"The All-American Car Wash" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

A dark brown BMW sedan sped down Ventura Boulevard past the sprawling mess of commercial Sepulveda Hills. Bronx born Larry Rivers, 40ish, a still aspiring screenwriter, was on his way to an appointment with a free-lance producer, Mark Evans. Passing the All American Car Wash, a booming business near the intersection of Casa Endora and Ventura, Larry turned into the car wash. A large, black Lincoln Navigator parked behind him. Rail thin Nathalie Newman and her four-year-old daughter Zola stepped out of the SUV.

Larry exited his car. The cell phone rang. He answered.

“Rivers here….Hi, Mark….Oh, you can’t make it. Listen no problem. Let’s do it again next week. I think you’re gonna love my idea. Ok. Bye.”

With hands full of orders for specialized car cleaning, Iraqi native Ali Hassan approached Larry. Ali Hassan is a charming man, one who easily persuades his customers to purchase vanilla air fresheners, tire detailing, hot wax protection, and steam spraying under the hood.

“My friend, my friend how have you been? Your BMW is what model? It looks like a custom car no?”

“Give me the $5.99 special Ali.”

“Larry, you say that every week. How am I supposed to make a living on $5.99?”

“Hey, I’m just a struggling writer. Give me a break.”

“Struggle? You are the best man! I saw your episode of Law and Order last week. Very clever!”

“You liked it? I worked my butt off for that.”

“It shows. Hey, how about I throw in the windshield protection? When it rains, the water will just drop off. Much safer driving.”

”OK, Ali. You always get your way!”

Inside the car wash viewing area, the procession entered under each owner’s watchful eyes. Larry watched as spray guns and brushes sprayed chemicals against the gleaming surfaces of chrome and metal. The electric conveyer chain grabbed the tires of the Lincoln Navigator, the car ahead of his. For a moment, Larry looked at the brushes, the soap, the blowing air and thought of Auschwitz. The passive march of the affluent vehicles as they entered a sterilization room………………..

A little girl with a reassuring blond and fresh face ran towards Larry. Her mother was running after her.

“Zola! Come here. You can’t run wild in the car wash!”

Nathalie swooped up the laughing daughter in her arms and looked at Larry with empathetic eyes.

“Larry, hi. I haven’t seen you in a while. As you can see, I have my hands full. Stop that young lady or you won’t go to day care!”

“She’s big enough for day care?”

“Yep. Right next door to the car wash!”

Larry asked, “ Are you and Eddie still living in Tarzana?”

“No. We moved to Sherman Oaks. We bought a house on Valley Vista. I love it there. Eddie is fifteen minutes from Universal.”

“Great. Is he still……”

Nathalie deepened her voice: “ He’s Vice President of Non-Fiction Television Development”

“That’s right. I remember pitching a show to him once. Did he ever do anything with that History of Ice Cream show?”

“No. I think they put it into the maybe category….. Zola! Stop pulling my hair!”

“I’m just getting done with a screenplay I wrote. It’s a suspense thriller about terrorists in LA.”

“Oh, pleasant” , was her disinterested reply.

Larry’s BMW entered the purification ritual, following the usual steps of detox prescribed by the car wash. Larry walked along the glass windows and kept pace as his transport vehicle moved along, dumb, mute and progressively prettier.

Fifteen years earlier, Larry had arrived from the Bronx determined to make a name for himself in the entertainment industry. He had answered an ad for a one bedroom guest house rental in Tarzana, and was awestruck when he arrived at the one acre estate with its orange groves, swimming pool and circular drive-way . The owners: Nathalie and Eddie.

Larry moved in and in that old Hollywood tradition of making friends to make it, began to “hang out” with Eddie. The good times turned bad. Larry struggled to write, becoming poorer as his output of words increased. He couldn’t pay his rent. The deep relationship between tenant and landlord turned hostile. Larry was thrown out and had to leave after six months. He vowed to never forgive the Newman’s cruelty, until the day he found out that Eddie had become a somebody in the senseless entertainment industry.

Now it was the new millennium—times were different—and the American dream still lurked beyond the next corner, even as its pursuer turned 40.

Nathalie stepped up to the cashier and handed her a coupon for the $4.99 special. Dark haired Leila Hassan looked at Nathalie harshly.

“I’m sorry. This coupon has expired.”

“What! I just got it in the mail last week.”

“Are you sure Miss? It says it’s good until July. This is November.”

“I want the $4.99 special. That’s what I told Ali outside!”

“I can’t help you. We don’t take expired coupons!”

“OK. How much is it then?”

“$8.99”

“$8.99! I only have five bucks in my wallet!”

“Do you have a credit card? We take Visa, American Express….”

“No! I don’t use credit cards! I have a debit card!”

“No debit cards. Do you have a check book?”

Larry stepped into the conversation. He handed the cashier a twenty-dollar bill.

“No. Larry you can’t pay for my car wash. This is ridiculous”

“No problem. You are my friend Nathalie. I don’t mind paying at all. And look I have a coupon here that hasn’t expired yet.”

“Thank you Larry,” Said she with due politeness.

Fifteen years after they had thrown Larry out for late-payment of rent, he paid for Nathalie’s car wash. Maybe she would go and tell Eddie about the newly Christened good Samaritan.

On this sunny and hot December morning, Larry was on his way to Starbucks to once again meet the free-lance producer Mark Evans. It was 9.30 am and Evans said he would be at Starbucks “around 9.30”. Larry ordered a decaf coffee and sat down. He had brought along his script: “Poison 818”.

818 is the area code for the San Fernando Valley. Larry had convinced himself that this special numeral would become the theme for a script based on Arab-American espionage and terror directed against the Jews in the San Fernando Valley.
“Poison 818” was the code used by the main protagonist, Ibrahim Abdulla, a Muslim fundamentalist who hides behind a seemingly placid façade though he is the head of an international terror cell.

“A timely and frightening story!”

“A bite-your- nails to the end saga”

“Do you know who your neighbor is?”

Larry ran the imaginary film slogans in his head. He pictured himself on stage at the Oscars thanking his widowed mother on Pelham Parkway for her patience and understanding.

In the real world, at Starbucks, the intended meeting looked again as if it were cancelled. Mark didn’t ring, but in the time-honored etiquette of Hollywood, he simply did not show. Larry was left drinking his coffee alone. All around him were customers; many of them black haired men with black mustaches living on their own diet of coffee, conversation, cigarettes and cell phones.

The All American Car Wash, with its thirteen American flags planted on thirteen pillars, might have earned praise for its vernacular style. In the land of the hot dog shaped hot dog stand, and the donut shop shaped liked a donut—the All American was simply another wonderful example of the triumph of commercialism over symmetry.

It was impossible to pass by the wash and miss its patriotic theme. Here, a family named Hassan had fled Baghdad and by way of Damascus had emigrated to Los Angeles. Six brothers: Ali, Hisham, Jordan, Saddam, Esu, and Abdullah had settled with their wives and children into a section of the US that had once been Mexican territory. The newly arrived men, looking for a sure way to ingratiate themselves with other transplanted customers, chose the red, white and blue for their business.

They had struggled to find the capital, the $150,000 it took to open the car wash. They had to deal with enormous bills—the water alone amounted to $4,500 dollars a month. Working 12-14 hour days, these brothers had unique personalities, interests and ambitions that ran beyond the car wash.

Ali, the oldest, wanted a stable business for his brothers. Hisham was the good-looking one, who hoped that his exposure in the car wash, might lead to an acting career. Jordan was the intellectual, he had once hoped to study physics, but his sudden flight from Baghdad had dashed his hopes of scientific higher education. Saddam was a liberally political man, who read every book he could on the American Revolution. He hoped that rational and enlightened thought might help him understand his new and weird surroundings. Esu was a lost child, he smoked pot and came to work without ambition to progress to either affluence or self-worth. Abdullah was the angry one. He had a quick temper and resented the power his older brothers had over him. He longed to make a name for himself outside of the car wash. He hated American life, with its promise of material wealth. He imagined himself as a spokesman for the powerless, the downtrodden, the ones without education, money or political freedom.

It didn’t escape the brother’s notice that Abdullah was sullen and withdrawn. Many times Ali had tried to talk to him, only to have Abdullah lash out at Ali with charges that his brother had hijacked the family to pursue a worthless American life. Why did they have to leave Iraq, Abdullah demanded? They had been there for hundreds of years, and now they lived in America and worked washing cars. What humiliation! Ali did not have an answer for his youngest sibling. It was simply inconceivable to Ali that Abdullah would fight against betterment and riches. What was so bad in America? All six brothers and their wives had s, they drove nice cars . Only last year the entire Hassan clan took a vacation in Arizona, where the desert environment recalled the Mesopotamian plain in Iraq.

Larry read the trade magazines with envy. There was a recent item concerning a story that had been optioned for “the low six figures”. It described a plot about “a college guy who hides out in the broom closet of a sorority for the weekend.” The idea was written by a 24 year old recent college grad named Dylan Weed. Larry felt himself in the grip of the old low self-esteem.

On lonely Friday evenings, the 40-year old man would walk around the plastic and insipid confines of Sherman Oaks, dodging skateboarders and stroller-pushing couples. Hamburger eating punks –who wore oversize pants exposing their ass crack– sat on the sidewalk in front of McDonalds.

It had been a decade and half of wandering around in an arid wilderness and still there was no deliverance. Los Angeles was Egypt without God, crowds of faithful without a Moses. The miracle of fame and fortune, was a special effect, like that cheap trick of parting the Red Sea they performed for the tourists at Universal City.

He couldn’t hide his anger anymore when he met “successful” people. Almost everyone seemed more fulfilled than he. If they were younger, they might be unemployed, but they had six pack abs and 30 inch waists. If they were older, they had children , a wife or a career. He had none of the above. He could go on pretending to take calls from important people who might be interested, but eventually he was just fooling himself.

He thought once of just leaving Los Angeles and returning back to New York. But the metropolis on the East Coast was a dangerous place. It had old memories and people who knew who you really were. He couldn’t hide out and affect achievement. The jaded facades which run so deep on the West Coast, seem like stage make-up to the battle hardened veterans of the Bronx, Brooklyn and New Jersey.

“Poison 818—-how far will they go to destroy America?”

“Poison 818—one psychopath who could murder children unless he is stopped.”

“Ok, enough already. I get your point!”

Sally Sheinman sat behind the glass-tabled desk with the white orchids. A polished and no-nonsense William Morris agent, she had been pushed by her mother Ida to meet with cousin Larry.

“What else do you have Larry?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

“What ELSE do you want to pitch?” she screeched.

“That’s it. I wrote a 110 page screenplay and I want you to take it and sell it!”

“Larry, darling…..I only work with clients who can bring me a lot of great material! I can’t just go out and sell one thing. You haven’t even sold one thing!”

“You know what Sally? I thought you would have a little heart. I come here and pitch my heart out and you slam the door in my face.”

