, Zyrtecah and Linda, and the cupcakes, of course, and ran over to the bathroom facilities.

Just as I neared the men’s room entrance, Freckles McFarley ran up to the water fountain. She was carrying a soccer ball, and dressed in a sweaty, torn t-shirt and blue cotton shorts. “Dude! What the hell are you doing here?” she yelled.

“Oh, my gosh! Hello, Freckles! I have to take a pee so please excuse me,” I said.

I ran into the bathroom, and peed what seemed like the longest pee on record. I had hoped that she would not be outside when I emerged from the urine scented, mosquito filled park’s department toilet chamber.

She was sitting on the concrete, right in front of the door. “Well”, I said.

“That was such an exhausting game. We beat the shit out of the skins. I’m going to go home and collapse,” she said.

“I guess I will see you on Monday,” I said.

“You just came to the park to use the bathroom?” she asked.

“No. Actually, I am here with some friends,” I said.

We stood there, looking at each other, awkward and silent. The way her eyes probed mine told me that perhaps she perceived something.

“You are so cool,” she said, “I don’t know anything about you. So long honey.”

She walked over to an old, upright, basket-bedecked bicycle. It was locked to a steel post. She unlocked and mounted the bike, and turned it onto a path that took her further, not closer to, the dangerously conflicting drama of the child’s birthday party. Her biking figure grew smaller in the vanishing path of the parkway. She was unaware of how close she had come to being hurt and humiliated.

And what if Freckles had followed me to the sandbox party? Would I have a job and friends waiting for me at “Whorse Race” the next morning?

I washed my now sweating face in the drinking fountain and let the warm air dry my skin as I briskly strolled back to the sandbox.

Ode to the Birthday Cake

Once, when I was young, so many cupcakes ago, children had birthday cakes. They were baked, boxed, bedecked with candles. The cake candles were lit and blown out and removed. The circular pastry was divided into pie shaped pieces placed on paper plates and passed to each hungry person.

But I was living in modern times, here in Southern California, and the sweetened cupcake with frosting, individually pre-cut and wrapped in paper, requires no ceremony, no clean up. Just eat it and it is gone. Somehow it seems like a cheat, a cheap shortcut, a celebratory scam. The cupcake is feminine and frosty, but oh so crafty in its artfully tiny caloric form. Consume its emptiness and the joy dissipates quickly.

That is what I think about the cake and the cupcake.

Twin Sandboxes

The two-dozen or more adults had arrived at the party. They stood and sat around one of two twin sandboxes where a blanket had been laid out with chilled wines, plastic cups and boxes of colored green, yellow, pink, purple and red cupcakes.

The mixed crowd of mid 30′s men and women were dressed in casual play clothes, infantile sneakers, low cut denim that showed butt cracks, and visibly patterned underwear on the men. The sartorial show was vintage Angeleno: torn, ironic, silly, ersatz cool.

And there was a second sandbox, one that nobody played in, where little Linda sat alone, with a plastic shovel and pail, digging in the dirt. This was her party, or a party in her honor, yet the guests ignored her, as they networked and bullshitted about reality TV, yoga and the bad economy. I walked over to one athletic Latino man and his Asian girlfriend who were speaking to Cipriana.

“Oh, we really dig Silver Lake Cip! It’s very cool. Our whole block is friendly,” he said.

“I know Silver Lake, sort of,” Cipriana said. “Do you live near Silver Lake Cheese and Wine?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Obama Drive bisects Rowena just east of Hyperion!”

“Obama?” she asked.

“Yeah. We love him so much that our whole street got together and renamed it for the Barack Obama!”

“Oh, that is so cool!” Cipriana said.

The time moved swiftly. Cipriana motioned to Josh to light a single cupcake which was then brought over to the lone digger Linda in her sandbox.

All the adults moved, in a ritualistic way, behind the lit cupcake, and towards the child. It seemed vaguely satanic, but was full of laughter and the flip-flip-flop of the feet hitting the sand.

Happy Birthday to you.
Happy Birthday to you.
Happy Birthday, dear Linda!
Happy Birthday to you!

The sweet little girl blew out her cupcake as the nanny unpeeled the paper around it and fed the morsel into the child’s mouth.

Cipriana was already picking up the dirty paper plates and I ran up with a garbage bag to start cleaning up.

Josh stood on top of a picnic table like a street preacher. “Hi, everyone. We are so happy you came to our daughter Linda’s party. We love all of you. Unfortunately, my wife Cip has got a horrible stomach-ache that she has had since last night. So she has to go home and get rest. All of you are welcome to stay and enjoy the party!”

The crowd let out a visible moan of empathy for Cipriana’s affliction.

Josh walked over to me and put his arm on my shoulder.

“Dude, thank you so much for your help. We really appreciate it. See you tomorrow,” he said.

Cipriana waved good-bye to everyone as she visibly put her right hand on her stomach to sign in pain.

“I hope she feels better. Such a shame to leave her daughter’s birthday party early,” the Asian girl said to me.

The End

By Andy Hurvitz

It began, as most events do nowadays, inside a mall.

I was eating lunch with my elderly Aunt Norma at the Olive Garden in Woodland Hills, CA. It was her 85th birthday and I had taken her out. I had not seen her for many months, and her sweet green eyes and regal disposition were often teary eyed. She was lonely and I was her only suitor.

We never discussed important things or personal things, only the breezy amusements that never touched on pain or loss or my hidden homosexuality. “So how are your parents doing?” she asked. My father Lester, is her brother.

These parents of mine were also old, but they were living back in Fawnwood, New Jersey, in lush surroundings, near a quiet lake, not far from Manhattan, in a part of the country of old stone walls, rolling hills and Dutch barns. My dad was slowly dying of an incurable illness.  Only his speech and ability to walk were affected.

I answered Aunt Norma in an upbeat, Southern California brightly newscasterish tone. “I think they are doing pretty well. Considering,” I said.

“Any chance they want to move to Los Angeles?” she asked.

“Not if they can avoid it,” I said.

Fifteen years earlier I had moved out to California, partially to avoid living near my mother. To have her faraway was some sort of sabbatical to me, a respite free of guilt, sadness and the implication that I had failed because I wasn’t married with children.

Ten years earlier, my younger brother Charlie moved out here and took a quick, sharp ascent up the Hollywood ladder of fame and success. He married a Persian Jewish girl, they have two kids, and moved to a 10 bedroom house in Tarzana.

“Don’t your folks miss you guys and their grandchildren?” she asked.

The waitress brought a large breadbasket full of buttery garlic rolls.  I went to grab one just as my vibrating mobile phone started dancing in my right pants pocket.

“Aaron?” the voice asked.

“Yes, this is Aaron,” I said.

“This is Mrs. Glenn. I’m a neighbor of your parents. Your mother fell and broke her hip. I’m here looking after your father. He is OK.”

I hung up. I called my brother Charlie who didn’t answer. I knew I would be on plane to New Jersey within 24 hours.

Marching Orders

I am mostly an unemployed writer. Though I try and work, my one big stumbling block in life has been the inability to choose one goal and try and reach it. My entire adulthood has been stuck in a kind of adolescence of confusion about how to earn money.

Charlie called me, barking orders from his Prius.

“You have to go back. Mom is in surgery tomorrow and if you could be there by Wednesday it would be a major help. I’ve got to be in Montreal to shoot a pilot. I can wire you two grand. Call my assistant Melanie and tell her what flight you want to take.”

I had hoped that I would never see the day when I might have to come back to New Jersey to close up my parents’ lives.

That day had arrived.

Tragedy in Lush Surroundings

I had mythologized my time 30 years earlier in Northern New Jersey. In my imagination, I was still 17 years old, and in the summer I would swim in the cool lakes up near Bear Mountain and eat corn-on-the-cob and white peaches from Van Every Farms.

But that was 30 years ago.  When we arrived there in 1979, the street was a dead end, surrounded by acres of woods and an adjacent azalea farm.

In 2003, a developer purchased the woods and bulldozed the trees and built those grotesque, ornate houses of no particular style, obese giants with protruding garages, circular driveways, double entry doorways, hanging chandeliers and SUV’s parked in front.

The quiet street was destroyed. It became a traffic artery of speeding women in sunglasses and Bluetooth headsets followed by Mexican workers whose high-pitched gas blowers and gaseous lawn mowers fouled the hot summer air.

The Day I Arrived

I landed at Newark Airport and a limo brought me to 12 Fawn Lane.

My dad was sitting in a wheelchair in the kitchen. Mrs. Glenn, 85 and widowed, was nervously setting out bagels and cream cheese in front of him when I walked into the house early Saturday night. Her husband of 50 years had just died earlier that year.

“Thank God you’re here Aaron,” she said.

The kitchen countertop was covered with newspapers, magazines, paper, binders, pens, Stickies. My parents saved everything and thus were at a loss to find anything.

Mrs. Glenn had been here setting up house and barely holding onto her sanity. She couldn’t wait to leave. “Your mother’s hospital room is on this piece of paper. She is in Valley Hospital in Ridgewood. Room #405.  Don’t call her tonight. She is sleeping.  I think the surgery went well.”

I dropped my suitcase on the kitchen floor. My father smiled at me and spoke in his disarthic, slurred English.

“Good to see you Aaron. It’s good to have you home,” he said.

Mrs. Glenn walked over to the front door. “I’m down the street if you need me,” she said.

Ataxia

My father couldn’t walk up the stairs alone. He could climb each one, but when he reached the top, it was a precarious and risky moment, as he stumbled to put himself on solid footing, grabbing onto the walls and the railing and reaching for the metal walker.

It had been a gradual breakdown in his health. For years, he had epilepsy, and then about age 70, it seemed that his speech was slurring. He would walk, and then suddenly lose his balance. But he never believed that he was becoming disabled. He held onto my mother for balance, literally grabbing her arms to right himself.

There was no admission that he needed a cane. But when it became impossible for him to stand alone, he was beyond the help of a single steel pole. Now he needed the double stabilizing walker, and soon the walker itself was inadequate for his declining mobility. He was destined for the wheelchair, for that time when one’s aloneness was dependant on the generosity and assistance of others.

He could not push his muscles to urinate and need to self-catheterize with a lubricated plastic tube that he precariously inserted into his penis when he needed to expel.  He carried his “plumbing” as he called it, in a brown purse that hung on the back of the wheelchair.

All these health crises transpired in New Jersey while we children lived in California. So every visit back home became a re-education in the transformation of our father. It was not just aging, it was the evaporation of power, of control, of his self-actualization slipping away. The all knowing, reassuring man who had created us and cared for us, was gone. He now basically was an infant whose very survival was in our hands.

The doctors at Columbia, the ones at Rutgers, the others at UCLA, none of them could diagnose anything specific. They called it Ataxia, but there was no medication, no surgery, no real certainty about how to defeat this insidious vandal of my father’s central nervous system.

I brought my suitcase upstairs and put it into one of the three empty bedrooms that once were full of young and courageous and impetuous people. I collapsed on a dusty comforter covered bed set under a window open to a dark night of humming crickets.

I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling, tears falling down my face, moistening the pillowcase.

Home Care

“I’m getting you some home care worker. They are going to start tomorrow,” Charlie said.

He was calling from Vancouver, the city he flew to after Montreal. “We are just taking few days off and Sarah came here to stay with me,” he said. “We ate at this awesome sushi restaurant on the water.”

Charlie was hiring a home service that he found online to come into the house to cook meals, to look after my father so I could “have some free time so you don’t go nuts”.  It was $2,000 a week and Charlie was paying for it.

It was peculiar to me, a 45 year-old man, to be back in the place I had lived in during my late teens and early 20s.  This was the house I came back to during summer vacations in college. This was the house I escaped from when my mother vomited after I confessed to her that I preferred to sleep with men.

But that was 20 years ago.

Rewind.
Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan.
A time.
Back in space.
Before the Internet.
Before mobile phones.
Before I had gray hair.

My father was in his bedroom. He walked from the iron posted bed and used his walker to navigate himself into the bathroom. This is also when he sometimes remembered to put his dentures into his mouth. But most mornings, he dressed and brushed his teeth, self-catheterized himself, and then made his way down the long hallway, down 13 stairs, along the central first floor hall and into the kitchen, where he sat down to his usual breakfast of Cheerios, banana, wheat germ and lactose free milk.

A fat Peruvian woman, Berta, came to work. She had remedial English skills but seemed genuine. I struggled to translate my bad Spanish and asked her to make coffee, to help my father upstairs, to give him a shower and assist him with getting dressed. She annoyed my father by shadowing him at his every turn, by waiting outside the bathroom door when he took a shit. “Get out of here!” he shouted and she smiled because she couldn’t understand what he was yelling.

I was living in a nursing home, working as a nurse, a cook, a maid. It was summer. The house was not air-conditioned and my physical endurance toughened as I began to run up and down the stairs to retrieve my father’s dentures, or if I heard a thump on the floor and he had fallen out of bed.

I came to the house weighing 175 pounds, 5’9. Four months later I was 162. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Fawnwood Manor

Most of my life I have known my mother as a dark haired woman, but when I saw her at Fawnwood Manor Rehabilitation Facility, she has patch of white hair and was sitting in bed that she was too weak to climb out of.

Charlie had flown in from Houston, after his Vancouver and Montreal trips, to see about how the family was doing. He was on his mobile phone, talking to a realtor because he was determined to use this time to make my parents sell their home.