“I’m not slamming the door! I’m trying to OPEN it!’

“Just because your Uncle Dan’s daughter, you grew up in Scarsdale and you came out here with a silver spoon in your mouth…..”

“Good bye! I said get out of here. I don’t need to have me or my father insulted!”

“Fine! I knew you would never help me. You’re too self-centered. It runs in all the Sheinmans!”

He walked out of her office and to the elevator where he punched the button so hard that his thumb almost broke off from the hand. Inside the mirrored elevator on the descent to the parking garage he muttered to himself: “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

At the car wash, Abdullah was the vacuum man. He had first entry into his customer’s cars. In the affluent world of Sepulveda Hills, he could temporarily sit inside a procession of recent model Jaguars, BMW’s, Infinitis , Lexuses, Lincolns and Mercedes. These cars came with a variety of gadgets: GPS navigation system, DVD / CD players, and speaker phones. The smell of leather often mixed with French perfume. On the seats of these cars, errant and forgetful men and women might leave behind Armani glasses, Dior scarves and even $100 dollar bills.

He was a good Muslim. He did not steal. He left everything where he saw it. He knew that God was watching.

Next to the Car Wash, was a day care center operated by the Jewish reformed Sepulveda Hills Congregation. In the rounds of chores performed by mothers in their 30’s and 40’s, was the depositing of children at the center, kids who ranged in age from 3 to 6 years old. A steel fence, about 10 feet high, separated the day care center from the end point of the car wash. As the dried autos exited, the children often stood on the other side of the fence, their hands grasping the metal, as Mommy’s car emerged with a temporary hydro facelift.

To those who think they know what Jews look like, the Southern Californian experiment in assimilation and inter-marriage has produced some surprisingly varied offspring. Many of the wives are Non-Jewish, as a result some of the kids look Scandinavian. For many months, Abdullah had smiled at the children, just thinking they were sweet young innocents. He stopped grinning when he found out that the day care center was operated by a Zionist entity.

It bothered him that these Jews had money. Here they had everything—beautiful wives, fancy cars, and they seemed to live in a world where politics was somebody else’s problem. For the Hollywood elite, the only things that mattered were self-empowerment. He felt pity for himself, his Iraqi people, and for the persecution of the Palestinians. How could the world ignore the suffering that existed in the Middle East? Surely it was not the fault of the good works of Islam that kept people impoverished. A malevolent force had to be working to keep the Arabs down.

He also “knew” that the Jews conspired, especially in the entertainment industry, to help one another. He “knew” that the Jews looked out, for family members, and helped to promote “their own kind” to influence in the media. Their goal was eventually world domination.

As Abdullah ruminated on those thoughts of the evil Jews, up drove Larry Rivers, one of the great beneficiaries of Hollywood family benevolence.

“Hi,” Larry said. He handed a coupon to Abdullah.

“This has expired sir.”

“Oh. Is your manager around?”

“Yes sir.”

Abdullah motioned to Ali, who came over with his widest smile.

“Hello, Larry! My friend, what can I do for you?”

“I think my coupon has expired.”

“How about a special? I have the $11.99 herbal car wash. We put retinol on your leather seats to preserve the youthful appearance. We also have aloe vera for the dashboard. You should see how beautiful and sexy a moisture rich car can look!”

“No thanks. I’m not feeling too rich today!”

“Oh, c’mon, you’re a successful screenwriter!”

On the seat of Larry’s car was a copy of “Poison 818”. Ali smiled as he looked at the script.

“I bet you gonna sell the script my friend. Come, let’s get a real car wash for you!”

Before Larry could answer, the hulking mass of the Newman family’s SUV pulled alongside the gentlemen. Eddie Newman, not seen since 1986, flew out of the car and shook Larry’s hand.

“How are you doing! Nathalie told me that she ran into you here! My gosh, it’s been what– ten years?”

“Fifteen!”

“Well, I’ll be damned. What are you doing these days? Still working free lance?”

“Yes. But I’ve got a couple of deals that may come through…..”

Eddie was tanned, trim and dressed in ninety eight dollar Lucky Brand jeans. Nathalie sat in the passenger seat and waved daintily to Larry. Ali looked to lock this newest deal.

Eddie pulled out his calfskin wallet. “Let me pay for Mr. Larry’s car wash. What kind of specials do you have Ali?”

Ali beamed, “I have a two for one! I’ll do both your cars, detail work with the herbal wash and the aloe vera. The works! Normally, this would be forty dollars—you two together, I give you for twenty five!”

“Wonderful!”

As Ali wrote up the receipt, Larry briefly protested.

“This isn’t necessary Eddie. Really.”

“No. I think it’s the least I could do for you. You took care of my wife and little girl. And now I’m repaying you. Besides you’re poor!”

Larry immediately felt reduced and gratified. As Eddie sauntered happily into the car wash viewing area, with wife and tyke in tow, Larry slouched outside with hands in his pockets.

Meanwhile, Abdullah watched everything from his seat against the wall. The mind hummed. Those people stick together, they even pay for each other’s car wash.

Abdullah grabbed the long plastic vacuum tube and started to clean Larry’s car. “Poison 818” sat on the front seat. Abdullah felt annoyed and insulted that Larry had gone over his head and asked for Ali. In revenge, just slight revenge, Abdullah took the script and put it into his pocket.

Fifteen minutes later, the cars emerged freshly washed and ready for a mating dance on the streets of the San Fernando Valley. Eddie hugged Larry, a physical bond ten times more real than the emotional connection.

Eddie bit his lower lip Clintonly, “In all sincerity. I really missed hanging out with you. I’m going to have you over to our new . You should see what we’ve done with the kitchen, Lar—“

Larry waved good-bye to his old friends. He got into his car and looked for his script. It was gone. Oh well, the hard copy was on his PC at . No biggie.

Leila Hassan was worried. For six months, her brother-in-law Abdullah had been back in Iraq. He also sent post cards from Hamburg, Germany; Turkey and one from Damascus. She didn’t understand how her husband Ali could allow his brother to take so much time off from work.

“He should be here in the US! He is supposed to be an American citizen. Why is he all over the Middle East! Why don’t his own brothers know where he is?”

Ali was staring blankly at the large screen TV. In a living room with thirty-foot high ceilings, the black box and the man watching it looked miniature.

“I don’t have the answers my wife. He said he needed a break. Too much stress.”

“What about his older brother? What about your worries?”

Handsome Hisham walked into the room wearing a muscle t-shirt and basketball shoes.

“I just got an email from Abdullah. He is flying back to New York this Sunday and will be in LA on Monday afternoon!”

“You see Leila. You worry about nothing!”

Spring came to Los Angeles, but nobody was sure when it had actually arrived. The roses had bloomed in December. By January the trees were sprouting buds, and in February the nurseries displayed racks of geraniums, marigolds, and vegetables for planting.

Another season had passed, and emerging from winter, Larry felt as if he were on the verge of some new possibility. He had been tough on himself, lonely and despondent—but now he knew that if he were to succeed he’d have to marshal his strengths once again.

Before his latest rerun episode of self -confidence wore off, he made a phone call to free lance producer Mark Evans. To Larry’s surprise, Evans agreed to meet him at Starbucks because “it’s on the way to my dentist’s office”.




Almost nobody in Hollywood had really read Larry’s work. If they did, it was in a cursory, dismissive way. But one reader took every last word of Larry’s and absorbed it totally: Abdullah Hassan.

“Poison 818” was to him the ultimate story of terrorist glory. He imagined himself as the lead character who poisons and kills hundreds of innocents and is remembered in America as the man “who let the Jews have it”. While Larry wrote with the intent of illuminating evil, Abdullah fashioned the screenplay as his own life story. With Larry’s blueprint, Abdullah could fashion one of the most heinous crimes in American terror—and earn the respect of people the world over.

A short, slight and meek looking man, Mark Evans seemed the polar opposite of what Larry had imagined him to be. He seemed to be the quintessential nebbish. He actually had washed his hand with sanitizer before he picked up his mug of latte. He looked to be anywhere from 25-40, and might be gay—but again might not be. The important thing is that he showed up and kept the appointment.

“Larry I’m so sorry about last fall. I was busy with a million things—and you unfortunately came off my to do list!”

“That’s cool. I understand.”

”I read your script, Poison 911….”

“818”

“I mean 818.”

“It’s just too…..I don’t know….weird. I mean you’ve got a lot of good points: the terrorism, the domestic underground. It just doesn’t fit any type of genre. You look at the best movies, like Armageddon or The Rock—they fit into a pattern. Yours is just almost like a science fiction comedy drama suspense mystery. Life isn’t like that. Neither are movies.”

“I’m sorry that you didn’t like it. I kind of hoped that our meeting would be more productive.”

“No. I liked it. I just don’t think it’s right for me.”

As they talked, loud police sirens and fire engines raced west down Ventura Boulevard. Mark tried to speak, but the emergency vehicles seemed to be endless. Helicopters flew above.

“What the hell is going on out there?”

People inside Starbucks looked nervously at one another. The sick feeling of impending doom entered the cozy confines of the café. Mark’s phone rang.

“Hello…..”

Just as Mark was speaking, a screaming middle-aged woman spilled her hot coffee as she ran through the door.

“They’ve bombed the day school! The children! Oh, my god! The children!”

“Hello. Jennifer, what’s the matter? Oh, my God! Oh, my God. This isn’t true! Oh, my God!”

Mark stood up. His face was a ghastly alabaster.

“You said it in your script! What you said came true!”

“Where? What happened?”

“A car wash attendant detonated himself in the temple children’s playground! There must have been a hundred children there. It was suicide. Just like you said………”

Days later, the normally placid sunshine ennui of Los Angeles was covered in a blanket of mourning. The nation looked to the Golden State and wept. One actor in a script of destruction had died, hundreds of innocents had been murdered. The obscure writer who couldn’t sell a screenplay became infamous, not for his movie, but for the collateral damage it caused.

"Such Happiness!" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

A beautiful and privileged young girl is blissfully unaware of a shy man’s affection for her.

My mother told me that I’m one of those young men with low self-esteem who will always be grateful for the attention that any young woman throws my way. My mother told me that I did not have athletic ability, or the greatest mind, but that I was the most loyal friend anyone could have. “Women only love one man”: the last words I remember my mother telling me when I got on the bus in Omaha on my way to become a nobody in Los Angeles. Was Mom telling me to be faithful to my next love–or to remember Mom always?

Nobody ever said they knew me from anywhere. I was transparent, average, just a John Doe from the Great Plains. When I was in high school, people said I looked like Jeff Bridges. In College, they said I looked liked Beau Bridges. I had only one question for those people: Who are Jeff and Beau Bridges?

“I know I know you from somewhere…..Don’t I look familiar to you?”

One day I met Julie Cadogan, a tall, thin, regal looking young woman who had just joined our television production as a supervising producer.