“So we are in agreement that they have to move?” he said. I agreed but inside I was not in agreement. The whole world I had believed in, the quiet house near the greatest city in the world, was going to be sold, and my dream of inheriting a lovely home was no more.

My mom had been through her surgery already, and her hip was somehow screwed back together. Her right leg was swollen. And when the nurses lifted her into a hydraulic four-wheeled scale, her water-bloated weight had increased 20 pounds above normal.

Mom had been immobile and there was a fear that perhaps a  clot might form. The physician on duty prescribed a blood thinner, but my brother frantically believed she should be taken back to the hospital for a scan.  She steadfastly refused to be taken by ambulance back to the rotten medical center.

“I’m not going! They said I was OK here!” she said.

“Mom, it’s for your own good,” Charlie yelled.

“No. I trust that I am fine here. I’m not going to the hospital,” she said.

Stephanie Romm

A blonde, middle-aged lady with a strong Long Island accent, her hair scented with Donna Karan perfume, and a beautiful diamond ring on her left finger. This was Stephanie Romm, the best-paid realtor in Fawnwood.

She drove up to our house and met my brother and I on the front porch. “Hello, howawya?” she asked.

She had been circling around my parents for a year, salivating eagerly and awaiting the day when the old and decrepit might finally put the house on the market.  We were there to tell her that we wanted to sell, and that my parents would be agreeable to selling, but that my mom, from her rehab bed, would set the final price.

“Your parents have a lovely home. The bathrooms are old. The kitchen needs remodeling.  I think six-ninety-nine is good. A house just like your parents sold on Old Kinderkamack Lane near the Old Mill for six-ninety-four. But it had air-conditioning,” she said.

Charlie looked at me. “I think that price sounds good. What we need is to get everything in writing and then I can show it to my attorney and hopefully we can get this thing moving.”

On the Front Porch

With my mother in rehab, and my father at home, I couldn’t go out.

I would bring my laptop outside, sit on the front porch wicker chair, and log onto Facebook.

Charlie had set up my parent’s house so that everything was wireless. For this act alone, I was quite grateful. For I literally had nobody to socialize with except my Facebook contacts.

It was strange to see people who were now in their early forties, people I had previously known as young singles living in Manhattan, who now had children and wrinkles.

This was my summer of solitude, punctuated by visits to the rehab center, oriented towards the care of old and disabled people. And yet, here, online, was Facebook where every summer weekend would see the addition of new photo albums like “Amazing Summer Weekend” and “Casper’s 8th Birthday Party”.

They were swimming and smiling, drinking martinis, boating, water skiing, eating cake. These Facebook friends of mine sent hourly updates, updates I could read about after I brought my father his dentures, or drove to the rehab center to deliver my mother fresh underwear. Verbs were expunged, the noun was the action, and I was seeing it online:

“LINDA IS CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT!”
“MARTIN IS BUENOS AIRES VACATION!”
“STEVEN IS GYM THEN DRINKS IN TRIBECA!”
“RICH IS NEW CONDOMINIUM WITH RACHEL LOVING IT!”

There is a modern myth that our Internet has made privacy impossible, that who we are and where we go, and where we’ve been are now public.

But I learned that what we show matters more than who we are. Facebook is not a secret look inside a secret world, it’s anybody’s presentation of what reality they want other people to see.

I was not yet old or sick. But I was surrounded, by these aged and ill humans, and saw that a more youthful time of blithe indifference and ungrateful blessings might end abruptly.  The walker by the stairs, the wheelchair at the kitchen table, the bottles of medication on the counter, the nurses aides, the home health care workers, the eyeglasses, canes, and urine scented air decorated a home that once recklessly entertained lives full of motion and passion, procreation and intoxication.

The air was hot and still this Facebook summer. And the only young and beautiful life was online, in my laptop.

“SAM IS SUSHI IN THE HAMPTONS WITH BEN, BILL AND DYLAN!”

“GINA IS RAIN AND RUNNING AND GETTING IN SHAPE FOR THE MARATHON!”

“PATRICK IS BROOKLYN BRIDGE CHAMPAGNE AND 10TH ANNIVERSARY KISS WITH CYNTHIA!”

“GLOTTY IS LOVE WITH SPRINKLES AND SEX AND MIMOSAS!”

#  #  #

Larry Kramer had a rich dad. They did something with printing. They had a factory on Fullerton on the NW side of Chicago. Then the father bought a lot of buildings, in depressed areas like Wicker Park. Then this dad died and the real estate became expensive and the rents went up and Larry was swimming in dough.

Larry was a slob. Even in the fourth grade he had a 36-inch waist. He had asthma and a “weak heart” so he was excused from gym class in our Highland Park grade school.

Larry’s mom, Joannie Kushner Kramer, was a beautiful woman. She had red hair, piled high and sprayed solid. She wore Guerlain and pleated, pressed gabardine trousers and smoked Camels.

They lived in a custom-house, built in the late 1950s with a double height living room and a two story deep basement. At the very bottom of the basement they had a freezer stocked with Mounds and Almond Joy bars, and a ping-pong and pool table.

You had to take off your shoes when you went inside the house. The windows, the “Pella” windows, were never opened, but the house was cool inside in the heat of the summer and toasty in the Chicago winter. Rich people live in air-conditioned houses if they can afford it. They never bother with natural weather conditions.

Marv Kramer was a gruff, bow-legged, cigar smoking, Eldorado driving 60-year old. He had fought in the big war and then he fought his new war at the printing plant. They had the contract for every synagogue newsletter in Chicago. It was some kind of tradition going back to Russia. The congregants prayed on “Kramer-print” and when you drove on the Dan-Ryan past Fullerton, you would see a 30 foot high neon sign with a printing press and the words, “K-R-A-M-E-R”.

Mild

I guess if I had one word to describe my own life it would be mild. I was not terribly angry. I was not very ambitious. I laughed easily and drove slowly. I didn’t get upset. I just thought things would come along and eventually I would get married and get a job and have kids and die.

In grade school I regularly earned B- or C+. I sucked at mathematics, but managed to get a C+.
My grades and demeanor and popularity were mildly successful.

My dad died when I was very young and my mother raised me. She worked in the Jewel as a cashier.
We got discounts on ground chuck, milk and produce and even though she earned around $4.50 an hour, we managed to live in a fairly clean and well-kept ranch house near Lake Avenue.

My mom kept a little collection of cameras on a shelf in the dining room. This was a little hobby of hers. There was a Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex, a little Nazi lens from Germany. There was also a Nikon F Mount, a Leica, and an Agfa Automatic 66.

She had once had aspirations to become a photographer, and during her young years in Grand Rapids, Michigan had worked in the Photographer’s Club. Then she met my handsome father, a thin Italian with a pencil thin mustache and a thin waist. They were married ten years, he made her give up photography. They fought a lot. Divorce followed. We moved to Chicago. He stayed back in Michigan.

She brought the cameras along. Put them on a glass shelf. Dusted them weekly. She never shot with them. They just were there as reminders of what she had never been.

Practical Advice

I found, living in the Midwest, that the most mundane people are the most self-assured.

Marv Kramer was like that. He knew just how to get a handle on life. And let you know it.

“If ya want to make money, sell something.”

“I never believed in education. Work is where it’s at.”

“Just pick something and pick at it.” (advice on work)

He pontificated when he walked into his house, after he laid his hat on the hall table, and went into the bathroom to wash his hands.

He was not bothered “by the road less taken”. He was on the crowded highway, the one that most ambitious men took, speeding along in the left lane, passing most of them.

I used to look at him, and think I never want to grow up into someone like that.

Mr. Kramer, as I called him, might ask some questions of me, but they were never probing, and perhaps they weren’t even sincere?

“Whom do you like, the Cubs or the White Sox?”

“Whom do you think is tougher, you or Larry?”

“Where do you want to go to school, Harvard or Yale?”

They were questions not to make you think, but to make sure you thought just like he did.

Regret

One day, when we were walking home from our last day of class in 9th Grade, I told Larry something I regret to this very day.

“I hate your fucking father ,” I said.

He suddenly was injured, sick, cheeks desaturated. His face seemed to nearly collapse. “Why would you say a fucking thing like that?” he asked.

“He’s a fucking ass hole. I just think he sucks,” I said.

“I ought to pound your face in,” he said. But he still couldn’t understand why I said it.

“He makes a ton of money, and you live like princes, and your mom doesn’t have to work, and you keep your fucking air-conditioning on all summer and you vacation in Florida or Arizona every year,” I rattled it all off, the damning evidence of decadence.

“So! I can’t help it. What do you want me to do about it?” he said.

“Just take what I said and think about it. My mom works as a cashier to support me and I don’t take any of it for granted,” I said. Somehow my moral superiority excused me from gross insensitivity.

“You know what! We aren’t friends anymore! You aren’t coming over anymore. You aren’t my friend,” he said. He pushed me and then ran away.

I was lying on the grass. I had just ruined a friendship and I was just thinking of how I kind of liked ruining good things for no good reason.

Retirement

Mom worked at the Jewel on Touhy in Skokie. Then she was transferred to the Jewel in Edgebrook where she stayed for a year. Then they put her up in Glenview, closer to our home in Highland Park.

She had worked as a cashier for so long that she trained the new cashiers on the automated scanning machines. The lasers: a miracle device that were supposed to make it easier to ring up customers.

But they caused the older customers discomfort. It went too fast for the old biddies who couldn’t see how much they were charged for each item.

Then the automated SKUs sometimes didn’t compute and the cashier had to enter each number on a product by hand. The lines grew longer, the impatience of both the workers and shoppers increased.

Mom was older and she earned $20 an hour, plus benefits. She was part of a union. She wore a special brass pin that said, “Genevieve/1970” the year she started at Jewel.

If she retired, in 1995, she would collect a pretty good pension for the rest of her life. But if she could stand on her feet until 2000, she would greatly increase her retirement income. The choice was easy.

She rang up groceries until the millennium.

Grades

I hated to study.

I had this recurring dream: that I was in a classroom and the teacher was passing out a math test that I had never studied for.

Only it wasn’t a dream. This was exactly how I went to school.

I wasn’t doing drugs. I wasn’t studying. I wasn’t playing sports. I’m not sure what I was doing.

When I think of high school, it is a blur of hallways with lockers. Bullies and bitches and running to the next class.

And the holidays! So many of them in America: Columbus Day and Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, Martin Luther King, Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Passover, Easter, Spring Break, Summer Vacation. God and heroes, harvests and resurrection. The beach….

The Mirror

People told me I was good-looking. It was a blessing, so I was told, to have clear skin, lots of thick hair, a wide forehead, a lean body, broad shoulders.

But when you are born like this, you don’t have any other image of yourself to contrast it to. You aren’t old yet, so your youth is just what it is. You eat badly, you don’t exercise, you don’t have to try hard, and still…..

“Wow, you are really handsome.”

It’s a good thing. You don’t have to try. It just pours in like a dividend or an inheritance.

Before Graduation

In my Senior year, almost as a throwaway, I decided to run cross-country. There I was, running everyday after school, with a bunch of other guys who ran much faster than me. The coach, Harold Serban, was an earnest blue-eyed Lutheran from Arlington Heights, with a close-cropped hair-cut and aqua eyes. He stood along the track eyeing us all like the rotten fuck-offs we could be. When his gaze locked onto you, you were in his sights, marked for assassination.

“I don’t like the way you run,” he said to me after one particularly breathless and exhausting spin around the track.

“I’m sorry?”

“No. This isn’t about an apology. It’s about your attitude. You have to stop skipping. You are relaxing in the end, instead of giving it your all,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Damn it!” he said as he pulled me by my sweatshirt hood into his face space. “Don’t apologize. Take action and show me what you can do! I don’t want anybody on this team who isn’t trying their hardest!”

The next week, I ran my hardest. I really pushed myself. At the Niles North meet, I ran the 800 meters. I came in last.

The week after that, I ran myself ragged. I loaded up on carbs, like spaghetti, and ate chocolate bars and drank Gatorade, milk shakes and cheeseburgers. I gained 3 pounds.

But I didn’t win any races. I dropped off the team. I wasn’t going to let any coach tell me that I wasn’t trying.

About a week before graduation, I drove over to the Jewel on Waukegan Road in Glenview to pick up my mom.

Sitting on a lawn chair near the front entrance was Joannie Kramer. She was smoking a cigarette and seeming to enjoy the spring sun. I walked up to her.

“Hi. I don’t know if you remember me Mrs. Kramer, but I am an old friend of Larry’s,” I said.

She got up and grinned and extended her hand. “Why how are you? I wouldn’t have recognized you. You grew up so much! You boys played together, you were such good friends.”

“Yes. I still see Larry in school but he runs around with a different crowd than me,” I said.

“He got into Yale. Yes, he’s going east in the fall!” she said.

“What brings you all the way up to Glenview?” I asked.

“The club. I just played tennis and I’m waiting for my husband to run inside and grab us some dinner,” she said.

I was here to pick up my mother, the cashier. I didn’t care to tell her that.

Marv Kramer walked out with two paper bags of groceries. He immediately saw me and put them down. He hugged me.

“My boy! We thought you had dropped off the face of the Earth. Larry still talks about you,” he said.

“I heard he’s going to Harvard,” I said.

“Yale. Yale University in Connecticut,” he said.

I had my hands in my pockets. I was smiling at both of them while shoppers went in and went out. We were momentarily united in an awkward moment.

“Please say hi to Larry,” I said.

“Yes, yes. We will,” Mrs. Kramer said.

“Well good-bye,” I said. They waved and walked to their car.