“Honestly, I don’t think so. Where do you think we could have met?”

She was looking me over intensely. Her 5’10 frame and waspish waist was dressed in a long Indian print skirt and tight short sleeve burgundy sweater. Ingrid Bergman at a Grateful Dead concert. In the frantic light of a Monday morning at the office, this new arrival was taking her time.

“I think maybe….did you ever attend NYU?”

“No. BU.”

“Oh. Well, did you rent a house in San Luis Obispo, or Palm Springs last summer?”

“I did!”

“Right! Well I stayed in a house in Palm Springs last year with my best friend Bridget and she loved to go out and maybe we saw you at some bar out there!”

“I did grow up in Omaha, Nebraska.”

”No!”

“Why? Do you come from Omaha also?”

“No! But I lived in Omaha for a year after graduation and worked at WOMA TV! That had to be where I saw you!”

“When was that?”

“Last year!”

“I moved out of Nebraska in 1992.”

“Oh.”

It was late November in Los Angeles and I had been working on a horrendously stupid television show, “Beat Me.” It was an MTV program where young, dumb men posed questions to young, dumb women and if the woman answered right they got to date the young, dumb man. It was my job to go out and recruit young, dumb and good looking people. Fortunately, this was easy because I lived in Los Angeles.

We lived on a quiet, conservative street in Omaha. It was so law abiding, church going and upright that my mother once called the police when a poodle peed on our lawn. Three cruisers came out in about 4 minutes to arrest the poodle. “People should keep their dogs on a tight leash” my mother said, the next day on her way to church. I remember another thing about growing up in Omaha: I was never awakened once during the night. It was so quiet, so peaceful, so dead.

“Hi ya Charlie!” It was Julie waking me up at 2 am. I was sound asleep and pulled the covers over my head when the phone rang so horribly loud one early Saturday morning.

“Who is this?”

“Julie! I’m in your neighborhood and I have a big favor to ask! Could you pick me up? My car broke down on Fairfax and Beverly and I know you live right around here and I was wondering if I could crash at your place and then in the morning I could call a tow truck company to come and get it…Please, please, don’t say no!”

I grabbed my jeans off the floor, wacked some Vaseline on my electrocuted hair and ran out with my keys, sandals and wallet. I drove only 4 blocks to where Julie said she would be waiting.

At the corner of Fairfax and Beverly: 2:45 am and Julie was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t stay awake much longer. I had been waiting 45 minutes, didn’t have a phone and was losing my patience. I went home.

On Monday morning we were having a production meeting at 9 am and the news was pretty good. “Beat Me” was doing well in the ratings and it looked like we were going to go to a full hour. This meant more work and more weeks of work. But it was lousy because I would have to get more contestants. My job would be harder but my pay would stay the same.

Julie came in smiling. She was dressed in a beautiful suede skirt with a cream-colored angora sweater and a stainless steel jewelry—bracelet. She hardly looked like a cad, a liar, or that disturbing bitch who woke me up in the middle of the night and got me into the cold to pick her up.

“I’m so sorry Charlie! I got back into my car and it started and then I didn’t know how to tell you, because I called your house and the machine wasn’t on and there was no way to leave a message. So here is a present.”

She handed me a small box of Godiva chocolates.
“You’re probably furious at me. You really have a right to be furious. I would be just as mad!”

“I’m not mad Julie!”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh!”

“Women who grew up with money love to talk about themselves son. Just remember to listen if you ever get involved with a rich girl.”-my father’s sage advice which he wrote down in a letter to me after he lost his job at the Ford plant.

Six months after Julie started, we had become the type of friends who go out to lunch and talk about work. But there was nothing else going on there. She would talk about her boyfriend and I would listen. I looked at my watch more than her eyes.

“He won’t commit to marriage because he is scared. So I told him that he has three weeks to decide—because if I don’t get a ring on my finger I’m going to move back to New York and work on my documentary! I told him I had a life before him and I meant it!”

How fortunate her life was, I could not have guessed. But I found out that her father was Anton Cadogan. He is a New York developer who built such landmarks as One Park Plaza Place and that enormous post-collegiate cellblock apartment complex known as Devonshire Court on Second Avenue in the 90’s. Julie didn’t like to talk about her family. Yet there was something in the ease and carefree way she talked about leaving jobs and leaving boyfriends and leaving town that let me know that she would never be down to her last nickel.

“I used to have an apartment on Second Avenue and it was so wonderful! Such happiness! A typical day for me would be…wake up, go to the gym, meet my friend Heather for lunch. We would hang out at the Met, go for a walk in Central Park, shop at Barneys, go to this fabulous cheese shop on Jones Street….Oh, I’m getting so depressed, I just wish I could move back to New York! Los Angeles is just not a city!”

“Oh, I agree. I’d like to move back to Manhattan myself. But it just isn’t easy with apartments so expensive. I think I read that some studio apartments start at $3500!”

“Well if it’s just an apartment that’s holding you back—they’re easy to get. I could find you one like that.”

She was so young. So used to luxury. Her work was just a hobby to fill time. What did she know about earning a living? I had graduated college 13 years ago and I was still paying student loans! Why did God create it so that some people have it so easy and still think it’s so tough for them?

When I think of people who have had it easy I think of people who have never shoveled snow. Yes, Julie Cadogan never shoveled snow in her entire god-damned life.

“Hello, handsome!”

“Hi.”

Julie was standing in front of my desk as I entered the list of possible contestants on the show. It was 4 O’Clock, an awful hour in the awful part of the day at work. She was smiling with just the widest grin this side of Montana.
“Look at what I’m wearing! Notice anything?”

I looked at her blue silk blouse, the grey nylon sweats, the open toed $250 dollar shoes…..Absolutely nothing unique. Expensive, yes. Different, no.

Then she extended her right hand in a screw like fashion aimed right for my nose. A glistening, enormous diamond ring was living atop the smoothest, longest, most polished fingers and nails I had ever seen.

“He did it. Wow. You must be happy.”

“Oh, my God! Charlie, I’m so happy! I have been waiting for this forever! We’re getting married in exactly six months on October 7th and I’ve got to get everything together and I just don’t know how I’m going to do it!”

“Wow. Julie, I’m so happy for you.”

“Thanks Charlie. I’m going to go and show this to the receptionist. Isn’t it gorgeous?”

I was ready to quit my job the day that Sean the producer yelled at me after I forgot to write down the age of that stupid blonde from Witchita. I was through with the crap of television, with the utter mindlessness of the program. I wanted to be somewhere important, doing something brainy, getting somewhere. I was standing still, earning nothing, without health insurance, a car, a life. I was a free lance, hand out taking, goatee wearing, slouchy, sloppy, slob with no self esteem…. handing out vouchers to strangers on the Santa Monica promenade (and hoping that they would think that my smile was cute enough to come down to the fuckin’ studio) and stand in line just to be rejected for the stupidest program on earth. Why did I do this kind of work? To what end?

I finally got up enough courage to walk down to Sean’s office and tell him that I was leaving.
“Hi Charlie.”

It was Julie. She intercepted me as I was on my way to ruin my career. She looked upset. Her eyes were watery, puffy.
“I need to talk to you. Could we go for a walk down to Ben and Jerry’s? I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

My dad was quite cynical. He told me to never trust a woman that offers to buy YOU something. “They always are after you. They all want to be taken care of. So if any broad offers to buy you something…..watch out!”

We walked out into the eye squinting brightness of the palm-lined boulevard and she took my hand. Her gesture was so unexpected. Its intimacy broke down my natural inclination to believe that everyone is full of shit.
“I just got into the worst fight with Van Ness.”

“Who is Van Ness?”

“My fiancee! Oh, I thought you knew that. Anyway, Van Ness wants to move to San Francisco. And I don’t.”

“Some people have to be all fancy and give their kids last names for first names”, my father cautioned. “Don’t expect anyone who is called Henderson or Langley to be a good friend. You’ll find your friends in people with plain names like Steve, Bill or Bob!”
“O.K. Why does he want to move there?”

“He wants it because Michaelfish wants it.”

“Michaelfish?”

“His band.”

“Oh.”

“I said that just because your band is leaving doesn’t mean that you can leave your fiancee behind. He thinks that his career will suffer and Michaelfish will go on and become famous and he will lose if he doesn’t go!”

Then she broke down into tears on Ventura Boulevard.

“But what about me! What about us! I tried to talk to him, but he said I was selfish! I don’t think I’m selfish if I ask him to stay in the same city and that city is Los Angeles. I would go with him, but my life is right here! Oh, my god! What should I do Charlie?”

“What should I do?”, she asks! Geez, who the hell knows what anyone should do! I’ve been trying to figure out what I should do for my whole life. I moved out to Los Angeles, the most lost city on earth, to find out some definitive things about myself. What I found is that I hate the sun and hate work. What kind of an answer is that?

Ben and Jerry’s was just ahead. I put my hand around her graceful and swanlike neck and guided her into the cool parlor of flavours. Her tears seemed to dissipate slightly when she saw the round, cold, chocolate mound of Cherry Garcia ice cream.
“Julie, let me buy this for you.”

“Oh, thank you.”

She was so tender, fragile and sweet. The unwrinkled and dewy complexion, the sudden emotion of a young woman afraid of losing her lover, the appealing vision of a virgin-like creature spooning down the creamiest and fattiest desert known to mankind…..A large Maraschino cherry stood atop the mounds of ice cream as the chocolate dripped down the sides and gathered lava like at the bottom of the dish. I wanted to kiss her and make love right there. This moment had cost me all of $3.50 but it was worth every penny.

“I think I want to go home Charlie.”

“You mean back to Hollywood?”

“No. I mean my parent’s house in New York.”

A House! A 17 room penthouse on Fifth Avenue! You call that a house?

“Do you think I should go? I mean my mother has already hired a wedding consultant and they might rent out this church in Pacific Palisades and then if I decide to hold the reception at the garden in back, they want a deposit. Oh, all these decisions! I just can’t stand it.”

“Your mother and I got married at the VFW hall just outside of Fort Pierce. We’ve been happily married for 34 years! We didn’t have no money, but hell, we were in love. Don’t think that you have to get married in some mansion on a cliff in Malibu! One expensive party never kept anyone happy for life!”
“My advice is not to do anything drastic. Just stay put. Don’t run away.”

“Ok. Ok. You’re right.”

I took a napkin, dipped it in water and dabbed away some chocolate under her lower lip.
“Michaelfish is playing at the Gardena Room tonight! Please come!”

It was Julie pleading for me to attend Van Ness and Michaelfish. She had made up with him, after he found out that he could rent rehearsal space cheaper in L.A. and convinced the band that economically it was better if they stayed in the Southland.
Julie was convinced that LOVE had won over Van Ness. She was so enchanted with Van Ness, so excited about staying in Los Angeles, so ecstatic about the impending wedding—that it seemed senseless and cruel to point out that $4 a square foot had won Van Ness over and preserved the sanctity of their relationship.