I went inside the store and picked up my mom.

I don’t think that either of the Kramers had remembered my name.

The Flat Streets

Almost every street in Chicago, except for a few, runs in a straight line. I can think of a few, like Lincoln or Milwaukee that are diagonal, but only one curves and it is called Sheridan Road.

Sheridan Road was where I escaped to when I dreamt of leaving Chicago. I would drive up, starting in Evanston, and pass through Wilmette, past the Bahai Temple, and then enter that green, lush, verdant, elegant precinct Kenilworth, past Winnetka, Glencoe and back home to Highland Park.

As an admitted failure, I would see the rows of identical yellow brick homes on our street and think not of how I might avoid living here, but of how I might one day end up in one of these.

There is nothing wrong with living in a clean, sterile ranch house, with crew cut shrubs and polished aluminum storm windows. This is what makes Chicagoland great in its entirety.

But after high school ended, and I graduated 464th out of a class of 530, and knew that I would never be inside the hallowed walls of Princeton, Yale or Madison, I had to plan an escape.

Woodland Hills

I now live in Woodland Hills, California deep inside the San Fernando Valley. On Friday nights, I eat in the Olive Garden, and I buy my books at Barnes and Noble and shop for groceries at Whole Foods, and rarely go west of Calabasas or east of DeSoto.

We had another day of 110 degree heat, our 15th in a row. It’s October 11th and I don’t think the temperature has gone below 99 in four months.

I applied for a job, not long ago, at the new giant Ralphs Market they are building up on VanOwen and I think I’m confident that I might be hired as a cashier there.

Mom died last year and I flew into Chicago and we had a quiet service at the chapel, and then she was buried way out in St. Charles.

I hope I have a job by the time Larry Kramer comes into LA. He told me about a big Brazilian steakhouse where you can get huge portions of food merely by putting a green light in front of your plate and then the waiter will slice another slab for you.

I really like LA. It’s so much better than Chicago. There is just so much more to do out here and I am really confident about where life is taking me. I’m not going to shovel snow, or look at gray skies ever again.

# # #

It’s 3pm and the young lady in the Range Rover is pulling out of Ralphs market and the light is green. She is annoyed that an old woman is crossing the street, taking her time. The young lady just got into an argument with the cashier at Ralphs who told her that the coupon for Tide expired yesterday on October 31st. “Who the hell is that bitch to tell me that I can’t use my coupon just one day after it expired?” The Range Rover gets stuck behind three Latinos in a pick-up truck and the young lady is damned angry. “Who the hell are they to drive in the left lane?” She honks her horn and gives them the finger and they honk and wave back.

In LA, there are seemingly more mad people per square mile than anywhere else in the United States. How they got that way is anybody’s guess. Maybe they moved to California with the idea that everyone out here is stupid and then they found out that people here are not stupid—they are very stupid. Maybe the angriest ten percent of the population here is tired of too many cars on the road. Maybe they are angry that a ballot initiative to limit public transportation funds actually just passed.

The young lady is driving a Range Rover equipped with:

· Three-point belts and headrests that swing down from the ceiling.

· A 3.9-liter V-8 with a new “Thor” intake system for an extra 6 hp and 18 pound-feet of torque.

· A new four-speed electronic automatic transmission with a sport mode when the transfer case is in high range and a manual mode when it is in low.

It is 5pm on the 405 “San Diego” freeway. The young lady is stuck in traffic again. An overturned milk truck dumped its cargo on the road and Caltrans is cleaning it up. The highway is backed up for 4 miles and the young lady is angry because she won’t get home in time to change for dinner and meet Gina for a drink. She is breaking up with Mike, the angry boy from Indiana, and wants to talk about it.

This Magical City

Wilshire Boulevard extends miles from downtown to the Pacific. Some of the landmarks on this fabled street include:

· Bullocks Department Store (closed).

· The Miracle Mile, the Museum of the City of Los Angeles, the Petersen Car Museum, the La Brea Tar Pits.

· The May Co.(closed).

· The Ambassador Hotel (closed, may become a high school).

· MacArthur Park: open to derelicts and druggies.

Wilshire is the arterial heart of Los Angeles. It is the Michigan Avenue, the Fifth Avenue, the Champs d’Elysee of this city. Dead at night with its shuttered shops, dark streets, missing pedestrians. Not one outdoor restaurant. Not one lively stretch of life. Neon signs from the 20’s hang on buildings with no inhabitants. Even the beautifully built, Moorish style synagogue is out of business.

10pm on Wilshire Boulevard. The young lady in the Range Rover speeds by. She is going 60 miles per hour. She runs through every green light. Her foot is slamming the accelerator. She runs through every red light. She is traveling faster than a bullet train. She doesn’t know where she is going, but nobody better get in her way. She is in control. She has a cell phone, a satellite navigation system, a pistol in her glove compartment. She has her bottled water, her cold Starbucks coffee from this morning, her half eaten Power bar crumpled on the floor. She is 11% body fat and trying to get down to 9%. She doesn’t have time to talk. She is on her way home to Brentwood, the former home of OJ Simpson and Joan Crawford.

Midnight. The young lady in the Range Rover is on her way to Vegas for the weekend. She called the Bellagio and got a room for $110. The roads are packed. The 10 Freeway is bumper to bumper with everyone trying to leave LA on Friday night. There is only one way to cross the desert at night, according to the young lady, and that is in your Range Rover. It is equipped so that you can pull off road, sleep in your car overnight and feel totally safe with the alarm turned on and the gun in the glove compartment.

The Boys

Just a few miles behind the young lady in the Range Rover are Angus Kim, Chuck Sweeney, Ryan Ho and Johnny Sporzie. They are all 19 years old and fresh out of high school. They grew up in Bella Vista and are in the same gang. They call themselves “The Warriors”. They don’t like Bella Vista, but that’s where they are from and they aren’t going anywhere else. Angus Kim has a three-year old daughter, Dedonna, and Johnny is also the father of a baby boy. Ryan just got out of prison– he served 9 months for burglary. Chuck is the good guy—he wants to be a prison guard because prisons are a “growth industry.”

The boys don’t remember when Bella Vista had truck farms with orange groves, acres of lemon orchards, walnut trees, lettuce, strawberries, broccoli and cantaloupes. They don’t know about wooden houses with wide framed porches, the 4-H club, the old Presbyterian Church founded by the earliest settlers. They don’t know about the Southern Pacific train, the streetcars, the artesian wells underneath their hometown. They don’t know about irrigation, squatter’s rights, the history of Bella Vista. They don’t remember when Marlon Brando played in “The Wild One” and a generation fell in love with movie rebels on bikes who rode out into places like Bella Vista and took over towns for a few desperate days.

The young men are not like young men once were in Bella Vista. Angus Kim has never tied a necktie around his neck. Johnny has never read a novel from cover to cover. Angus Kim never met his own father. Chuck cannot name the states on California’s eastern border. These young men were born when Jimmy Carter was in office but cannot tell you whom Jimmy Carter was.

Last year, Ryan Ho got angry. His girlfriend had asked him to help her fill out a driver’s license application and he couldn’t understand what the abbreviations “ht.” and “wt.” meant.

The young men are driving Angus Kim’s car, a 2002 Chevy Suburban. His car payments total about $450 a month and he lives at home. He doesn’t save a penny but he has the baddest ass car on his block. Angus Kim hangs a cross from the rear view mirror and has strawberry air freshener glued onto his dashboard. His hair is cut razor short—like Lou Diamond Phillips. Angus Kim thinks (at least people tell him) that he looks tougher with a goatee. Chuck teases Johnny about his growing gut and then they all decide to pull into a Taco Bell and get dinner. Taco Bell sucks–but it is better than Burger King because Taco Bell has baked beans and Frostee Freezes.

The boys haven’t been outside of Bella Vista much. There was a road trip down to visit a couple of buddies stationed at Camp Pendleton. There was another trip to Santa Barbara. “Shit that was a long fuckin’ ass trip.” Never again! Staying home is better.

Bella Vista is pretty cool. They just opened up a new pastel stucco Bella Vista View Mall with some good shops like Ross Dress for Less, Athlete’s Foot, Starbucks Coffee, The Sneaker Outlet. The boys hang out at Bella Vista View Mall almost every Saturday afternoon and they check out the girls who work at Donut Queen because Angus Kim loves the Chocolate Cream filled donuts there. The Bella Vista Mall is painted pretty cool colors on the outside. Lots of pinks, yellows, ochres, blues, greens. Jutting angles and diagonal designs. No big boxes for Bella Vista. There are huge palm trees, fountains, and an enormous indoor skating rink when the desert gets about 112 degrees.

Young Lady in the Desert

The young lady in the Range Rover is driving in the desert in the dark. The yellow lines on the two-lane highway are lit up with her headlights. She is going about 80 miles an hour and should be in Vegas in about two hours. She just passed Barstow and the young lady had stopped to take a leak in the Chevron station near the 15 Freeway. She thought about staying overnight in Barstow. It was too tacky.

Barstow was in the lyrics of the song “Route 66″ but the young lady has never heard that song or Nat King Cole. She doesn’t really give a shit about old songs and she hated Frank Sinatra and was glad to see him die. She only cares about the here and now and what she can hear on the radio now. It’s very annoying when you are 120 miles from Los Angeles and you can’t listen to the radio and its the middle of the night and you are lonely.

The young lady takes out a cigarette and lights up. The nicotine keeps her calm and keeps her thin. She isn’t dating anyone– so no man is going to be offended if she smells like nicotine– so fuck ‘em.

Boys in the Desert

Angus Kim, Chuck Sweeney, Ryan Ho and Johnny Sporzie are going 85 miles an hour on their way to Vegas. Finally. Angus Kim had to stop in Barstow and buy a lottery ticket. They pass the young lady in the Range Rover and barely notice that she is driving alone. Chuck is driving, Ryan is asleep in the back seat, and Angus Kim and Johnny are awake but unthinkingly dreaming. Angus Kim opens a Corona and takes a swig. One beer isn’t going to hurt him—he can drive intoxicated. Last year, he drove all the way from San Diego to Bella Vista without an accident after he drank three martinis and two beers.

Seat belts are a hassle and the young lady in the Range Rover would rather not wear one. But Range Rovers are about safety and so are seat belts. That is why she keeps the AAA card in the wallet, the spare tire in the back, the flashlight on the floor, the gun in the glove compartment and a phone in the car.

The four boys are speeding. They are going 95 miles per hour and should be in Vegas in another hour and a half. They will arrive about 4 am but who cares? The casinos are open all night and so are the restaurants. They are really excited to get into a casino and win big. Johnny’s friend, Roberto Demisson, won $500,000 at a slot machine last summer. That’s the way Vegas is—you never know when you are going to win big.

At the Nevada-California border, in the town of Cauldron, a new giant outlet mall has opened with last years discount excitement merchandise from Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Swatch and Guess. These shops are on the girl’s mind.

A New Morning

The sun rises and the desert is lit with a faint orange light. It’s a new morning in the Mojave, an ecologically endangered desert. The young lady in the $50,000, two-ton vehicle, shares her environment with threatened desert tortoises, golden eagles, Nelson bighorn sheep, Gila woodpeckers and Mojave ground squirrels. She doesn’t care about the Bighorn sheep habitat, or even what a Native American is. She hasn’t looked at the scenic mountain range, valleys, bajãdas, washes, and hills all around her. She passes the piñon but wouldn’t know its name. She is minutes from the Avawatz and the Soda Mountains and the Kingston Range– but their colors and shapes can’t compare to the neon at Caesar’s Palace and the big buffet at the Paris. All this girl knows is that she has to get to Vegas by morning to hit the stores and the casinos.

The last giant sloping mountain pass at Nevada’s border looms ahead. The young lady is tired and will probably stop at Vodka Viktor’s for breakfast. The boys are a couple of hundred feet behind her. They also want to stop off at Vodka Viktor’s and get a bite to eat.

An Evil Mirage

Cauldron is a desert mirage constructed by corrupted architects and pure hearted mobsters. A twenty-story hotel in the shape of a red barn sits on the east of the highway. A roller coaster cuts through the lobby. Giant tractor- trailer trucks sit in the parking lot. Acres of cars and simmering asphalt greet the visitor. A 40 foot wide neon sign advertises, “Prime Rib: $4.50″ Everyone eats like a winner here.

According to the owners of Vodka Viktor’s, there really was a Vodka Viktor! Years ago, a two-lane road crossed the desert to Las Vegas. Hot, dusty travelers used to stop at the California-Nevada state line at a two-pump gas station on the spot where Vodka Viktor’s Casino stands today. The gas counter was run by an ornery, old-west character who got his nickname from the vodka cases he stored in a hidden cave across the highway from his filling station.

A Place to Park

The young lady pulls off the highway and parks in Vodka Viktor’s parking lot. She sees a parking space near the entrance at the same moment that the boys see it. The two SUV’s stop to see whom will grab the prize. But she accelerates, cuts them off and wins it. She puts her gun into her purse. She grabs her bottled water and her car keys and purse and goes into the hotel. “Fucking bitch!” yells Angus Kim. “Cunt!” screams Chuck Sweeney. Johnny Sporzie adds, “I’d like to kill that bitch!’ The boys find a spot further down, park and pile out of their car.

Styled rage

This is what the boys looked like as they entered the Casino:

Angus Kim: White oversized T-shirt creased in the middle, LeTigre type knit shirt (oversized) and worn buttoned to the top and un-tucked. Brown oversized Dickie work pants.

Chuck Sweeney: Oversized starched and creased Levi jeans. His pants are worn low, “sagging” and cuffed inside at the bottom and dragging on the ground; Backwards baseball cap (black with the initials “TW” or THE WARRIORS). Hair combed straight back, extremely short cut; Cut off work-type, under-the-knee, short pants worn with knee-high socks.

Ryan Ho: Black “Kings” jacket. Pin-striped imitation baseball style oversized shirt; Black stretch belt with chrome or silver gang initial belt buckle. Unfastened overalls.

Johnnie Sporzie: Oversized plaid, dark Pendleton-type long sleeve wool shirt; All white tennis shoes with black shoelaces; Black woven cross worn around the neck.

Angus Kim, Chuck Sweeney and Ryan Ho go to play blackjack but Johnnie Sporzie goes to the men’s room. He is the first to spot the young lady in the Range Rover who stole the parking space outside of the restroom. She is wearing black silk Ralph Lauren trousers that hug her tight butt. Johnnie hasn’t jacked off for three days and is horny as hell. The young lady doesn’t know she is being watched. She is looking for the rest room and she found it. Johnnie follows her into the ladies room.

The young lady goes right into a stall and sits on the toilet. She can hear someone enter the restroom. She looks under the stall door and can see a man’s legs. She feels threatened. She looks inside her purse and makes sure her gun is inside. Angus Kim hangs out next to the restroom, looking for Johnnie and suspects that he might have gone into the ladies room to get bonus points for rape and murder.

Johnnie is indeed inside and has a sharp Henckels German made knife ready for use when the young lady comes out of the stall. The knife is extremely lethal. It cost $129.00 and was purchased at the Bella Vista View Mall last week.

Vodka Viktor’s casino had a horrible murder in late 1995. A seven year old girl, whose father was gambling, wandered off in the casino and was abducted and later murdered by a 19 year old boy from Long Beach, Ca. This young murderer stuffed the girl’s face into a toilet and then strangled her to death. He later was apprehended, tried and sentenced to death.

As Angus Kim nervously waits outside, he hears the sound he had heard so many times. A gunshot. No screams, no struggle. That was a gun he heard, wasn’t it? The young lady in the Range Rover emerges from the rest room elegantly composed. She combs her lustrous blonde hair back and calmly walks up to a security guard and takes him inside the ladies room.

Angus Kim knows what’s happening. All of a sudden, he runs to the tell Ryan and Chuck. Shocked? Shocked. But nobody is going to wait for Johnnie or the police or to see what went on in the ladies room. The three boys dash out of the casino and into the Chevy Suburban and are off into the desert, without Johnnie.

Johnnie lies mortally wounded on the floor of the ladies room. Blood covers his oversized plaid, dark Pendleton-type long sleeve wool shirt. His once all white tennis shoes are splattered red. His dying hand clasps the black cross around his neck.

Two cops enter the bathroom with two more security guards. The young lady in the Range Rover is escorted out of the bathroom and into a waiting sheriff’s car outside of the casino.

She cannot believe what has happened to her. But she is thankful that she carried a gun and thought about her own protection first. She will never again think of canceling her NRA membership. She carried a firearm because she was prepared she beat the odds.

Cauldron and the Vodka Viktor’s Casino offer a night’s free accommodations to the lady. She spends several hours in the casino and actually walks away with an extra $5,000. Naturally, she will hire a lawyer and probably sue the casino– but for now she is satisfied. The casino even offers to ship her car back to Brentwood and fly her home first class. She politely declines. She would rather drive back to Brentwood in her Range Rover.

# # # # #

I am 40 years old and have lived in this city my whole life. When I was very young, things were very different here. The traffic was horrendous. One of my earliest memories is riding in the back of my parent’s 1999 Chevy Suburban as my dad screamed at my mom.
“Sarah, I can’t stand this city anymore.”

“Quiet, the baby is sleeping.”
“The baby is up! Can’t you see him smiling? I see him in the rear view mirror! Hi, Hobby! Daddy hates this traffic and wants to move his family out of L.A! Don’t you think we should get out of here? Hobby, do you want Daddy and Mommy to move you to Las Vegas?”

Naturally, I couldn’t really respond rationally. I just knew from an early age that Dad was miserable in the City of Angels. He was a frustrated film- maker, enjoying little success and depending on his wife to earn the bucks as an architect. Mom made good money and quietly supported us through Dad’s tantrums and ejections from the studios of Hollywood.

We stayed on though. California’s population grew from 35 million in 2000, to 60 million today. Los Angeles was losing people early in the 21st Century but that was before the Roundhouse. God bless the Roundhouse, that’s what people say all the time. Without it, Los Angeles would have died. California might not have become the nation it is today without the Roundhouse.

The train begins its gradual descent into the Valley and I see the Roundhouse in the distance. What a beautiful sight it is! Ten stories tall, round, built of red brick with thick Roman arches at the base. The roof is built of Spanish tile and lit up with a thousand tiny lights.
The tracks go right through the building and curve around.

I get out of the train and look around the dazzling interior. It is ten stories tall inside and the walkways curve around the building. It’s like the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Except our Roundhouse is a mall. No wait! It is more than a place to shop, it is our holy cathedral. The architecture recalls the interior of the Bahai Temple in Chicago, St. Peter’s in Rome and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

It is so late, and my eyes are heavy, but I want to go say a prayer. My choice tonight: St. Jude. I step before the altar and kneel, and his lovely image comes on screen. I push “Byzantine Jude” and he appears before me as he was painted in 1450. I recite a prayer which I know by heart:

“St. Jude, please intercede upon my behalf and pray to the Holy Father for my liberation. Please free me to leave this city which I love, so that I might again know freedom.”

He responds with animatronic grace: “My child, I shall ask our Lord to answer your request. I must ask you one question though: Why would you want to leave this paradise on earth, this city of angels, which God himself has given to St. Disney?”

I cannot answer Jude, right now, for I don’t have an answer really. I just know that I want to get out of this place. I am 40, restless, tired of perfectly sunny days, efficient public transportation, guaranteed health care and the cult of Mickey.

Yes, I work for Disney. But isn’t that obvious since I am a resident of Los Angeles, and a citizen of the National Entertainment State? I live and breathe–the religion of entertainment– which is one and the same as the holy state. A perfect trinity of celebrity, fame, money. We are all famous here in LA, but mostly we are well taken care of. St.Disney sees to that.

I walk around the Roundhouse in the wee small hours of the morning. Every shop is open, staffed by robots. I pass by: The Shrine of the Gap; The Church of the Holy Banana Republic; Our Lady of Victoria’s Secret. I can either pray or shop. I might do both. Using my fingerprint as collateral, I pick out a handsome brown sweater from the racks at the Gap and pause to light a candle as I leave the store. A voice from inside intones:

“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, thank you for shopping here.”

When I was little, I remember being told that the church was separate from the state which was something different than the corporation. But the War of Passivity (2015-2019) abolished all that. The passive American fell asleep and abandoned his voting rights, his opinions, his public spirit. He became a mere viewer of his country and the result was the bloodless revolution which made America into a National Entertainment State where consumers and viewers live under a Holy Entertainment empire.

Enough of my history lesson.

I’m walking again and I stop at my next favorite shrine, the Church of Samantha which is in Our Brother of Warners. There she is! My favorite saint. She was born over a hundred years ago, a human actress, Elizabeth Montgomery. She lived on Morning Glory Circle and married a mortal named Darrin. Darrin and Samantha had two children: Tabitha and Adam (who were also witches).

I grab a prayer card and recite the following: “May Maurice and Endora bless you my child, for you are the fair haired beauty who weareth the white mini and disappear into the mists of time to work magic upon the world. May Uncle Arthur bring you laughter, Doctor Bombay good health, and Gladys Kravits a concern for thy neighbor.”

Ever since I was a little boy, the holy spirit of Samantha has infused me with the greatest hope. I looked to her and imagined that I too could disappear and escape this perfect place. But alas, it was not to be.

A year ago, in 2039, I was arrested. I was riding on the Dreamworks line and had just got on at Culver City and was heading west towards the Airport. I had planned to get to LAX and tell the customs officers that I had official business in Las Vegas. Secretly, I was planning to get to Vegas and hike across the desert to Utah, which is still a part of the United States. If I could get to Utah, the Mormons would consider me an asylum seeker and I might finally get out of Los Angeles.

But I was stupid. I was openly carrying a map of Salt Lake City and reading it on the train. An overhead camera recorded my illicit reading and I had no answer when the policeman in his mouse eared hat came up to me on the train.

“Hi, son. In the name of Eisner, where are you headed?”
“Uh, I have no real destination….”
“What do you mean? What category are you? Producer, director, or consumer?”
“I’m a producer, I think. I’m doing research on Utah for a project in development at Burbank Center. This map is for a script I’m writing for an elderly actor, Leonardo.”

“That’s easy enough to verify. May I see your NES I.D. card please?”
“Yes sir. Here it is. As you can see, I am in the Sherman Oaks district on Funicello Street.”
“Nice area. You guys won an award for the prettiest geraniums on Ventura Blvd. I think.”
“That’s right. We will do anything to make our company proud.”
“Let me take your card and I ‘ll just phone into Burbank. I’ll be right back.”

He took my card, my ID, and I was suddenly on the verge of arrest. When he came back, I could tell that Burbank didn’t confirm my work record and I would be arrested.

“I’m sorry Hobby. You don’t have any script in development. Why are you on your way to the airport and carrying that map? Be straight with me boy!”

I looked at his Seven Dwarf pointed badge and the engraved medal of Jenna Elfman and knew he was quite devout. He would be a tough cookie to lie to.

Maybe honesty would be the best policy…

“That’s right officer. I lied to you. I was on my way to LAX to escape to Nevada so I could run across the Utah state line and claim political asylum in the United States.”

“Son, please stick your arms straight out.”

I stuck my wrists out. The cop flashed a laser gun at my hands. My arms froze. The train came to an emergency stop. At the Centinela platform, a dozen mouse cops met us at the train doors.

I was in a jail in Santa Monica. Not like the jails of the 20th Century, but a cartoonish prison full of wacky effects. This branch of the National Entertainment State Penitentiary was one of Michael Graves’ last projects. Picture a turquoise box on flamingo’s feet. The very top of the building (where the guards tower stood) has pink wings which jut out. The sides of the box are painted with red and white stripes like candy canes.

The prison interiors are equally as childish to remind you of what you are missing outside.

If you spoke up and insulted the guards, you risked treason charges. I saw one lady prisoner who laughed when she was first brought in and the guard said, “Lady, laugh all you want because you aren’t going to watch another TV show again! No Internet, no trailers, no US magazine, nothing!” She collapsed right there in the hall.

My trial was speedy. I was brought up before Her Video Honor, Judge Barbara Eden. The Judge was a perfectly preserved specimen of time that could think and rationalize like a human being but instead peered down at me from atop an elevated wide screen TV.

“Oh, my darling Hobby. How it irks me to see that you want to leave our little kingdom! What a naughty boy you are! Perhaps I should blink my eyes and we could go into the bottle and do a little talking! Would you like that my evil sweet?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or shit in my pants. I was terrified and excited to think that I might be transported into the bottle of the Jeannie and have her rub up against me in her harem pants. But I was also scared that she might blink me and put me onto a bed with a thousand nails as she had once done to Major Nelson.

“Please Jeannie, I mean Judge Jeannie. Do not punish me. I am guilty of wanting to run away. Just as Amanda Bellows wanted to escape Doctor Bellows when you put a spell on her to make her like Roger Healy. I am just like Amanda, I was under a spell. But I am better now. I won’t run away.”

“Very good answer. You are well schooled in the tenants of our faith. Were you an altar boy at the Church of the Rerun? It says that you were quite a brilliant theologian who knew all of the episodes of “I Dream of Jeannie” by heart.”

“Yes, Jeannie. I would say that I bow in your presence. You are one of the holy spirits of this kingdom and I often light a candle in the Roundhouse at your altar.”

“Ah, the Roundhouse! Is it not the greatest gift of his Eisner to the people of Los Angeles?”

“Yes, Jeannie. It is a most high honor to visit the Roundhouse and pray and shop and shop and pray.”

I was getting calmer even as I tripped and repeated my words. But something must have worked, for I was released on a first offense charge and put on probation. I would have to report to the Nielsen house of Community service two days a week for the next year.

I kissed the image of Judge Jeannie on screen and then the doors of the prison opened to the glorious sunrise over the Pacific Ocean.

The Nielsen house was in an old section of Van Nuys where gangs had once sold drugs on the street in the early part of this century. A museum called, THE HOUSE OF REMEMBERENCE had many photos on display of the awful conditions present in Los Angeles circa 2000. I was assigned to the photo collection.

An elderly woman, Mrs. Nielsen, told me that her father had been a photographer and taken many pictures of the city and she herself was a keen historian. She knew the history of the old ranchos, the orange groves, the onslaught of smog, the post WWII suburban development, the freeways, thetax revolts of the late 20th century. With great emotion, she explained how Los Angeles life was in the “old days”.

“Men carried guns and children went to school afraid for their lives. Many people lived without health insurance, and there was no public transportation or clean air. It was a real angry, violent, crazy place. People would deface the walls and gangs would kill you if you looked at them the wrong way.”

“Is that why there were bars on the windows that you see in some old houses?”

Her face lit up. “Oh, yes. You couldn’t live normally in those days. They would just break into your house if you didn’t protect it. Thank goodness we have the National Camcorder Act for everyone’s protection.”