I’ve always thought that my clothes were among the homeliest ever. I mostly wear plaid shirts, with short sleeves and button down collars. I have a paunchy stomach that accentuates the cheapness of the fabrics I wear. My glasses look like something that an insurance adjuster would wear in Omaha-say about 1955. I have a chipped front tooth which I’ve never bothered to fix. I am not cool, not at all.

Outside of the Gardena Room, stood a crowd of black draped, gothic styled, cigarette inhaling young people. Many of them were tall, thin like models on speed. They were waiting to be picked to enter the exalted space where Michaelfish was to perform. Two enormous Black men dressed in woolen over coats, searched patrons for concealed weapons and illicit drugs.

A light rain was falling on a late Friday night in early December. Los Angeles, which had remained dry for six months, was inexplicably thrust into a new, temporary, chilly and wet season where the air was pure and such Northern inclinations as sweaters, red wine and contemplation come into fashion. The city, which wore a sunburned and gregarious face, now was forced to don waterproof rain-jackets and subdued emotion.

Inside the Gardena Room, it was dark, smoky and the band was warming up. The no-smoking policy was, as is customary, broken in defiance of state law. Julie sat in a corner, smoking a cigarette. I walked over to see her.
“Hi! I’m so glad you came.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it. Have you found work?”

“No. I’ve been so busy with the wedding—buying a dress, choosing a caterer, flying back to New York to pick out invitations….I just don’t have time to earn money right now. How about you?”

My father once offered me this financial advice: “Just save a quarter every day. At the end of the week you’ll have $1.75, at the end of the month $7, and at the end of the year $84. In ten years, you’ll have $840, and in fifty years it will be worth $4200.”

“Well, it’s Christmas. Not too easy to get a job this time of year.”

“Right. Have you talked to MTV? Do they have anything else?”

“No. I’m mean yes…I heard they’re starting up a new show called BUSTED. It’s supposed to be about men who cheat or women who cheat on men and they catch them on tape. I think they need someone to find the cheaters so that’s the position. But I don’t think I’ll take it….And then I had…..”

Van Ness walked in. He was dressed in a black leather vest, cowboy buckled belt, tight jeans covering a wide load ass. A bald spotted ego with long hair, overweight, tattoos, mid 30’s. He smelled like the inside of a refrigerator filled with old meat loaf that hadn’t been cleaned out for three months. His biceps were big—but not muscular, merely wide. They were covered with eagles, Jesus ,the twelve apostles, and some Chinese letters. He gave me a great big bear hug.
“Nice to see you man! Julie’s been talkin’ you up man! Says you gotta meet my buddy Charlie! Shit, I need a light. Julie can you run out to the car and grab my lighter?”

“Sure honey! Charlie, you’ll still be here when I get back right?”

“Right!”

Julie ran out to the car. Van Ness sneezed loudly. He looked at me salaciously and wiped some mucus off his beard with his left forearm.
“Hey Charlie. I have to run backstage. Thanks for coming.”

I sat down at the darkened table, waiting for the opening number of Michaelfish. A waitress came by. I ordered a Becks and waited for the effervescent Julie to come back inside.

"Post Men" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

When did American men stop being men? Once upon a time, they strode this continent with inviolate manhood. Conquering the West, they killed and hunted and cut paths through forests and grasses. On top of horses, or on the rails, they rode unopposed by lesser mortals in a vast march to the Pacific. They built cities of stone and iron, dams to stop the mighty rivers, and took to the air like eagles. Men hung heads of animals they killed on walls, and drank jugs of whisky until they passed out. From Boston Harbor to Death Valley, they built the most noble and valorous civilization that history ever created.
* * *
The Mall is the place where they gather every weekend. The young and affluent North Shore of Chicago converges on Northbrook Court. Like a cattle drive, hordes of SUV’s pour down Edens Highway and head for the vast, untamed parking lot on Lake-Cook Road. Hungry for adventure, seeking trophies and displays of wealth, the suburban hunter-gatherers and many who make their killing at the Board of Trade, put down their credit cards and walk away with the greatest assortment of riches available in the world.

These lucky Americans are the inheritors of those who laid down their lives at Omaha Beach, in Korea and in the swamps of Vietnam to preserve freedom. The beneficiaries of these soldiers of democracy are often seen on weekends making their way into the cozy and bland confines of the apparel smart “Banana Republic” store.

Inside the well-merchandised bi-sexual emporium little Emily and Zoe and Max and Dylan romp around the bleached blond wood floors as their parents try on solid colored robot garments in every shade of black, grey and dark brown. Scented candles in vanilla and lavender fill the air with a calming aroma. Soft lights flatter men who are persuaded and cajoled and belittled into wearing ribbed and solid crew necks and v-necks and flat front trousers and dark shoes. The guys, for the most part, have short trimmed hair, with just a dab of gel. The wives are aerobically thin, hydrated and slick. The Banana Republicans wear a uniform: prosperous, understated, cyber smart. These folks, are no longer very young, not quite middle aged. This store is a state of mind. It embodies a state of corporate caution.

Charles and Diana Spence belong to this club. Married seven years, the couple has one 3-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. They live in the town of Fort Sheridan, a former military base on the shores of Lake Michigan that has now been sensitively redeveloped for the Land Rover and Volvo set in shades of muted green. Residences are carved out of old officer’s quarters in homely yellow Chicago brick now lushly planted with elms, maples, hostas, and ivy. Ornate cast iron lampposts stand like sentries on curving streets paved in cobblestone. The train station is but a walk from the homes, and like the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a privileged few are allowed to live in exurbia with all of the commuting conveniences.

Charles has been out of Notre Dame for almost 15 years now. He played fullback at the fightin’ school and took his testosterone and Celtic manliness to the Board of Trade where he managed to build a successful career as a commodities broker. Six feet tall, 205 pounds, green eyed and auburn haired, he has a sharp jaw that could slice a sirloin steak. Yet his manner is as convivial as his practical jokes. He likes people, likes to kid around and if he had his way would probably just go fishing in Oshkosh every weekend rather than walk around Northbrook Court.

He met his wife when he went shopping for a suit at Marshall Fields on Michigan Avenue. He walked into the men’s department and was immediately confronted by a blonde, confident salesperson. Diana Jakowski was only 26, but she was already the highest grossing employee in her area. She had green eyes, and a navy woolen suit and took him by the arm to the 46 regular suits. She had already sized her future husband up.

“I’m looking for a 44 regular dark gray suit,” he said.
“Take off your coat. You’re a 46,” she said.
“OK. But I’m not a 46,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she answered, “Here this is a Hickey Freeman. It’s a little loose in the shoulders which is just fine for you.” He put on the dark gray pinstriped jacket. She walked around front and grabbed his lapels and slid her hands down to button the top of the coat. He felt like a little boy getting dressed by mommy.
“See, I told you lady. I’m swimming in it.”

“Did you ever hear of a tailor? We have the best in the city. Mr. Piaggi. Your waist is about a 33, and your jacket is definitely a 46. Your traps are pulling your shoulders.”
“OK,” he said. “Bring out Mr. Piaggi. I want a man’s opinion.”

She wasn’t insulted. She liked his assertiveness and refusal to be pushed into buying a suit. “Mr. Piaggi!” she yelled. Piaggi– a short, older and elegant Italian gentleman– walked out with a tape measure. He stuck the numerical string at the back of Charles’ shoulders. He opened the coat and measured the waist again.

“Perfecto. Now please try on the trousers,” Piaggi said.
“If you’re wearing boxers sir,” she instructed, “Please remember that you cannot wear briefs if we measure you for boxers.”
He looked at her directly. “I’m not wearing any underwear today.” She looked down at his crotch. “Yes. I can see you’re right.”
He bought two suits that day. He also purchased three dress shirts, five neckties, and some socks. Diana asked him for his driver’s license when he got ready to pay. “Oh, you live on North Avenue near Clark. We’re neighbors,” she said. “Give me your number Diana,” he ordered.

They went out and discovered that they had a lot of things in common. They were both Catholics. She was part Irish and Polish and he was Irish and German. He grew up in Arlington Heights and she came from Edgebrook, on the Northwest Side of Chicago. She went to school at a small Catholic girls college in Kansas but dropped out and became a retail sales clerk at 21. He attended Notre Dame on a football scholarship and barely graduated due to his poor grades. They both loved sports. He had season’s tickets to the Cubs. She was a big Bulls fan. They loved beer. He drank Becks and she liked Kirin. They took showers two times a day and kept their cars scrupulously clean. They believed in the Church, but disagreed with everything the Church advocated. He wanted to succeed very badly in business, and show up his older brother. She wanted to make lots of money and show off her success to friends. They were aggressive, motivated, honest, hard working, athletic, clean minded, sexually driven. They married only six months later, honeymooned in Hawaii and moved back to Chicago and rented a two-bedroom apartment on Fullerton and Broadway near Lincoln Park.

In the early years of their marriage, they fought a lot. What interests they had in common were opposite to how they lived in private. She was organized. He threw his clothes on the floor. She had all of her receipts in files, he crumpled bills in his pockets and never cleaned out his wallet. He liked to dress in t-shirts and torn jeans after work. She was forever after him to dress up nicer. He never cleaned the house. She dusted every day.

More than once she had threatened to leave him. He had answered that he would rather live alone than be bossed around. She often burst into tears, and he would hug her, and then she might slap him, and he would get angry, and they would slam doors, and he would sleep on the couch, and then he’d wake up and enter the bedroom and crawl under the sheets with her and they’d end up making love and making up.

Friends like Sari Garentz, a sweet Jewish girl from Skokie who worked with Diana at Fields, adored Charles. He was just so sexy, so masculine, so playful, so funny. Diana’s stories of their fights and problems didn’t ring true with Sari. One Wednesday, Sari and Diana went out to lunch and were walking along Michigan Avenue when Sari suggested they stop off at Banana Republic.

The ladies eyed a table full of solid colored ribbed sweaters in such colors as black, dark gray, dark brown and dark blue. “Every guy looks great in one of these,” said Sari. Diana picked up a brown one. “My husband is too buff for this. Even XXL is going to be small on him.” Sari picked up a blue model. “Well, I’m going to buy Andy one. I hate it when he wears those horrible Western Shirts. He still has a closet of those awful rhinestone and embroidered Gene Autry shirts. Boots, Stetson hats, bandanas—in Chicago! Coming from Colorado he thinks he has to dress like a rodeo cowboy. Well he’s gonna wear Banana Republic from now on!”

Diana picked up the sweater again and pulled and stretched it. “I just don’t know. It’s so conservative. I think he’ll look just like every other guy in his early 30’s.” Sari rolled her eyes. “If you let him dictate what clothes he wants to wear, he’s going to dress like a slob. Your husband is gorgeous. I wish mine was half as sexy as yours. But you have to dress him up. You have to make him into the man you want him to be.” Diana bought the advice and the sweater.