It was my silly job to provide tours for the busloads of school children who came to tour the museum. I would scare them with the ugly photos: the pit bulls, the shaved heads of the punks, the bloody murders, the graffiti scarred walls.

You could hear the children’s disgust with the old Los Angeles.
“Icky! Who would want to live in a house with prison bars?”
“How come all of the cars are stuck in traffic? Didn’t they have mandatory carpools?”
“Look how ugly the kids were! They probably didn’t pray to Mickey did they?”

Clean hearted, clean intentioned, the children of the National Entertainment State were perfect little automatons who would grow up to become movie watchers, Internet surfers, web producers, and virtual athletes. They were in spirit most close to the vision of his eminence Eisner, but to me they were fanatic in their intolerance of imperfection.

I would get off work around 5pm and usually take the Magnotrain up to the Roundhouse for dinner. I loved the Old Carrot Cake Factory, because the cakes there had beautiful images of Bugs Bunny on top. This restaurant was free to members of Our Brothers of Warners but I had to pay.

Standing outside of the restaurant one night, as the trains streamed in and out of the Roundhouse, I spotted a gorgeous young blond girl with long denim clad legs and a skimpy cotton lacey top. She couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. I felt ridiculously old, but she was also looking at the carrot cake and seemed too poor to buy herself a piece. I approached her.

“Would you like a piece of that?”
She jumped back as if I had startled her.
“Uh, no. I am just on my way to LAX. I mean I’m going to Pasadena. Good bye.”

Something seemed terribly wrong. I thought I had frightened her. I followed her through the crowds in the Roundhouse, careful to not be too conspicuous.

I could see that she was carrying a book: New York, 1960. It was a big book, probably full of photographs of New York in 1960, I thought. She seemed to have trouble walking, maybe it was her two inch clog heels.

She was 20 feet ahead of me, and I dodged in and out of shoppers to try and hide and follow her at the same time. I suspected that she was not on her way to Pasadena, but going to the Airport as I had done a year earlier.

There was no law against riding the rails to LAX, but if you were going there you better have a good reason as it was always under high security alert.

She and I were now riding on the Magnotrain through the Sepulveda pass on our way to the Airport. Traffic was light(as usual) on the freeway. The train ride took 20 minutes and we pulled into LAX and she got out. I followed her and kept one eye on the girl, and another on the invisible cameras which recorded everyone’s moves.

At Mormonair, the young woman stepped up to the ATM and inserted an identity card. The machine spit out a green ticket and she carefully put it into her purse. She smoothed over her blond hair with a deft swing of her left hand and then disappeared into the ladies room.

I waited outside the restroom for her to exit. But 15 minutes passed and I still hadn’t seen her come out. I heard an announcement for a flight to Salt Lake City and knew that the one flight of the day was boarding and the young woman was nowhere in sight.

But suddenly, a dark curly haired woman in a flowered dress emerged from the restroom. Was it her? I couldn’t tell, except this young woman carried a black backpack with a half open zipper.
Again, the flight to Salt Lake was announced and the woman ran to the gate.

I stepped up my pace and tried to keep my eye on her. As she slowed down, she tripped on the floor and a huge copy of the “New York: 1960″ book flew out of her bag. Indeed, this was the same blonde woman who was now a dark haired vixen!

She had bloodied her lip on the granite floor and I couldn’t help but run up to help her.

“Excuse me. Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. Please! I have to make this flight!”
“Wait! I want to talk to you!”

This was the most ridiculous thing for me to say. How could I, a perfect stranger, hope to stop her from catching a flight? But the momentary delay had been fatal to her connection. The doors to the on ramp at Mormonair closed, and this young woman was destined to spend at least another night in Los Angeles.

“Damn! Damn, damn, damn! I wanted to get on that plane!”
“Shush!”
I looked around and hoped that we weren’t being followed. I quickly told her who I was.
“Miss, if anyone asks you. Just say I’m your boyfriend and you are staying with me. I have a National Identity Card with a guest pass and you can stay with me.”
“What? I don’t even know you! I have to get out of this fuckin’ Roundhouse, fuckin’ Mickey mouse land!”
“Miss! Please! In the name of the Eisner and the Holy Church of Perry Mason please obey the law!”

Her ruckus had already caused us to stand out. Two mouse eared security attendants gingerly approached us.

“Hi, folks! Hope you’re having a nice day!”
“Oh yes,” I answered, “quite fine.”
“Is the missus all right? You seem to have a cut on your lip? Would you like a little Red Riding hood band aid?”

She declined. Politely.

“No thanks. I’m OK. My boyfriend and I just were deciding on whether to go to the Roundhouse or go home and watch The Lion King.”
The guards seemed pleased.
“Oh, the Lion King. What a lovely picture. Have a good evening folks.”
The guards left. The girl looked at me with gratitude.
“I just saved your ass honey. Why don’t you come with me to dinner?”

It was just we two at a little French restaurant downtown on Mary Poppins Place Blvd. As the musicians strummed, “Super-cala-frag-ilicious” on violins, we drank red Merlot and talked in hushed tones about our paranoid feelings.

She confessed that she wanted to run away. Her name was Junia. A beautiful name.

“Did you know that Junia was an apostle of Jesus?”
“Jesus? Was he in PRINCE OF EGYPT?”
“No, you’re thinking of Moses. Jesus was pre-Disney.”
“Oh, PD.”
Junia, Junia, oh my Junia. 20 year old with green goddess eyes, and dark curly hair. Pretty as a Barbie doll.

“I first saw you and thought that you were blonde.”
“I know. I sometimes wear it to piss off my parents. They want me to look like Snow White and she had dark hair. It’s kind of rebellious huh?”

I ventured to find out if she was unhappy at home.
“Do you like you parents?”
“Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”
“Yes. Of course. And we are all happy, well taken care of, and always entertained.”

As I spoke, a dancing Dopey came over to the table and sang the Marseilleaise.

We walked after dinner on the lovely Wilshire Boulevard. Couples were arm in arm, reassured by the dozens of mouse cops walking the beat and the cameras which watched over us as electronic chaperones. A restored park with a lake beckoned us onto the grounds. The night air was redolent with jasmine, roses, and her perfume: L’Air d’Ellen Generes.

“I want to kiss you,” I said.
“No, Hobby. No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to get into it.”

“Don’t you think I’m attractive? I mean I’m forty, but I work out and I drink creatine shakes everyday.”
“Hobby. I’m not going to kiss you.”
OK. OK with her. Fuck her. I was an ex-con, over the hill, a peeping Tom, a stalker, a treasonous loser who didn’t even belong in the park with a beautiful doll like Junia.

“Fine, Junia. I’ll get lost.”

I started to walk away. But how wonderful reverse psychology can be on an innocent 20 year old girl! She started to run after me! Me! Imagine that.

“Wait! Hobby get back here! I want to be your friend!”

I looked back at her and she seemed so alone and lost that I couldn’t pretend to be tough when I really wanted her so badly. Even ‘friend’ was enough to ensnare me.

We went back to my apartment on Funicello Street in Sherman Oaks. It was 4 am and we were both exhausted. I respectfully (though disappointingly) laid out an air mattress for Junia in the living room. She slept like a stuffed animal or a toy doll. It was too late to call my landlord and tell him that I had an overnight guest, but the hall camera or the elevator camera or maybe the garage door camera had recorded our arrival. All I wanted to do was go to sleep…..

9 am. The Magnotrain platform in Sherman Oaks. It is a perfectly clear day, with the Santa Ana’s blowing from the east. The sun beats down on the gorgeous purple mountains. Electric trains whoosh by the platform and I am eating a tangerine and sprout sandwich on whole wheat bread. I am dragging a large trunk next to me, which has several air holes inserted so that the secret occupant inside (Junia) can breathe.

The trunk is covered with Mickey Mouse stickers and says in bright orange lettering, “For Filming purposes. Camera equipment.” I am going to make a movie, or so the world thinks, and this is one of the noblest things I can do in the National Entertainment State.

We are taking the high speed train to Vegas which will get us there in about 2 hours and 40 minutes. It runs almost 175 miles an hour and is really nice.

On the train, I am sitting next to a big tinted window to watch the scenery speed by. On we zoom to Vegas through California towns: Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, later on Ontario, Apple Valley, Barstow, Baker. Finally, down a huge incline into Nevada and we arrive in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s a small town of a million and a half residents.

Vegas reminds me of photos I saw of West Berlin after World War II. There are border guards everywhere and the city has a decadent and spy saturated feeling going around. The casinos are full (so I heard) of double agents, and American spies who are trying to get into the National Entertainment State by sneaking across Utah into Nevada.

Proud to say, Junia and I will attempt to emigrate to Utah. I know I want to live in Provo, but I love Salt Lake as well. Maybe we’ll ski and become Mormons. That would be lovely.

I check into Hotel Bellagio, a fine old place with 6,000 rooms and a lovely lake in front with filtered water— and live hummingbirds in the imported olive trees. I carry the trunk with Junia inside and enter my room and unlock this lovely doll girlfriend of mine.

She gets out and looks around the room. Her hair is a mess and her complexion is lobster red, but other than that, she looks fine.

“I want to take a shower.”
“Sure.”

She goes into the bathroom and turns on the water. Before I know it, there is a knock on the door. I go to open it.

Two security guards are standing there. They are wearing mouse badges.

“Yes, officer. What is the trouble?”
“Sir, the front desk alerted us that you signed in as a resident of Salt Lake City. Your fingerprint indicates that you reside in Sherman Oaks, CA. Care to explain that?”
“I don’t know if I can.”

They smile at me.

“Would you kindly come with us.”
“Now? My girlfriend is taking a shower!”
“We can have the front desk call her up and alert her to your absence.”

I leave the room and officers follow me close behind.

What will I tell Junia? I march down the casino halls past the card tables, the video poker players, the backgammon players. The casino is a whirl of the sounds of money, of change falling into metal, and a thousand smoking players throwing their life savings away.

They handcuff me and chain me to an ATM machine in the back of the casino. One of the guards is laughing at me. Laughing behind my back, because another guard is carrying an inflatable doll through the casino. The doll is in his arms, a beautiful blond doll with hair like Junia’s.

Up close, I can see the face and it’s………………… Junia!

The guard carrying Junia walks up to me.

“Say good-bye to your friend. Guess she knew you better than you knew her! She was just such a doll, wasn’t she!”

I had made friends with an animatronic doll and now I was alone. Trapped and arrested again. There’s no escaping the happy kingdom is there?

The guard carries Junia away, as her still wet hair drips along the casino carpet.

THE END

Five weeks into the new season, “The Matterhorn” was doing terribly in the ratings. It was ranked 59 out of 70 programs in the Nielsen ratings. Reviewers pronounced the new show “dead on arrival”, “sickening”, “juvenile”, “like warmed over pea soup.”

Harry’s work load was excruciating. He would drive, an hour each way, from his apartment in Brentwood to the NTC studio in Burbank.

He would get to work around 10 am. Immediately, Harry would get pounced on by schmoozers, agents, writers, assistants, emails, secretaries, publicists, producers, executives, guests. He barely knew how to manage his time. It seemed that every little problem was a top priority.

Some of these problems included: a strike by lighting technicians which threatened to darken the show on the night of taping; a pregnant head writer who objected to a line about abortion in the final script; a hypochondriacal director who feared getting germs on his coffee which had been served to him by an HIV positive production assistant.

######

Harry had arrived in Hollywood, 4 years earlier, with a recommendation from the Director of the School of Communication at Boston University. Harry had interned at Warner Brothers in the Director’s training program.

He had “tailed” a senior director on “Friends” for a year. Harry joined a “writers” group and met LISA SCHNITZER, the head writer of the hit show, MEET MEGAN ROONEY. Lisa liked Harry. Harry showed her a spec script he had written for MEET MEGAN ROONEY
Lisa read it ,liked it and hired Harry to be a staff writer.

To Lisa, Harry was reminiscent of her ex-boyfriend from Syosset. Harry played up his “eastern” background, continually reminding Lisa how close Toledo was to the Jersey Shore (only an hour and a half by plane.) They constructed a private reality of worldly and well read easterners in a dumb, ignorant, superficial, silly city. They were both destined for great things, Harry told her, and he pushed Lisa to develop new shows, new ideas and—- introduce him to her agent at William Morris.

Lisa was having trouble on MEET MEGAN ROONEY. The lead character didn’t think that Lisa understood her well enough— so ” Megan Rooney” told the executive producer to fire Lisa. Lisa came in– the next day– and found out she and Harry were gone.

Luck intervened. A 21 year old assistant at William Morris liked Lisa (because Lisa had a really great Tibetan tattoo on her navel drawn with henna ink) and the assistant recommended a pitch Lisa and Harry wrote about an expensive store on Madison Avenue with crazy customers and funny employees called “The Matterhorn.”

The pitch made its way to SIMON SHARON, the hottest television agent at William Morris. Simon was born on the day that the hostages in Iran were freed from captivity and considered himself destined for great things.

Simon liked Lisa. She was only a few years older than him and she had a nice butt. Lisa worked out at Simon’s gym and sometimes bumped into him there. Lisa thought Simon was cute, even though he had an annoying twitch. When he spoke, he turned his head on an angle, as if he were a basset hound who didn’t understand his master’s orders. One night, Lisa went home with him and they made love and quickly downloaded their intimacy into each other.

#####

Things move fast in Hollywood, especially when you are under thirty and don’t know where you are going, but are determined to get there.

That summed up Harry, who teamed up with Lisa, post-coital Lisa, to pitch Simon on “The Matterhorn” sit com. Simon immediately christened Lisa “THE MEGAN ROONEY” writer and that was the equivalent of a master’s degree at William Morris. WM had placed many of their clients on the staff of the MEET MEGAN ROONEY show.

Disney agreed to finance THE MATTERHORN, with Harry and Lisa as executive producers. NTC bought the show from Disney and put it on their Tuesday night prime time roster. This Tuesday line up became infamous as “TUESDAY SCHNOOZEDAY” because the programs were so boring, so banal, so juvenile, so unfunny. They were written by young, unread, unschooled boys who thought toilet paper, tits and teenage tantrums were the quintessence of laughs.

Harry and Lisa desperately tried to make “The Matterhorn” more sophisticated. To make sure that the program had some Manhattan appeal, exterior still photographs of an 1889 Rococo Madison Avenue mansion were placed at the beginning and end of each ½ hour. The show was filmed in a dark studio in sunny Burbank but the program took place in New York. This was quite intentional. The most successful sit coms took place in New York City: MAD ABOUT YOU, SEINFELD, FRIENDS, etc.

The writers were graduates of Manhattan prep schools and Eastern colleges. The average writer was only 22 years old, but that was what they reported on their w-4 forms and some rumors went around that one writer was as old as 33.

The acting talent was top notch. William Morris placed the young, wacky and busty blond comedienne, VIVIAN VON VECTOR, as the head of the posh emporium. Her assistant was played by the plump and rosy cheeked CHARLES LEADER who was on Broadway last year as a gay baritone in “I’LL SING TOMORROW.” Other William Morris clients became guest stars including: YOLANDA CHUTNEY, an ex-Sri Lankan former stripper who was in an episode where the owner of The Matterhorn was embarrassed when he was caught on videotape with Yolanda in a sexual act by the store security.

Seven shows had already been aired as November sweeps came on. The Matterhorn was slipping further down the ratings barrel. NTC was impatient and doubtful about the show’s survival. Commercial spots, which originally sold for $250,000 for thirty seconds, now were discounted at $175,000. The Matterhorn was also an expensive show to produce with all the costumes, beautiful mahogany store interiors, antique furniture, crystal, perfume, glass props. It was a drain on the budget of NTC. Cancellation seemed at hand.

#####

One balmy, misty November evening, Harry met Lisa at the bar of the HOTEL Peninsula in Beverly Hills. Lisa drank echinaccea flavored water while Harry opted for a pink grapefruit Kava herb cocktail to calm his nerves. Lisa heard from Simon that the NTC executives thought that the show lacked “ethnicity.” Simon said a New York show needed at least one Jewish character. All of the actors were white and Waspy, except for Yolanda, who was Sri Lankan. Who even knew where Sri Lanka was?

Harry and Simon agreed that it was the eleventh hour and time was running out. As Simon spoke to Harry, actress and client RHODA MOSKOWITZ walked in to the office. Rhoda had been huge at William Morris back in the 70’s when her New York, Jewish, schmaltzy and hamische voice charmed and annoyed audiences on such shows as: RHODA, MARY TYLER MOORE, BOB NEWHART, and THE LOVE BOAT. Rhoda was friends with Simon’s mother so this was more of a social call. Simon looked at Rhoda and thought that she might be the one to re-invigorate THE MATTERHORN.

Simon could only look at this 6o-year-old friend of his mother’s and laugh. She had black hair which she piled up like fancy croissant atop her head. She wore big glasses with dainty chains, a huge “chai” necklace, and several large rings with opals, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. She preferred tailored clothing a la Ralph Lauren, with cashmere, fine woolens and Italian shoes to her liking. She was in excellent shape and followed a diet rich in fresh fruits, fish and eight glasses of water a day.

Rhoda had been on the stage in New York, and on the tube in LA. Now living in Sherman Oaks, CA she was asked by Simon if she would like to appear as a guest star on The Matterhorn? “Sure.”
Immediately, Simon’s brain waves started to spin with 15% commissions and the possibility of more to come.

Simon and Rhoda hopped into his Porsche and drove to the Peninsula. Harry and Lisa met Rhoda and Simon and the foursome decided to develop a character for Rhoda which would make the audience stand up and laugh, advertisers buy spots and the executives dance with delight. Simon, Rhoda,Harry and Lisa shook hands. Harry went home to try and dream up how to convince his boss that Rhoda was needed and more importantly, might just be the saviour of the show.

#####

Just 31 years old, Helene Reisman had a reputation as one of the toughest S.O.B.’s at NTC. She was paid well over $1,000,000 a year and had put MEET MEGAN ROONEY on the air over the objections of her entire junior staff.

Harry met HELENE REISMAN at her large glass and synthetic white panelled home in Encino that evening. Harry pitched the idea of “Rhoda” while Helene played patty cake with her 3 year old son, O’RYAN.

She barely contained her glee at her young child’s smile, but grew angry as Harry laid out his plans for Rhoda.

Helene was blunt: “Listen I don’t like it when you say a typical Jewish older woman in New York who has a lot of money and is very demanding. It’s Anti-Semitic stereotyping.”

Harry grabbed a rattle and danced it in front of O’Ryan’s blue eyes. The child laughed and tried to grab it. Harry wouldn’t back down. “Helene, they’ve had successful Jewish characters on TV for years. You know them by name: Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, David Schwimmer. None of them admit being Jewish. It’s like a joke. Act Jewish, but don’t celebrate Jewish holidays, don’t wear a yarmulke, don’t let the audience know what they already know. It’s like its Ok to have a Jew on TV as long as he or she is in the closet.”

Helene cooled off. She picked up the baby and danced with some rhythm around the nursery. “O’Ryan, what should Mommy do? Should mommy say yes to the nice man?” O’Ryan seemed to point at Harry. “He likes you Harry. My son thinks you’re OK.” Harry smiled that broad, salesman’s smile ready to close the deal.

“O.K. Try Rhoda. If she doesn’t work, which she probably won’t, it will just be a one time thing. Don’t say I let you have an anti-semitic character on the show. Leave me out of it. If the ratings go up, then by god we either have a real dilemma or a godsend.”

With Helene (and O’Ryan’s)blessing, Harry was back at the studio for an all night session with Lisa and the writers to come up with a story which would eventually revolve around Rhoda as a pushy and wealthy woman who is furious when her grandson’s bar mitzvah suit is lost in the store’s alterations department.

The new character would be called MISSY MISHKIN, the doyenne of Park Avenue. Missy was no push over, had a strong Bronx accent, and was not above arguing with a sales clerk if she thought she had been ripped off, treated unfairly, or paid little attention to.

Rehearsals began. Vivian Von Vector put her best WASPy accent and superior attitude on. Charles Leader made sure that his vulnerable gay sensitivity was on full blast as the assault of Missy began on stage. After four days, Harry and Lisa were pleased with the chemistry between Rhoda’s guest character and the rest of the leads.

But Yolanda Chutney was disturbed by some of the dialogue. One late,fatigued Thursday night, the cast had been rehearsing all day. Yolanda asked if she could please not refer to Missy as “that demanding and annoying woman from Hadassah.” Yolanda had always been a liberal person, and had battled color prejudice her whole life as a darker skinned person with sub-continental hues. Harry refused to alter the line, and Lisa backed him up. Yolanda threw the script up in the air and walked right up to Harry and thrust her finger in his face.

“You as a Jew, of all people, should know how mean, how vicious these words sound. Are you gonna tell everyone that the dialogue is funny and that’s how you’re gonna worm out of it this bigoted bullshit?”
Harry was unmoved. “Yolanda, you are totally fuckin’ out of line. Missy is a fictional character who is only a guest star. She is not a representation of all Jews any more than Charles Manson is a stand in for the Christians!”

Rhoda Moskowitz stepped up to the plate to defend herself, her role and also score with Harry. “Listen Yolanda, I’m Jewish and believe me, if I thought there was anything wrong with this I wouldn’t do it.”
Yolanda seemed to be slightly comforted by these words, and besides an argument (by a lowly actor) on principle in Hollywood assumes a ridiculousness when arrayed against the necessities of work, money and the imperatives of executive power.

Yolanda picked up her script.”O.K. let’s just get this fuckin’ scene over with.”

#####

At the Friday night dress performance, before a half empty studio audience, Harry and Lisa nervously watched as the first scene was shot. Director CAMERON SCHNITZER, a 24 year old MTV video editor, and Lisa’s younger brother, was confident and sure of how to direct his cast.

At Cameron’s personal urging, the costume for Missy was particularly elegant. A fur collared black knit suit with a velvet pill box hat anchored by a diamond pin, was sewn especially for Ms. Moskowitz. Missy would enter “The Matterhorn” with a retinue of servants: a driver, a maid, and her nurse. She would demand of Ms. Von Vector that the management provide a free bar mitzvah suit for her grand son or she would sue the whole store and possibly put it out of business.

Rhoda pronounced her words with the maximum nasal affect and made sure to drop her “r”s. Helene Reisman watched the show from the side of the stage and thought it stunk. She found Missy to be a cartoon. Helene blamed herself for the failure but outwardly she was livid at Harry and Lisa. Now Helene might lose her job in this universe of short memories, and her previous success would be buried under the defeat of THE MATTERHORN.

At one a.m., the show was finally wrapped. The cast went home, and Lisa decided that she was too tired to go out for a drink with Harry. Harry went up to Helene and kissed her, but she turned her face away. Helene just looked at him with wounded eyes. “I don’t know what you were thinking.” She turned and walked out of the studio and into the black Burbank darkness.

#####

A week later, the show aired. NTC Executives had put the cancellation on hold, awaiting the pleas and the desperate bargaining of Simon,his bosses at William Morris, Harry and Lisa. Word from the affiliates was encouraging. One station manager in Cedar Rapids called to say that they loved this new character. The station director in Uttica said that callers were phoning in their approval for Missy.

Fate intervened again on the day of the airing. A pro-basketball player, RILEY HIGHCALF, was shot and killed outside of the mansion which served as the exterior location shot for “The Matterhorn.” Folks in Seattle, Seneca Falls, Peoria, Tallahassee, Denver, and the Ozarks were saying, “Did you hear that Riley Highcalf was shot outside of the that Matterhorn store?” Suddenly, a real life news event created a buzz about the show which the writers, the actors and the producers could not.

The show had been typically earning a 15 share but after the “Missy” episode, the show almost doubled its audience to a 29. Harry and Lisa arrived at work on Wednesday to find a huge vase of fresh flowers sent by Helene Reisman. A note to Harry read, “Sorry about my lack of faith. I have a lot to learn. Helene.”

Her humility touched Harry.

Emails were pouring into The Matterhorn WEB SITE. KCBS sent a crew over to interview “the return of Rhoda Moskowtiz” and KABC did an interview with Vivian Von Vector who could barely contain her “love” for Rhoda and delight at the old lady’s return to the small screen.

YAHOO.com suddenly had two chat rooms with MATTERHORN themes. Amazon.com contacted NTC to create a link between NTC’s web site and books about: RILEY HIGHCALF, PRO BASKETBALL, JEWISH WOMEN, MEGAN ROONEY, NEW YORK CITY, MADISON AVENUE, TELEVISION SIT COMS, CHARLES LEADER, YOLANDA CHUTNEY.
#####

Three days after the “Missy” episode, a meeting was held in Helene’s office. Harry and Lisa were told that the show would be renewed for another six episodes, provided that Missy stayed. Rhoda Moskowitz jumped for joy when she found out that she would have a recurring role on the program, and Simon negotiated a contract for her paying $20,000 an episode with residuals and agreements to have Rhoda guest star on other sit-coms.

Everyone, it seemed, was happy. Ratings were up, NTC had new viewer interest and increasing advertiser revenues. The media jumped in to find out what the buzz was about. TV GUIDE did a small story about Rhoda’s return; VOGUE featured Charles Leader in drag; THE WALL ST. JOURNAL called NTC “the corpse who came in from the cold”.

Three more episodes were written with Missy as the main focus. One story was about how Missy took offense at a perceived anti-semitic remark by an employee of the store who accused Missy of being ostentatious after Missy spent $500,000 on a bar mitzvah cruise party. Another episode had an ALAN DERSHOWITZ look alike who dates Missy and defends serial killers just to get himself on television.

#####

RABBI MARTIN NIER was the first clerical voice to speak up. The dean of Los Angeles rabbis, his congregation had many prominent members from the entertainment community.

His grandfather had been the chief Rabbi of Cracow and had perished at Auschwitz. Martin Nier was a Rabbi who had travelled the strange and wondrous route of the the 20th Century from shtetl, to concentration camp, to the freedom of America. The freedom which promised that the voices of the persecuted would never be silenced. Now those voices took a vulgar and warped transformation into sit com hatred and Rabbi Nier was outraged.

Rabbi Nier contacted THE ANTI DESECRATION SOCIETY and began to circulate a petition to protest THE MATTERHORN and the character of Missy in particular. He preached a sermon entitled, “WHEN LAUGHING BECOMES DEADLY” which begged that his congregants understand that even in humor, there were messages which preached hatred regardless of whether they were intended as entertainment.

Reviewers in the BOSTON GLOBE, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, MIAMI HERALD, all wrote about the show—which they generally thought had gotten funnier—but had somehow descended into the depths of meanness, vindictiveness, and anti-jewish scapegoating.