The Lure of the Suburbs

They had been living on Fullerton Avenue for four years. One evening, Charles came home with a real estate magazine. There had been vague talk and rumblings almost inaudible of children and schools and “more space.” The double income couple lived quite well, their industriousness and energy had been marshaled into moneymaking and now they had the resources to choose where to live.

“Honey,” he said, “Look at this house in Evanston.”
She walked over to him and looked at color photo of a 1920’s Tudor home for 2.5 million. “Nice. If we move to Evanston, that wouldn’t be too far from downtown,” she said.
“Oh,” he said jokingly, “You do want to move. Last week you told me that Sari and Andy and Steve and Lisa loved it downtown and that you would never move to the dull suburbs.”
“I want to move to a nice town. But I don’t want to commute for two hours every day and raise a child. That’s why I like living here,” she said.
“Then we won’t move.” he said.
“We can’t raise a child in this small place?” she protested.
“What the hell! First you say we could move then you don’t want to move. Make up your mind,” he said.

Fort Sheridan

It was Sari who told Diana about an old army base that had closed down and was now being redeveloped with “exclusive homes.” Fort Sheridan, named after Civil War General Phillip Henry Sheridan, was going to preserve the historic architecture and landscaping of the “prairie style” while adding stylish and upscale new homes.

One Saturday afternoon, Sari and Charles and Diana drove up to Fort Sheridan home so they could scout it out.
What Diana saw was not only the beautiful grounds, and historic buildings, but her kind of people: white, pretty, thin and rich.

Two months later, Charles and Diana moved into Fort Sheridan. Sari and Andy chose a “Parade Ground” home with five bedrooms, approximately 5,400 square feet of living area and an attached three-car garage. Charles and Diana bought a “Deluxe Parade Ground” model that featured a fireplace in the master bathroom. What luxury!

Diana and Charles had a longer commute, but they had their best friends to keep them company way up in the burbs.

Baby Time

One humid June Saturday , Andy and Charles were driving back up Edens Highway after attending a Cubs game. At the Willow Road, Andy pulled his Explorer off the road. “Hey, Chuck. We’re going to have a baby!”

“That’s great news buddy!” Chuck said. He smiled broadly but in his heart he dreaded the consequences of this announcement and Diana’s reaction.

Diana reacted politely when Andy and Charles told her the news a half hour later. Andy left and Diana was free to tell Charles that she resented that her best friends had beaten her to conception. Diana had a fine house, a great job, a socially acceptable husband. The baby was next.

Saturday night Charles was at home but his mind was at Wrigley Field. He was still thinking about Delino DeShields hitting his game-opening homer and Moises Alou with that double that drove in two runs. Diana was cleaning, her usual behavior when she was preoccupied. The 10pm WBBM sportscaster was reviewing the game when Diana turned on the vacuum.

Charles shouted, “Turn off that damn thing Diana!”

She pulled the plug out of the wall and started winding the cord tightly around the Hoover. “You saw the game this afternoon. Can’t you pay attention to me tonight?”

“OK. Let’s go out Diana,” he said.
“Fine. Where should we go at 10 pm in the suburbs?” She asked.
“The lake. Let’s take a walk down to the lake,” he answered.
The night was balmy, the summer humidity still hung in the air. They walked outside, not even locking the doors behind them.
The moon cast its glow over the waters and calmed their nerves. “Do you still love me?” Diana asked. He looked her in the eye. “Sometimes.”

Later that night, they returned home and made love. Diana is convinced that her elevated hormones that June evening were the reason Elizabeth was conceived.

March of Time

Sari Garentz had Jayson (with a y) Ariel on February 5th. Elizabeth Montgomery Spence was born on March 30th (the middle name honored Montgomery Ward, the first store Diana had worked in).

Jayson looked like Sari, dark haired with “knowing eyes”. The son would seem to emulate his mother in looks and love, and the boy, as Charles said, “is being smothered.” The spelling of the name annoyed Diana, but she told Sari that it was unique and kind of cute.

Elizabeth was chubby and blonde and laughed a lot. Sari told Andy that Diana fed her baby too much and that the “kid was going to be obese.” Andy was bored with both his own baby and Elizabeth and longed to go back to Colorardo to ride in a rodeo.

It was a secret life and fantasy that Andy Garentz had. He was outwardly a prosperous Chicago dentist, but inwardly he hadn’t left his Western upbringing behind. His dad had been a Jewish cowboy in Durango, Colorado and Andy grew up with horses, dust, saddles, mountains and steaks on the campfire. It was a soft and constricting adjustment to live in the polished confines of the suburban North Shore of Chicago where barbecue flames were delivered by natural gas and steak came from Dominicks wrapped in plastic.

He had met Chicago girl Sari Sethbart at the University of Colorado. She was the only Jewish girl he had ever dated, because he was the only Jewish boy in his high school. He thought he would marry her, move back to Illinois temporarily and then set up practice back in Colorado. Yet luxury and malls and family and passivity glued them, like so many, to the Land of Lincoln.

Diana and Charles continued to live with their new baby in Fort Sheridan. Sometimes Charles would conjure up a secret fantasy life, where he was back at Notre Dame and just hanging out with the guys. He had no responsibility, and no schedule, no nagging expectations. He just did what the hell he felt like. He imagined a life where he never married and never had a daughter and remained a free spirit. But it was just a thought, that’s all.
# # #

"Mrs. Yanstrom" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

It was bitter cold and the thermometer read 3 degrees. Lincolnwood, Ilinois stood under the freezing hell of a Northern Illinois winter. In the Harkness home, frozen icicles formed on the six pane windows. Fog obscured the view outside. The upright, red brick house was a fortress heated by an ancient gas furnace that pumped dusty hot air into rooms with leaky doors and creaky oak floors.

Just east of McCormick Blvd, the square and rigid village of Lincolnwood (established 1940) billed itself as “10 minutes north of downtown Chicago” with “the lowest taxes on the north shore”. Smug, snobbish, insular, uptight, unfriendly—it shared none of the aesthetic loveliness that graced such lakeside arbor towns like Winnetka or Glencoe. Instead, it featured yellow brick ranches on square lots with crew cut shrubs. An ugly, concrete entombed artery , Lincoln Avenue, cut a diagonal scar across a land of rectangles and closed mindedness.

Hal and Marsha Harkness and their two young boys had moved to Kilpatrick Street in July 1965. They liked the clean streets, the fine schools, and the safety of Lincolnwood. Hal, an account executive at Doyle Dane Bernbach, worked downtown and figured he could get on the Edens and exit Ohio Avenue in perhaps 15 to 20 minutes.

On the first day of July, the day the family moved into their two-story Georgian, a stern middle aged red haired woman with piercing blue eyes, and glass clippers knocked on the front door. Mrs. Harkness, her young son Adam in tow, opened the door.
“Mrs. Harkness?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Mary Ann Yanstrom, your neighbor. How do you do?”
“Oh, just fine. A little frantic. Would you like to come in?”
“No. Thank you. I just came to let you know that that I have just planted some orange marigolds on the side of the house.”
“Oh. That’s nice.”
“….and boys love to trample flowers. It’s happened before and I don’t like it.”
“Thank you. Well, nice meeting you Mrs. Yanstrom.”
The door closed.
* * * * *

Lincolnwood had once been farmland. During the depression, the mayor got a grant from the WPA and planted thousands of elm trees throughout the village. Well to do Chicagoans, mostly Irish Catholics and Germans, moved into Lincolnwood. They built imitation English cottages and colonial, boxy, all brick houses. Restrictive housing kept the undesirables out. After World War Two, the Jews moved in and shook up the architectural landscape. They constructed ranch houses with diamond ornamented garage doors, bi-levels with hygienically clean front lawns. Weeds, trees, dandelions were extinguished.
In the winter, the snow fell on Lincolnwood. Within hours, driveways were shoveled, walkways cleared, salt was poured. By Lincolnwood law, no household could leave its sidewalk un-shoveled.

In the spring of 1967, the rains and the violent thunderstorms pushed their way across the upper Midwest. Tornadoes tore out Chicago’s negro south side, ripped down houses, businesses and trailer parks in other areas of Chicagoland. But solid, stone- faced Lincolnwood survived every storm in stolid gracefulness. The power stayed on. The windows never cracked. The composure of the population remained composed.

In the summer, the humidity and the heat made the outdoors a jungle. Inside almost every home in Lincolnwood, the windows were pulled shut, the shades and drapes were drawn closed. The awnings unfurled. The air conditioning went on, and the entire village hummed a song of somnambulant coolness.

The fall came and the leaves fell. Vast armies of Mexican gardeners and village elders brought out rakes and crammed the debris into steel drummed waste-cans. Red, gold and yellow leaves stayed on the branches for just a week or so. Later, they fell down on the sidewalks and lawns and were buried for eternity in bonfires.
# # # #

Mrs. Yanstrom lived behind the closed shutters of her yellow brick Georgian house. She had two sons: grim faced, buzz cut fascists who wore short sleeved button down shirts with the tails sticking out. They had blonde hair and green eyes and walked from car to front door, front door to car, never uttering a hello or good-bye to the Harknesses.

For five years after the Harknesses moved to Kilpatrick, Mrs. Yanstrom never once opened the white shutters that covered her living room windows. The Harkness boys, Adam and Gary, grew up and turned 10 and 8 respectively. One day, Gary, got on his bike and rode across Mrs. Yanstrom’s marigolds. It was an accident. Gary was retarded and didn’t know any better.
Like the sudden invasion of the German army into Poland which instigated World War Two, Mrs. Yanstrom and her two boys poured out of the house and chased Gary off of the flowers. Gary, frightened and confused, pedaled his bike away, hit a bump on the sidewalk ,flew off and bumped his head on the sidewalk. He was bleeding and crying.

Twenty feet away, Mrs. Yanstrom and the boys picked up the injured marigolds and poured water on the bruised leaves and flower petals. Mrs. Yanstrom angrily eyed her flowers and shook her head in disbelief. Her black Rotweiller, Heinrich, crouched mournfully over the ruined flowers.

Meanwhile, Gary ran into the house, holding his shirt- sleeve against his bleeding eyebrow and crying.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy!”

# # # # #

At the May 1971 Lincolnwood Town Hall meeting, Hal Harkness got up to speak in front of the Board of Supervisors.
“My name is Hal Harkness and I want to say I don’t think they should be allowed to build a bridge over the sewage canal where Pratt Avenue meets McCormick. “

“Why? Are you against the bridge, Mr. Harkness?”
“It would bring too much traffic into the town. I have two children and I’m afraid for their safety.”
“Me too!” other voices piped up with objections to the new bridge.
“But wouldn’t it free up traffic on Devon and Touhy Avenues?” asked Mrs. Cohen.
“Sit down you idiot!” yelled Fred Hayman.
“You don’t have any children!” shouted Selma Frank
“You want coloreds in Lincolnwood? Just build more bridges, and they’ll come in and rob you Mrs. Cohen!” cautioned Phil Azzuto.
The Board voted against building a bridge. Lincolnwood still had half of a moat protecting it against the city of Chicago.
# # # #

In the winter of 1975, Hal lost his job. At the same time, young Gary was entering adolescence and becoming increasingly unhinged. Retarded, but seized with the onslaught of hormonal messengers attacking his every nerve ending, Gary went on violent rampages and broke glass, dishes, railing banisters. He pulled the toilet out of the floor. He overturned a fish tank and laughed as the glass and guppies died on the green shag carpet in the den. He lit a fire in the kitchen trash. He pulled the telephone out of the wall. He dragged burning logs out of the fireplace. He urinated in his bed. He urinated on the living room sofa.

Hal and Marsha knew that they could not live with this child. They took him to doctors, specialists, surgeons, experts. Nobody knew what they could give this retarded lunatic to calm him down. The poor boy, so beautiful in his infancy, became a passage out of a Jack London story: “”His eyes turned bloodshot, and he was metamorphosed into a raging fiend”.
Gary broke a window. Through the crack, weakly covered by Saran Wrap, poured a torrent of freezing northern air. The whole family shivered as the winter grip intensified. Spring may have been weeks away, yet the imprisonment of the Harknesses continued. Mental and meteorological torture sealed the family in a jar of sadness.
# # # #

Mrs. Yanstrom and her family prayed at St. John’s Lutheran Church up the street. As Easter arrived, the crocuses, daffodils and tulips came up in neat rows alongside the Yanstrom residence, and the blue shirted and neatly showered family emerged from their long winter hibernation to celebrate the resurrection of Lord Jesus.

“In Christ all things are possible” the apostle Paul once said. In hymns and prayers the songs of joy rang out, spilling out of the windows and onto the street below. Retarded Gary pedaled his bike past the church, unaware that a benevolent Lord was looking down on his creation as the celebrants sang of eternal life and blessings for believers.

The doors of the church swung open and the crowd of worshippers stepped out onto lightly traveled Pratt Avenue. Kisses and hugs, handshakes and “peace be with you.” filled the air on this joyous morning.

The three Yanstroms, Mrs. and her boys, walked a block south, past the green lawns, back to their home on Kilpatrick. They passed retarded Gary as he sat on the curb watching the water from a sprinkler drain into the sewer. Mrs. Yanstrom looked at Gary and then smiled at her sons, shaking her head in disbelief.

“They let him play down there, isn’t that a shame?”
“Horrible. Why can’t they find a place for that boy?”

”An institution. He belongs in an institution.”
“Yes. He certainly doesn’t belong in Lincolnwood. That’s for sure.”
They continued walking, these three, in their Easter best. A light breeze from the southwest ruffled the pink and turquoise hem of Mrs. Yanstrom’s new Sears dress.
# # #

"Incidental in Studio City" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

It was a clear, sparkling, blue-sky morning in Los Angeles. Ned Le Reve of Studio City went out for a walk.

Ned, his wife Stacey and daughter Kirsten lived on the quaint Cantura Street just south of Ventura Boulevard. Their house was rented, but it felt like home with its double hung windows, black shutters, white washed picket fence and Iceberg roses in the front yard.

Ned, born in Chicago, had moved out to Los Angeles some twenty years earlier to work as a production assistant on the TV pilot “Twenty Lashes” which starred Potter Palmer, an obscure Chicago comedian who was briefly popular in the latter half of 1984. Ned considered himself a real Chicagoan who grew up in Rogers Park, went to Senn High School and the University of Illinois.

Everyone Lives Near the Beverly Center

In the 1980’s, many young Chicagoans and New Yorkers who emigrated to LA moved to that section of Los Angeles near the brown concrete mass of the Beverly Center. The straight, ambitious, cunning, aggressive and creative aspiring sycophants…all of them… were drawn to an area built up largely in the 1930’s and 40’s with Spanish and Art Moderne flats in gardens of green lawns, ficus trees and Birds of Paradise.

Ned found a 1939 vintage two-bedroom apartment on Orlando, just north of Beverly. His roommate was Alan Blockkopf (block-off), a short red haired and wiry nerd from Skokie, Illinois. Alan had been in Ned’s Secrets of Sitcom Writing class at U of I. He was a connection of sorts. He had just secured a job as a runner on The Cosby Show and was full of advice.

Ned soon found out that Alan never shut up with his helpful hints about making it in Hollywood. A typical Alan comment: “What you want to do in Hollywood is send a postcard to any person you meet at a party and thank them for talking to you.” He was full of career, dating, eating, carnal, social, family and financial recommendations.

As Ned reached into the refrigerator to prepare himself a tuna sandwich he felt Alan’s hand on his left shoulder.” I never eat tuna salad the day after I make it,” Alan said. “Oh, Ok,” was Ned’s reply.

“ Your mother called today,” Alan said. He then added, “You should probably tell her to stop calling you more than once a week. You’re 23 now and she’s treating you like a baby.”

Alan had his way in the apartment with the arrangement of: the closets (he had two of three); the bookshelves (he had all of them for his own books); the keys (he had many keys but allowed Ned only one to get into the front door). Alan used electric air freshners in his bathroom. He asked Ned to used shower gel (not soap because it clogs drains). He paid his bills on the first Sunday of every month at 10am and expected Ned to do the same.

Alan imagined himself as a comedy writer, and he was hard at working writing pilot episodes for Mr. Cosby himself, though Mr. Cosby never read any of Alan’s work. Alan adored the sludgy Cosby’s humor and was especially fond of quoting the droll Jello gelatin commercials verbatim.

In 1985, popular music was recorded on “LP’s” (a long playing phonograph record). Ned would throw his LP albums around his bedroom. Tidy Alan stacked his music alphabetically in the dining room bookcase. If Ned wanted to find a favorite album of his own, he would merely get down on the floor and sweep his hands over the record covers. Eventually he would find what he was looking for.

This disorder was too much for Alan. He asked Ned to find a place to store the albums correctly. Ned said, “Like fuck I will.” The next day Alan asked Ned to move out. Ned was unemployed, directionless, single and had no place to live. In a sense, he was on equal ground with every other 23 year old in Los Angeles.

Liza O’Neil of Studio City

“People suck, you know what I mean?” Ned was having a dreadful conversation with another college friend, Liza O’Neil, a Los Angeles native who worked in TV and was fond of such phrases as “you know what I mean” and “people suck…. you know what I mean?”

Liza was 5’10 and had blunt cut brown hair which complimented her big brown eyes and tiny little ears. She was tall and wore baggy men’s oxford shirts and torn jeans. In Ned’s naive assessment of Liza, she was laid back. Unlike girls back in Chicago, Liza never wore make-up and the only tailored clothing she owned was a vintage man’s formal jacket and trousers which she wore to very fancy occasions like Dodger’s games.

Her beauty was compromised by her character. She was self-centered, self-absorbed, a slob who chain smoked and only dated successful fat comedians whom she judged were on their way up in Hollywood. Her leisure time was spent talking on the phone about herself and her failed relationships.

“If you want a place to stay…..” Liza paused after exhaling smoke, “…Then you can stay in my extra bedroom and pay me $200 a month. I live on North Golf Course Drive in Studio City and I have a really nice little gray house that I rent. I’m going to be working on a televised concert in Vancouver this summer. I insist that you move out when I get back in Septmember.”

This was Ned’s second taste of hospitality in LA. You were always welcome as long as you were needed. You were always welcome as long as you were useful. You could be cut out or fired or dropped, simply at a moment’s notice. The one in power reserved all of the rights to dismiss you. It was a tradition dating back to Joan Crawford and her poor, oppressed daughter Christina.

Love in Toluca Lake

One hot Tuesday in May, while Liza worked in Vancouver, Ned was unemployed and bored in Studio City. He had opened up the Hollywood Reporter and sent out his resumes. He had made some calls to his “connections” but found that he had none. He locked up the house and started walking east down Moorpark.

He passed Whitsett, and then Laurel Canyon, Colfax, Tujunga, Vineland, Lankershim, Cahuenga. Two hours later he had entered Toluca Lake, the picturesque and prosperous district– where the institution and sometimes human– Bob Hope lived. In this fairy land, mountains caressed rose covered cottages where little blonde tykes were watched over by benevolent nannies and au pairs and Mom never looked any older than 40 even on her 75th birthday.

It was hot, maybe 99 degrees, so Ned stopped at a gas station and bought a Coca-Cola. He almost didn’t make it to the soda machine. A young woman in a 1986 Taurus came screaching through pump area, her foot on the accelerator. Ned was merely an insect at the end of the woman’s hood ornament. He might have died right there, but he jumped on top of her hood. The woman slammed on her brakes with an expression stunned and sorry. She ran over to Ned on top of her windshield. “Oh, I’m so embarassed. I could have killed you. Let me help you down. ” She was an attractive if innocent looking sandy haired gal with a light blue t-shirt. “It’s so hot,” she said, “that I just wasn’t thinking. The sun got in my eyes.”

“My name is Ned, ” he said. “Stacey, pleased to meet you.”

They exchanged numbers and a few days later they were laughing at a French bakery on Riverside Drive that reminded Ned of the one his mom had back home. Stacey was really funny he found out. She was a Phoenix girl, who moved here to work as a comedy writer, but was supporting herself as a receptionist in a medical office in Toluca Lake.

Crossing Liza O’Neil

Three months after Ned met Stacey, he proposed marriage to her. But he was still staying at Liza’s house. The owner had blown back into town after an exciting summer supplying the refreshments at a crafts services table in Vancouver backstage at U2 Concerts. She had seen wealth and fame and power. She seemed to possess a new philosophical maturation.

“You know what I mean about working in our industry, she opined, as she smoked away on the back porch with Ned, “We work a few months out of the year, and then we are free but we have no money. So it sucks. You know what I mean? I wish I was living in Paris like I did in college. My parents gave me $500 a month. Now they don’t give me anything. You know what I mean? I mean they did buy me that white BMW but so what? I still have to work. You know what I mean?”

Ned broke the news to Liza about Stacey, a girl he really liked and now intended to marry. “That’s really cool. I’m happy for you. We all need someone. You know?” Liza was almost thoughtful. “So when are you moving out Ned?” She asked.

Only Yesterday

Ned had been in Los Angeles for 19 years. He had left Liza’s house at 24, and woke up at 41 with a 40 year-old wife and a 16 year-old daughter. What had he accomplished in the decade and a half since he moved here to work in “TV”? Or was it “FILM”?

One year he was a writer’s assistant on a game show. He hated the hours spent locked up in white walled windowless offices coming up with trivia questions. He quit.

He worked as a researcher on documentaries and checked facts for producers who wrote it into one hour History Channel shows like, “Noah’s Ark: The Mystery Rises” and “Hoover: A Man and a Dam”.