A particular warning came from THE CATHOLIC EYE, a conservative journal which wrote, “Our brethren in the Jewish faith cannot condone comedic hatred in the name of commercial success. For ultimately ideas conceived in the poison of bigotry pollute the author.”

While mainstream media fixated and debated upon the role of Missy and what she might or might not represent, the show jumped to third in the ratings. “It was unbelievable”, Helene said, “to see a show go from almost cancellation to the top of the game.”

Almost forgotten in the adulation, was the growing volume of hate letters pouring into the web site from around the country. At “www.matterhorn.com” such comments as, “you fuckin’ Jews deserve everything you have coming to you.” Other viewers were kinder. One 11 year old Nebraska girl wrote, “I used to be mad at my Mom for talking badly about Jews, but now I know cause of Missy, what my Mom is talking about.” At the University of Wyoming, Tuesday night Matterhorn parties the participants throw pretzels at the screen and shouted obscenities whenever Missy came on.
#####

At the annual NTC affiliates meeting in January, there was huge exaltation and applause for Helene Reisman who told the audience, “We will not be bullied by the army of the politically correct telling us how we to portray our artistic creations.” Joined on stage by stars Vivian Von Vector, Charles Leader, Yolanda Chutney, and of course, Rhoda Moskowitz, the entire cast and creators received a 5 minute standing ovation. Surely, the furor would die down.

As spring rolled around, and the final episodes were shot, there was little doubt that THE MATTERHORN would be renewed. Harry was exhausted, but he suddenly couldn’t believe how ironic his luck was: he was now earning over $400,000 a week with the prospect of earning tens of millions from syndication sales. He would be rich forever. But his heart was heavy from his complicity in creating something that he knew might blacken his name and the reputation of his people.

#####

Lisa was changing too. Once she had been a fairly devout Jew. She had looked forward to celebrating Passover with her friends. But this Spring, she hadn’t heard from her usual friends who conducted a seder and always had included her. Lisa went to see her girlfriend, MOIRA, a strictly Orthodox young woman who wore a veil outside of the house and walked her four children to shul every morning and kept a kosher house. If Moira fell out, then Lisa knew she might have made the fatal choice.

On a warm and smoggy Saturday, Lisa drove from her nice house in the Hollywood Hills over the mountain to the flat, hot plainness of Moira’s modest and mostly Orthodox valley neighborhood. Here, the timeless tableau of bearded men in dark suits said their morning prayers to the Almighty. Women dressed in modesty, with the children as the center of their lives. God was so present here, he supplanted the materialism, the artificiality that Lisa had come to expect of Los Angeles. Under these sturdy and rigid palm trees, respect for the Torah, the Ten Commandments, and the word of the deity were supreme.

Moira was only 27, but she had the dignity and repose of a 50 year old. She was alone on this morning, with her children at school.
She spoke: “So much to do about your program. I watched it myself just to see what all the fuss was about.” Lisa waited, wondering if Moira would point her finger at Lisa and indict her for inciting the hatred against the Jewish people which others had accused THE MATTERHORN of fanning.

Moira poured some hot tea for Lisa. It was served in a homely and old fashioned teacup. Lisa thought it could have been a teacup in a bubby’s apartment, circa 1920.

“Lisa, you obviously earn a lot of money. You can buy things. You have a beautiful car. Lots of nice clothes. You keep yourself thin…..” Lisa thought Moira was asking her at what price these goodies had been bought. But Moira had other things on her mind….

Moira asked:”So who are you dating?” Lisa was aghast. “Oh, nobody right now. I was seeing an exec at MGM last year. But he was so busy. And I’m so busy. You know.”

Moira wasn’t convinced. “You’re busy? What about me? I have four children. I’m 27 years old. And yet I have a husband, a home, a life.”

A life. It was that horrible phrase. A life. Moira had just put it out in the open. Lisa had a life. Or maybe she didn’t have a life. That’s what Moira meant. For what was life without a man, a family, children, a house, meals, memories?

Moira’s innocent and simple comment stung more than all of the months of incrimination in the press. Lisa was no anti-semite. She wasn’t guilty of anything. Lisa was just alone.

Moira seemed to offer no answer to Lisa about The Matterhorn. Lisa almost didn’t want to know what Moira really thought. Besides, hadn’t Lisa done as well as Moira? Lisa had a gorgeous home in the Hollywood Hills. She worked out five days a week and now had a personal trainer, a masseur and a dietician. Moira looked old, paunchy, frumpy—and she wasn’t even 30 years old! Lisa reassured herself that Moira was just jealous.
#####

Back in Burbank, Harry was leaving the studio when he decided to check his email. There was a message from his mother in Ohio. She wrote that she was pleased that he was doing well, but she could not endure the social ostracization from her friends who were angry and hurt about the character of Missy Mishkin. She wanted to talk with him, but she couldn’t bring herself to dial the phone. She was a mother shamed.

The success, the money, the ratings, the fame—he had done it all for his Mom. No matter how wealthy he got, Harry never forgot his mother in Toledo. Her disapproval was the fatal poison which could turn him from an optimistic man into a fatalistic basket case.

Harry sat in his corner office and he breathed heavily upon the surface of his glass desk top. He took his index finger and on the mist which his hot breath created, he wrote the word, “JEW”. Never particularly observant, never one to identify with the bearded, the learned, the Orthodox—he now had constructed a box which he could not break out of. He had reached for commercial success by using the one poison forbidden to him.

The phone rang. It was his assistant telling him that Geraldo wanted an interview with him. Harry would not keep Geraldo waiting. The few seconds of introspection were closed and Harry prepared to say yes to Geraldo. The show would go on…..

Johnse Carl was an inventor, a businessman, a high tech fanatic. He worked in computer related satellite equipment for space research. He had a lot of money. Juanita spent so many nights alone. While Johnse worked in the lab, she would walk along the moonlit beach in La Jolla and think of ending her life, so empty were her days.

They had met at Burger King where he managed the counter. He was the only worker with ambitions beyond fries. Juanita knew it when she walked in at sixteen and ordered a whopper. He asked her for a date and she came by later to hear him speak while he mopped the floor.
As he poured Pine Sol into the bucket, he exclaimed: “I want to invent something! Like those guys down at Scripps. Only I don’t want to be a poor researcher, I want to be a rich entrepreneur.”

“A what?”
“An entrepreneur. Someone who creates their own wealth.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“No. I’m not. I just can’t believe that’s all you want. To be rich….”
“That’s cause you already are Juanita.”

Juanita Adams was rich. Her parents had come from Oklahoma in the early 1940’s and took some of their meager savings and bought an old hotel downtown. When San Diego developed, the hotel was sold and they reinvested the land in the country east of the city. When the city finally overtook the country, they were wealthy landowners.

Just east of La Jolla, the Adams built a rustic California ranch with white board and batten siding, wood shingled roof, green shutters and a generous stable. The property was in a canyon, surrounded by eucalyptus, pine and firs. A gravel driveway, shaped like a horseshoe, lent an air of horsey wealth and quiet ostentation. This was the kind of house, where all Americans dreamed of living. It had a wood paneled library, a beamed family room, and French doors leading out onto a slate paved patio.

Lydia Adams, “Mom”, was a famous equestrian in Southern California. With her regal jaw and pulled back hair she was well-bred and polished. She had been in many horse shows in the 1940’s and 50’s. A fiercely competitive woman, she acted as horse trainer to Juanita as the little girl practiced dressage. A typical Saturday afternoon would find the two women in the spacious front yard, with Juanita on top of her horse Charlie while her mother barked orders.

” Put your whip down Juanita! Relax! Your arms are too stiff!”
“I can’t help it!”
“Yes you can! Don’t ever say you can’t help something!”

Johnse had ambition, Juanita had class. Johnse got into Cal Tech on a scholarship and Juanita went the liberal arts route at UCSD. In college, she would ride the still verdant hills around her parent’s house.

One foggy and cloudy Sunday in February, eighteen year old Juanita took Charlie for a ride on the beach near Torrey Pines. She loved the sound of the waves crashing onshore and how beautifully Charlie jumped over the large pieces of driftwood on the sand. She took the reins and steered Charlie in shallow water ,kicking up the spray and pulling back onto the dry beach again. Zig-zag, back and forth, wet and dry. It was a game of control. She was boss.

Her mother’s words echoed in her head: “Don’t ever say you can’t help something!”

That foggy day was her last moment of childhood frolic. When she rode Charlie home to her parent’s house in the late afternoon, she saw her mother being carried out on a stretcher. Two white suited men loaded her into the back of an ambulance.

She pulled the horse and tied him up to a front porch pillar. Running up to her father, she couldn’t catch her breath to speak.

“Oh, my God! What is this? Dad please tell me she’s all right! What is it?”

He only stood there with teary blue eyes. He stared at the ambulance and clutched an empty bottle of lithium in his left hand.

She would never understand why her mother had left her motherless at eighteen. At the cemetery, Mom was eulogized for all the right reasons: she loved her husband and daughter, she was a wonderful rider, she was active in the community, she was a friend to the animals. Why then did she kill herself?

Johnse had come down from Pasadena for the funeral. She hadn’t expected him, but when she saw the skinny and awkward physicist dressed in a black suit, she suddenly felt a wave of gratitude and fulfillment.

“I heard about your mother. I’m here for you.”

For months after the funeral, she went riding, almost every day. Johnse wrote and sent her funny cards from school. She did little studying of her own, but eagerly read all the Jane Austen she could lay her hands on.

Mostly, it was the horse that provided the strength for her to move on. Temperament is particularly important for dressage, and as she again started to compete in shows, her speed, endurance and discipline were called into action again.

By May, she had gone to Kentucky to ride. There were many distractions: horses, crowds, parties, and gin. Death and the empty grave were forgotten. At a bluegrass party, a tall and older southern gentleman in grey tweed coat, fawn breeches, boots, collar and tie walked up to her and put his arm on her shoulder. He reminded her of her father in confederate costume.

A terrific stench of Jack Daniels mixed in with the smell of leather, oats and tobacco stepped close to her.

“Young lady, you are just about the finest rider in these championships. Where y’all from?”
“San Diego.”
“How would you like to be my dinner companion this evening?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”

”Where we go to dinner. I’m staying right here in Bowling Green.”
“Marvelous. My farm is also in Bowling Green.”

That night, she found herself in a daring bet. She wagered that she wouldn’t sleep with this older, athletic and white-haired aristocrat. Was she was stronger than his flattering words, his fireplace, and three single malt scotch whiskies that he fed her upon arrival at the farm? Probably not……

A golden retriever came bouncing into a dimly lit living room, and lay his snout directly into her jodphurs. The dog smelled more than the lady could hide. A few minutes later, she left the dog behind and followed the master upstairs to his bedroom.

Kentucky was her trip her to moon. She came back to an empty house in La Jolla. Dad was out of town and visiting an old girlfriend in Oklahoma. She called up Johnse, who was at school, and he was deep in the throes of his final exams. Instinctively, she busied herself in a maze of gala events, charity balls and horse shows.

Yet she would go to the parties, ride in the events, and come home to the big empty house and walk into the bedroom where her mother had once slept.

Her father returned from Oklahoma in September. His old stoic selfishness flared up in quietly irritating ways. He had told her that he would return in late August, then he changed it to September 10th, finally to September 24th. One day, he just walked into his house and threw his coat on the floor of the kitchen.

“Hi.”
“Hello Dad. I didn’t know you were coming back today. I was just leaving to take Charlie out for a ride.”
“Didn’t you get my message?”
“The one about you coming back late?”
“No. The one about my leaving you the house and moving back to Tulsa.”
She dropped the whip and pulled a chair and sat down.

“Why would you do that?”
“Why? Oklahoma is my home!”
“You haven’t lived there in 3o years!”
“It’s still my home. My brother lives there. It’s also where I went to high school and its…….”
“Its what…Say it!”
“I met a lady….”
“Oh, I see. You found your next wife.”

“I called Irene, you remember, my high school sweetheart….she loves me…. I know you and I haven’t been that close in sometime…But I want you to come back to Tulsa and we can be a family again.”

“My god! I’m almost 20 years old. I’m not your little girl. I’m not leaving California, to go to god forsaken Oklahoma with its tornadoes, Baptists, and boredom.”

“All right. Tell me what you want.”

“I want to stay in my home, and get my feet on the ground. If you can’t be here with me, just let me alone!”

“Listen Juanita. You don’t understand. I can’t stay here. It’s too painful for me. Your mother lived here. This was her house.”
“Do you have to sell this house right now?”
“No. I just thought you’d want me to…..”
“Just let me stay here. If you want to move to Oklahoma then just go.”

He left for Oklahoma. He did buy her a present before he left: A coffee table book about English Thoroughbreds.

A horse’s hoof grows continually and will renew itself completely over a period of about nine months. In her father’s absence, Juanita began to rebuild some semblance of normalcy in her life. She grew tougher and learned how to get up from the couch and plant her feet on the ground again.

One mitigating factor was the return of Johnse. He started working for a new La Jolla company, Genetech. He was well paid, and renting a lovely new apartment with a swimming pool and a view of the ocean. His work was quite complex, involving computers, defense contracts and secret meetings. He started calling her soon after his arrival, and she pretended to be so busy with her riding that she had little time for him.

She was, however, awakened one morning, by two well-dressed men in pin striped suits, carrying briefcases and ringing the front doorbell. She cautiously peered through the peephole and was reassured by the clean-cut haircuts and their purebred appearance.