He worked in a producer’s office sorting headshots. He tried acting and ended up in a cult acting class where the teacher, Boris, fell in love with him because his stage presence was so natural and unaffected (and untaught and unpracticed and inexperienced).

Kirsten was a lovely child, and he doted on her. But Stacey had grown into a morose woman who resented Ned’s stagnant career and looked around at other women who enjoyed vacations, cosmetic surgery and weekends in Manhattan. Ned felt that he was lacking in masculine energy, drive or cruelty.

Softball

The only real progress he made was on the softball field. Every Sunday, he met Dick Raymond and other past primers for a men’s only game of softball at the Studio City Park athletic field. Dick was a bearded rebel who grew up in Berkeley in the 1960’s and was forever in search of the meaning of life as experienced between those three bases and home plate. “Ned”, Dick told him one day, “The only thing you need for happiness in this world is a good baseball bat.”

The Good Bat

Ned took Dick’s advice and went out to buy the best bat he could find. At the Sports Store on Ventura Boulevard, he pushed his way past the 11 and 12-year old boys and their dads to lay his hands on a solid man’s bat. A glossy label hung seductively on one of the biggest and best-looking bat models stacked against the wall:

“The Amateur Softball Association of America, headquarters in Oklahoma City, OK certifies that this “Louisville Slugger” model bat meets our standards for ASA Bat Performance.”

Ned immediately made eye contact with one bat. It was the “TPS GENESIS” whose advertising bragged about its aerospace applications and graphite, carbon, and tensile strengths. Lightning bolt graphics in enormous exploding letters promised the ultimate in power hitting for slow pitch softball.

Ned was about to take that item to the cashier. Then he spotted the $159.00 TPS POWER RESPONSE. A glossy brochure attached to the bat explained the enormous technological advances that went into this product:

“The strongest and toughest alloy ever developed for aluminum bats. In aluminum bat construction, the alloy’s “yield strength” is key to bat design, performance and durability. GEN1X, the strongest alloy on the market, is the first aluminum bat alloy to measure over 100 ksi (THE MEASUREMENT OF AN ALLOY’S STRENGTH). The result is the most technologically advanced line of aluminum bats to ever be developed. Years in the development process, Alcoa Research and Development Engineers formulated a breakthrough combination of Aluminum, Zinc, Copper, Zirconium, Magnesium and traces of Titanium to obtain this incredible strength.”

Ned picked up the softball bat. In a dance like configuration of ass out, knees bent he got into a batter’s stance. It felt good, him and the big bat. He carefully swung it and imagined himself as the greatest softball hitter in the world. Like Viagra it put a new virility into Ned. He had to buy it. He ran up to the counter and handed the cashier two hundred dollar bills. This bat might just change his life.

Unnerving

Alan Blockkopf had eventually become the executive producer and creator of “Whoremobile”. The MTB reality show starred a beautiful Playboy bunny who would pick one lucky male winner to ride (and do much more) in her car all night. The winner was selected from three guys who had to eat dead cat meat or drink pig’s blood in order to win a date with her. The supervising producer, just under Blockkopf , was Liza O’Neil. Here were two old friends of Ned who were now in distinguished positions were they could earn accolades and honors.

Ned felt diminished. College friends of Ned’s became neurosurgeons and Congressmen, CEO’s and Engineers, diplomats, designers and producers of “Whoremobile” but where was he? Ned was still poor Ned stuck outside with his hungry nose against the window watching the lucky ones inside.

He was desperate to prove something to himself. He would ask Alan or Liza for a job on “Whoremobile”. He just had to.

Nose Ring Central

“Of course you can come in and talk to us.” Thus, Liza O’Neil invited Ned Le Reve to visit her production offices at MTB in Santa Monica.

MTB (Music Tele-Broadcasting) was housed in a long, low slung brown brick building in a flat and uninteresting section of West Los Angeles.

Ned arrived dressed in his best “I’m still young, cool and hip” style that looked hopelessly out of date to those MTB employees who were not yet born when Ned graduated College. He was wearing a red 50’s style rayon camp shirt with the tails untucked, baggy jeans and leather Steve Madden sneakers. His hair was cut short and frosted blonde in parts to block out the gray. The receptionist was an Asian tattooed young man with nose rings and a laptop on his lap. Ned was buzzed into the offices of “Whoremobile”.

MTB’s architecture in Los Angeles is a circus side-show, a commercially calculating carnival of deception and pretense. Interior design here is fun, crazy and lunatic with an infant’s sense of decorum and the quiet subtlety of a Marine drill sergeant. Acid green walls and unadorned bare bulbs were accentuated by psychedelic carpets and linoleum violently mismatched. The intent: to express how free and cool it is at MTB. The result: it only served to make the Ned feel ill at ease and unsure. Big-framed posters of shirtless and muscular black men grabbing their crotches were advertisements for the best debauchery and merrymaking. This land of MTB: whores and thugs, killers and sluts, singers and salesmen, hell and hucksterism. This is what middle aged, white and nerdy Ned Le Reve saw as he walked down the hall to Liza’s office.

On the 10

It was 5 O’clock and Ned was stuck on the freeway. He was driving his wife’s 1986 Taurus, the one that had almost killed him years ago. He was hot, hungry and tired. He couldn’t stop replaying the ridiculous and sickening interview with Liza O’Neil.

“We like to talk about sex and food. You know what I mean? I mean do you know anything about the new MTB food channel FTV?” Liza said.

“I’ve been working in documentaries,” Ned said.

“We are going to Vegas to do a special with Paris Hilton. You know her?” Liza asked.

“Yes.”

“Well I mean if you want to move to Vegas, I could probably use someone as my assistant there. Do you have a car?” Liza asked.

She had put a tape of the show in the VCR and they had watched it. A tan, 22 year-old blond girl with orange skin peeled off her top and three guys jumped on top of her and the whole scene was blacked out by sensors.

“Why do you bother to show what you can’t show?” Ned asked.

“It’s the idea. They’re jumping on top of her and the audience knows she’s topless and everyone uses their imagination. You-know-what-I-mean?” She said.

“I do. And I think it’s asinine to tease your viewers with explicit sex and not make it explicit!” He answered. He lost his chances right there. Not that he wanted to win the job anyway.

“Well it’s been great seeing you again. I’ll say hi to Alan. He’s so busy. He wanted to come by and say hello but he just doesn’t have time. You-know-what-I-mean?” Liza said goodbye and walked out of the room. MTB had cooked her brain like a TV dinner left too long in the microwave.

North on Laurel Canyon

Ned was crawling up the one lane Laurel Canyon at the height of the rush hour. He looked out his rear view mirror and could see a brown haired young woman in a Lincoln Navigator. She was on the phone, putting on lipstick, driving, and drinking coffee.

His phone rang. It was Dick Raymond, “Hey Ned. I just called to tell you that the game is cancelled tomorrow. I was invited to spend the weekend with my friend Alan and his wife at their beach house in Newport Beach.”

“Oh, that’s OK,” answered Ned.

“Are you all right kid?” Dick asked.

“No. I just had a horrible interview and now I’m stuck in traffic. Nothing out of the ordinary,” answered Ned.

“Interview?” Dick asked.

“Yes. Some fuckin’ idiotic show called “Whoremobile”. I mean can you imagine me on a show like that? It’s like one step above porn.” Ned said.

“But very profitable. My friend Alan is the executive producer of that show. That’s the Alan my wife are going to spend the weekend with in Newport!” he said.

“Hey. I didn’t mean to take a swipe at your friend.” Ned said.

“No. I agree with you. It’s garbage, but I wouldn’t tell him that. Do you know he just bought a nine million dollar house in Brentwood?” Alan said.

“No, I didn’t.” Ned said.

“Well. He’s enjoying every minute of it. The United Jewish Appeal voted him Citizen of the Year. He’s a big guy now. So long. Have a good weekend Ned.” Alan said.

At last Ned reached the top of Mulholland, the mountain summit road that separates Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley. The golden haze of the sun was closing on a day full of ambiguity and yearning.

What he wanted now, more than anything, he thought, was to go to the park and hit a few balls.

"Hated Hill House" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

More than 30 years ago, in a town halfway between Los Encinos, CA and Riverside, Mr. and Mrs. Hill bought a modest ranch house in the sleepy Santa Tara Valley.

The newly named Hill House was a white clapboard ranch set back about 200 feet from Highway 14, along a beautiful apple orchard nestled beneath the Santa Tara Mountains. In its rustic and gentle unpretentiousness, the ranch looked like it might have once been a set piece for a 1940’s cowboy movie.

Santa Tara had only about 1,300 residents back then, most of whom were farmers, small business owners, retirees and migrant workers.

When Larry and Annie Hill moved into Santa Tara, they were a different type. Larry was a rugged, long-haired sculptor who looked something like the 60’s radical Abby Hoffman. Annie was the Joan Baez wife, who wore her long black hair with a headband, and drove a Ford pick-up around town with her three black Dalmatians. She hid her wealthy origins well. Her father had been a publisher of a San Francisco newspaper, it was alleged.

They had moved from somewhere else, perhaps San Francisco, possibly Berkeley, maybe Portland, nobody knew for sure.

They might have had anti-war connections, experimented with drugs, conducted all night orgies, or maybe they weren’t even married. They just looked strange.

I was 12 year old Edgar Evens, a boy who rode my bike past their house and wondered why such artsy folk would move to such a dusty dry town far removed from urban sophisticates.

I looked at those people and I wished my parents looked that cool. But my mom and dad were fat and Baptist, listened to Lawrence Welk and said grace before every single meal.

One blistering July afternoon, I came into my parent’s bedroom to find them lying lifeless on top of their king- sized bed. They had been shot up, and my mother was full of blood and holes. My father lay there with his eyes wide open and a red-river of liquid pouring out of his stunned mouth and onto the soaking crimson pillows.

The Sheriff came. Then the ambulance, and then the coroner. My seventh grade teacher, Mona McKinsey came, and she brought Pastor Clark, and pretty soon the good Pastor took me back to his place and I never went back to my parent’s house again.

The funeral was a week later. My Uncle Russ, Aunt Betty, and tons of cousins from Kentucky, Oklahoma and Oregon showed up. They said that my father had shot my mother and then turned the gun on himself.

KTLA-TV sent a reporter to interview me, but Pastor Clark wouldn’t let me talk. The Los Angeles Times called once, but then they didn’t call again. The Santa Tara Gazette reported the killing on its front page. That was something.

I went back to school, and finished the seventh grade. Then Pastor Clark asked me if I wanted to move into Hill House. The Hills wanted to become my guardian. I said yes, and moved into the white ranch house in the apple orchards.

Larry played The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. He had a studio where he kept sheets of metal, tools, paints and poisons and fashioned bizarre beings out of steel.