“Hi! Are you Miss Adams?” asked a shorter, 25-ish man.
“Yes. What can I do for you?”
“I’m Doug Einhorn and this is my associate Randy Weaver. We work for Capitol Development and we wondered if we might have a word with you about your land holdings.”

“Land holdings?”
“Yes. You own 30 acres not far from Del Mar racetrack.”
“I ride there. That belongs to my father.”
“Not according to this deed. You are the owner now.”
“Please come in.”

The men explained that this land was zoned for commercial development and that they were prepared to pay $90,000 an acre so that two large office complexes could be built. Juanita was completely shocked and not at all likely to sell the land which she considered sacred. She did promise to contact her father to discuss this and took the business cards from the young hucksters.

For a few days after the visit of the two men, poor old Charlie seemed to be depressed. The horse normally ate his diet of oats and barley, but he barely touched his meals. He usually whined and neighed when Juanita came close, but now he exhibited a defensive posture in his stable, turning his body sideways when she attempted to mount .
She took him up to the property near Del Mar for a ride. His natural gait of four separate beats, became irregular, and he would bow his head down so far that the muzzle almost touched his chest. She had difficulty controlling the reins and he seemed to want to break free of her control at every moment.

She dismounted and walked up to him and stared straight at him.
“You mustn’t do that! If you don’t behave, I’m taking you back home!”
She dropped the reins and he turned his hindquarters away. The English Thoroughbred was uncharacteristically moody, insolent and angry. She got back on the horse and they rode home.

“I think Charlie is sick.” She told Johnse.
“Why?” He asked as they dined on burgers on the boardwalk.
“He doesn’t eat. When I took him riding, he was just not behaving.”
“Well, if there is empirical evidence—you have to quantify it.”
“Stop talking like a scientist.”
“I mean”, he instructed, ” you better write down what he does and just keep a record. Otherwise, you won’t be able to measure the changes, if any.”
“You’re so logical.”
“Have to be.”
“How come?”
“Can’t live without logic. “

“Charlie thinks like you also.”
“How do you know?”
“You both want to upset me. Finish your burger.”
On the freeway, he asked her about selling the land.
“So what did you tell them?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything. I don’t want to sell. I hate it when I drive around San Diego and all my favorite hills are being decapitated for some alien office buildings with horizontal windows, parking lots and security fences.”

“That’s called the free market. Companies expand. People get work. Offices get built.”

“And where do I ride? When do we say stop to the bulldozers? I don’t want to live in a place where I can’t take my horse out and feel free.”
“If you could make a little money, say a million bucks, maybe you’d reconsider.”

“No. I have money. How much do I need? I don’t want to develop my land for some god-damned company who makes something that I can’t understand or pronounce.”

“If I told you that I wanted to build my company on your land would you let me?”
“No.”
“If I asked you to marry me, would you let me do that?”
“What?”
“I said if I asked you to marry me, would you say yes?”
“You ask me to marry you? On the freeway!”

A year passed and Johnse was living in her house and she rode and he worked and they made money and things seemed fine.

The wedding had been a simple affair, they had simply decorated the front yard, with flowers, chairs and about 75 guests. Dad flew in for the wedding, and naturally he refused to stay in the house. He and his new wife Irene rented a hotel room in Carlsbad.

When Juanita most yearned for her father, he was in Oklahoma, now that he came back for the wedding and was staying close by, she realized how unnecessary he really had become.

Johnse was barely able (or interested) in attending to the details of the wedding. At the last minute, he asked a friend of his from college,

Doug Einhorn, to be his best man. Juanita met Doug for the first time the day of her wedding. Or at least she thought it was the first time. Then she remembered that Doug had been one of the real estate brokers at her doorstep and she experienced a quiet discomfort at his reappearance that she could not vocalize.

A veterinarian came to the house to look at Charlie a year after the wedding.

He went out to the stable and stayed there for about an hour. He came back to Juanita with sad eyes and bit his lower lip like Bill Clinton.

“I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. Charlie has equine infectious anemia, commonly known as swamp fever. This is a viral disease that attacks the horse’s immune system.”

“Oh, my God. I’m gonna lose Charlie aren’t I?”
“Well, right now there is no cure. It’s caused by a retrovirus closely related to the HIV virus in humans.”
“My horse is HIV?”
“No, not exactly. You see he might have picked up this disease at the shows, from other horses.”
“It’s my fault then…”

“No. In most cases, a positive EIA test is the first time a horse is recognized as being infected by the virus. The Coggins test is the name for the agar gel immuno-diffusion test that determines the presence of EIA antibodies in his blood. Charlie tests positive and is a carrier of the EIA virus. My fear is that he could infect other horses. Especially horses at shows. That’s what Charlie has. I’m sorry Juanita. I really see no other choice than to put him out of his suffering.”
“No! You can’t do that! I won’t let you. Are you absolutely sure.”
“Positive. The test is 95% positive.”

“Then go ahead….Don’t tell me about it……”
“I want to go back out there and take him into quarantine. He shouldn’t be outside anymore. It’s too dangerous. A fly or a mosquito could land on him and then……”

She grabbed her head and screamed.
“Just do it!”

The vet put on a surgical mask and went back into the stable. Juanita came running behind him. She didn’t want to go into the barn with the doctor who was taking her friend away forever. She wanted to remember Charlie as the vigorous horse who had galloped through the salt spraying waters on the beach.

Johnse had been away at a software conference in Seattle. When he came home, he found the stable empty and the house unoccupied. A note was on the counter. He took his calculator out of his pocket and put on his reading glasses. He read an official notice of Death / San Diego County signed by the animal coroner. He knew she would be upset– but he couldn’t get stirred up about a dead horse.

He peered out the kitchen window and in the distance he could make out the faint figure of his wife sitting on the hillside. She seemed to be holding a glass of wine. He was about to open the door and walk out to comfort her, but then he picked up the remote control. He sat down to watch a news report on a new Mars astronomy find. Juanita sat out alone. On the windswept field she felt dazed , confused and mournful. She was quite unaware that her legal soul mate was yards away engrossed in the evening newscast.

A few weeks later, Dad called from Oklahoma. Juanita picked up the phone, and exchanged the usual banalities about the weather, the difference between the flat land in Oklahoma and the mountains of California, etc. Dad asked to speak to Johnse. Juanita asked why and was given a rather cryptic answer.

“Do I need special permission to speak to my son-in-law?” he snapped.

“Johnse”, she yelled, “Get in here, someone wants to speak to you.”
Johnse picked up the phone in the library and she stood within a few invisible feet from his conversation.

Here is what she heard:
“Yep…..well I think it would be a good idea to finally sell it. I mean they’re building all around the area…..I think if Juanita was more logical she would see the tax benefits….well Charlie died….she isn’t going to be riding forever….I know it’s like a little girl thing with her favorite riding place…..my company is really hot on LaJolla….they need the space…oh, its’ very suitable….high tech…near the freeway….flat land….easy to build….Oh, you’re talking about a million….”

Johnse never mentioned the phone call again, but Doug Weaver continued to play golf with Johnse, and the two men would go out together and in a strange display of male bonding, would often spend the night together, “Just the boys” as Johnse would say. Juanita often spent Saturday night alone “the loneliest night of the week” while her husband might be off with his best friend fishing, drinking beers, or shooting the shit in Tijuana.

Johnse worked long hours, and many times ate dinner at the office. He might work Saturdays also and if he spent Sunday at home, he watched football. The stables were empty now, and the house had a joyless air compounded by her husband’s inattention and domestic inactivity.

It was time for Juanita to do something, and as she neared the mature age of 27, she felt the pressing need to overturn the status quo of helplessness that seemed to haunt her.

Out of the blue, Juanita was startled to hear Johnse suggest something that seemed outrageously incongruous.

“I think we should start having a baby.”
“Great. Are you sure this is something you want?”
“Well, its logical. We’ve been married for five years. I mean when I start a project at work I always examine the variables and add up the numbers and I’d say that we are statistically at the exact point that we should begin procreating.”

It was a better offer than he usually made, albeit with some coldness and scientific rigidity. If he made love as he spoke, she imagined that it might feel like a car engine pumped by a piston. Her orgasm would be like exhaust from a car, a byproduct of combustion—as far from love as Venus is from San Diego.

There was one thing that bothered her. Why did he care about children when he seemed to care so little about her? Would this be the man that would father her children? Why should she lay down and allow herself to be impregnated by the man who couldn’t bring himself to put his lips on her mouth?

She practiced a most unholy deception. She took her birth control pills and told him she had stopped. They made love every night and she was made happy by the fact that once more she knew something that he did not.

After a year, she still was not pregnant and he stopped asking why. He was now deeply involved in trying to create a software program for NASA to help measure whether there was any possibility of life on Mars. He traveled constantly to the great space cities of Houston, Cocoa Beach, Seattle and Ontario, Calilfornia. While his wife remained unfertilized at home, he eagerly set forth to conquer the mystery of whether life existed beyond this planet.

He began to get involved in the early 90’s with a fascinating new project called the “Internet”. It was, she heard, some new computer that would connect all the computers around the world and allow people to trade information with anyone who had a “modem”.

The developers continued their assault on the land around San Diego. There was not a hill left within 20 miles of downtown San Diego that wasn’t sliced off with a flat topped building and asphalt. Sloburban development tore into the hills, flattened the curves, introduced 24/7 traffic jams to the metropolis and robbed the once sunny settlement of its peace of mind, slow pace, and courtly manners.

She opened the paper and read about Doug Weaver who was now the largest commercial office broker in La Jolla. His office had leased a record amount last year. He was odious to her because the land was just a commodity to him. But land was treated cheaply and sold expensively all around southern California.

The sameness of the super housing, built for repetition, cheaply and inhumanely, deeply disturbed Juanita. She yearned for the open lands that she and Charlie had once traversed. The alien names on the office buildings gave off a sinister air of secrecy as if they were evil marinated in technological conquest: Softech, Genuscape, NetWatch, Hypercalm, Seaecotech, Digital Industries.com. The new construction didn’t sit on the street, it invaded the hills, pockmarked the land and destroyed the once verdant beauty surrounding San Diego.
“Honey, are you sitting down?”


The phone call had come in just as Juanita was done filling out her application for environmental studies at UCSD.

“Hi. Where are you?”
“I told you. Portland…….. The Mainframe conference. Weren’t you listening when you dropped me off at Lindbergh?”
“How’s it going?”

“Fantastic. I got the head of a Stanford think tank who is working with Microsoft on a new space shuttle project and they want to use my software. Bill Gates himself sent his one of his people from Washington to talk to me. I have to go honey. I just want you to know that we might be going to the moon!”

This was great. More money, more prestige, more science. If it was leading her into a brave new world, she could only guess. She only knew that when she opened the windows of her house, the constant drum of trucks, cars and fumes were audible from the never-ending freeway rush that was now the official outdoor orchestra of La Jolla.
Johnse rented an apartment in Palo Alto, Ca. He needed to be there because he was constantly in meetings with technology companies in the newly named Silicon Valley. Once the valleys of California had been named after flesh and blood Spanish missionaries and explorers, like San Fernando , San Gabriel and San Joaquin.

Now they bore the names of the new rulers whose hearts were made of silicon.

He never invited her to spend the weekend in Palo Alto. It was strange, but no stranger than the nights he spent with Doug Weaver. He was a loner, after a buck, and he wanted to get to that place in the heavens so fast that he couldn’t stop to pick up his wife.

Weaver continued to try to make friends with Juanita. He sent her bottles of Sonoma County’s best wines and little notes about how he drove past her vacant lands and imagined beautiful office parks with sparkling fountains.

She wished that she might get happiness from shopping, or trading stocks, or something more tangible. She had land and money and security and the promise of computer wealth. But everything with a living heartbeat was gone, and the greed that consumed the people around her left her alone. She was the lady on the horse and there she stayed alone.

In spring, one year after he rented the Palo Alto apartment, and six months after he signed the contract , and three months after the first check arrived for $2 million dollars, she told Johnse that she wanted a divorce. He was calm and collected and told her that they could discuss it when he returned later in the week.

Why had she stayed married to a man for whom she had no love for so long? Was she so afraid of being alone that she would settle for this? She needed to invigorate her life with the passion that had once animated her. Only one relationship had ever animated and excited her……

She opened the paper to the classified section and saw this ad for a horse:

4-year-old Thoroughbred/Trakehner mare -
”Jovial” for sale at Temecula Farms:
Very quiet and sweet, easy to ride and handle, no vices.
15.3 hands and growing, great mover, always sound, ties, trailers.
Jumping 2’6″, successfully competed beginner novice combined training.
Confident, Bold Jumper, comfortable in the ring and on the trail.
Jockey Club Performance Horse registered, great eventing prospect!

She drove out to Temecula and pulled up to a sprawling, sunny ranch set amidst the wineries and mountains of this blessed land. Mary Beth, the lady who took care of Jovial was careworn, a widow and her whole life had been spent here. When she saw Juanita go into the stable to meet Jovial for the first time, she knew that the horse and its new owner were a perfect match. Jovial was only $15,000 but the price of the horse could not be appraised as the happiness it brought Juanita was beyond words.

They brought Jovial out of the stable and into the sunshine. A cavesson noseband was affixed to the horse, and a well-balanced saddle was placed gently atop the spine of the animal. Though it was a hot day, and the sun was beating down, it was dry, desert weather, just fine for a test ride.

As Mary Beth watched, Juanita led Jovial out of the confines of his cell block and onto the trail which led into the open lands and out they rode so happily….

The End