Annie worked as a guidance counselor at the high school, but at night, she drove 20 miles to study architecture at the local college. Her drafting tools, papers, and architecture books took up one corner of Larry’s studio.

A few days after I had moved in, Annie knocked on my bedroom door and sat on the edge of my bed. Outside, crows were circling the fields and causing a ruckus. In late afternoon, the gentle orange tints of the setting sun washed against the bedspread.

“Do you think of your parents, son?” she asked.

“No, not really.”

She fastened her deep brown eyes into mine. Her breath smelled of red wine and rosemary. The scent of chicken in the pot perfumed her hair.

“I’m cooking downstairs, and we’ll have some dinner. Just know that no matter what, I’m here for you to talk. Understand?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Yes ma’am! You don’t have to call me that. How about Annie?”

“Yes ma’am. I mean Annie……”

The eighth grade started again, and I went back to school. The Mexican workers came into town to pick the ripened apples. I would pass straw hatted kids my age in the fields while sitting on the bus dreaming of running away from Santa Tara.

Mona McKinsey was again my teacher and this year she began class by saying that everyone was so sorry about the death of my parents and how much I was loved by everyone in town.

I had once liked school, but the eighth grade was horrible. We had to study trigonometry and algebra. We had to memorize English and American history, and we were drilled in grammar and sentence structure. Every night, I spent two or three hours struggling with math, and I never seemed to catch up to the other kids. I was falling behind, and then I began to feel shy.

I started eating alone at lunchtime. In gym class, I was picked last for sports teams. My skin began to break out and every morning I would wake up and find that my cheeks were sore and ruptured with pimples and blackheads.

Girls were now growing breasts and getting bitchier. They ganged up in large groups and walked around the playground picking out targets like game hunters on an African safari.

I remember one bitch, Lisa Gettleman, who had freckles and brown teeth, but acted as if she were Cheryl Tiegs.

“Well, if it isn’t the town weirdo. When are you going to act normal again? You’re not the only kid whose parents are dead!”

Six of these girls were glued together, laughing and chewing gum and taunting me.

“I think he’s gay. That’s what he is. Do you know what a HOMO is?”

“Fuck you! Fuck off bitches!”

“Fuck you loser!”

They fled the scene of the crime and I ran to the other side of the playground and hid my head behind the thorny bushes under the cafeteria windows.

Larry took me for a walk with the three Dalmatians: Missy, Matador and Marvin. We walked up behind the barn, and into the hills behind the house. A couple of hundred feet along the trail, you could stop and see the whole town below. The air was cooler and the settlement down there seemed small and unimportant.

“It’s a toy town. Toy town with toy folks.” He said.

“What do you mean?”

“Little minds like dolls. They go about their lives and their small matters. You have to come up here and breathe some fresh air sometimes. Don’t swim in the town without coming up for air.”

“I hate this town.” I said.

“I know. I hate it too.”

“Then why did you move here?”

“I wanted to get out of the city. I had my art, and my wife. We just thought it would be better to concentrate on creating something. So Santa Tara seemed to beckon.”

“But its so dinky here.”

“But that’s the point. Annie wants to be a big fish in a small pond.”

“Why did you take me in?”

“Why not?”

“That’s not a good answer. You don’t just take a strange kid into your home just because he has no parents.”

“You were an outcast. That’s why. We took you in because we don’t like it when people are outcasted.”

“Great. You think I’m a freak!”

“An outcast. Not a freak! You can be different and come from difficulty and it don’t make you a freak!”

Annie got her degree and now she was an architect. She threw a party and invited some of the townsfolk. Her diploma stood proudly atop the fireplace mantle.

She didn’t design houses though. There weren’t any people who would hire her. Larry did, however, know of a man in Santa Monica, a radical architect who did weird projects like building homes out of sheet metal, plywood, fencing, and old tires. This future design celebrity came out to Santa Tara one day and sat out on the front porch drinking red wine in his faded jeans and dirty ostrich boots.

“This is our boy. Sort of. Edgar come and meet Frank T. Geary.”

“How do you do Mr. Geary?”

“Just fine. Larry tells me that you hate this house.”

“Yep.”

“Tell me why you hate it?”

“Look at it. It’s just plain and doesn’t say anything. It looks like boring people live here. These people aren’t boring—but their house looks like hell.”

Everyone laughed. Annie poured herself a glass of wine, and then Larry brought out some avocado dip. The architect dipped his potato chip into the bowl and sat down on the wooden steps of the porch, petting Missy.

Annie spoke. “We don’t want you to improve this house. We want you to transform it. I want people to drive out to Santa Tara and look at my house and say, “What were they thinking!”

“Now you don’t want all that publicity do you Annie?”

“I want whatever is going to make a name for all of us. I have a husband who needs to sell his sculptures. I need to find work at least as a draftsman and you need to get your name on TV.”

“Something for everyone, huh?” sneered the architect.

“We ought to be famous for something good here. The last time our town was in the news…….”

They had spoken the unspeakable. Crossed the line. The air turned sticky and silent. Larry took Annie aside and she went into the house.

Larry came out and exclaimed with renewed confidence:”If Santa Tara becomes famous it’s going to be from the new Hill House.”

There was talk of money in the house. Larry had an inheritance and a little cash to play around with. The architect was going to take on the project, and charge very little commission in the hope that Hill House would put his name on the map.

After I graduated from the eighth grade, Larry asked me to work with him in construction. He was going to help build the home, with guidance from his wife and the architect, and I could be the intern on the project.

The drawings for the house arrived in the mail. Annie laid the giant manila envelope on the dining room table, sliced open the cover and pulled out the blueprints.

“What is that?” I asked. I was looking at a window that was not round or square, but a trapezoid with cartoonish angles set against a façade of corrugated steel, plywood, plastic and aluminum.

“That’s our new house, Edgar. Isn’t it fantastic?”

“That’s the house? That’s the ugliest thing I have ever seen! How could you even build that!”

She laughed. She picked up the drawings and went outside to show her husband.

“Edgar thinks it’s ugly. That’s the point. We want them to hate Hill House. Then we’ll be famous.”

“You want to be so obvious! I don’t want to live in something that people make fun of.”

Larry put his hand on my shoulder. “All great art is despised when it’s first shown. I’m going to tell you about the French impressionists. Why, do you know the first time Renoir painted, people spit at his paintings? Van Gogh died broke. Picasso was despised. So were the Beatles, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marlon Brando. People– I mean average people– don’t understand great artists!”

I was getting angry. My teenage temper burst.

“You’re not building art! You’re building a house and it’s ugly and you’re pretending that you have something artful and it’s just so you can fool people so you can make money. It’s dishonest and you want to trick people!”

“Now don’t be a jerk! You don’t have the knowledge to talk about art. You will learn, but right now you have to accept that we are telling you the truth.”

Just as I entered freshman year, Annie quit her job at the high school. She had gotten some work from the architect, and had managed to build up a clientele based upon her association with the radical builder. The projects were money, they weren’t fun and they bored her. One of the assignments was to design a chicken coop for a neighbor.

But Annie and Larry’s house was now nearing completion. Just as the town had once driven by another house to see where the dead victims were, they now pulled up to gawk, to take pictures, to comment on our house. We were conspicuous and I was ashamed. Annie and Larry were town celebrities though, and they knew they had hit a nerve.

Larry came home one night, ran into the den and turned on the TV.

“Look, everyone get in here! KTLA has something about Frank’s new house in Venice. Robert Redford might move into it.”

“It looks like a retarded person’s playhouse.” I said.

Annie came in holding her glass of wine. “Yes, yes, yes! If that house can be on TV, so can ours!”

Workmen arrived every morning at 6am. It was impossible to sleep through the hammering, drilling, screaming, cussing, dust, trucks and sawing.

Mr. Geary hardly came out to the house. Great architects worked like that, Annie explained. They created, and then others did the building.

Finally, the house was complete. Standing alone in the apple orchards, with the blue-mountains as a backdrop, stood the architectural sensation of the year.

Folks could not believe the “genius” of the building. Some thought it was ridiculous, but most believers convinced the skeptical and very soon almost everyone knew that something amazing had come to Santa Tara.

“Looks like a tornado hit it.”

“Ugly as sin.”

“You don’t know beauty when you see it.”

“Fascinating.”

“Where are the loonies?”

“Does that weird kid still live there?”

Mr. Geary, Larry, Annie and dozens of friends came over for the housewarming. Vegetarian chili, white wine, reefer, scented candles and the barking dogs, it was California hospitality at its most sincere. I was a part of a new wave, like Surrealism or Expressionism or Method acting, and where I slept and shit now was a hallowed ground for the aesthetes of Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Soho.

They had taken me once after my parents died, into a home which was a sanctuary from violent America. I had been ripped open, left alone, orphaned, and these two rescuers had brought me into their lives. They would protect me, and nourish me, and teach me those great values that might insure my success in life.

I had seen greatness in the new art, the house that looked like an insane asylum, but who was I to judge? As unanimous opinion spread like a virus, I realized that I was destined to live in a home that was now on the map of celebrity residences. I could not object to what I hated, I had to learn to love what everyone else desired, and eventually I would desire it myself.

"Carmelita" a short story by Andrew B. Hurvitz

Just north of tony Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, within breathing distance of the ocean, an interview with an LA Times reporter was taking place in an elegant old Spanish hacienda home.

The lifestyle reporter, Liza Palazzo, sat in the living room of Margarita Lopez-Camilla, a Santa Monica film producer. They were talking about Margarita’s friend and housekeeper, Carmelita Sanchez. The Columbian born domestic worker was the founder of a successful health care program begun at one of LA’s poorest clinics.

“How does Carmelita feel about being honored tonight at the Biltmore Hotel for her work at the Crenshaw Clinic?”

The aristocratic Margarita put her teacup down on the glass coffee table. 46 years old, also a native of Columbia, she was born in privilege to the head of a coffee plantation. She studied film at UCLA 25 years ago and decided to stay in the City of Angels. She was now head of Caustic Productions, a film making company here in Santa Monica.

“Oh, it’s the highlight of her life. She is absolutely thrilled to be honored. Only 10 years ago in the little mountain village of Ciudad Sana, she started “La Flora” and look at what has been accomplished,” said Margarita.

Carmelita, the nueva Americana, worked for Lopez-Camilla as a maid, nanny, housekeeper, cook and chauffeur. Carmelita, the Columbian had trained as a nurse, and in Ciudad Sana she had started a health clinic financed by the sale of coffee, a tax paid by the growers to finance the hospitalization and medical care of their workers.

“May I ask Carmelita a question?” asked the reporter, a solicitous and still young acting girl of 33. Palazzo, with red hair, faded jeans, 70’s sneakers and fashionably quirky gelled hair tousled in every direction emitted the very essence of hip in contrast to Margarita’s patrician being.

“Of course. Carmelita, can you come in here?” Lopez Camilla yelled .

The French doors, which led out into the lavender bush and lemon tree garden, burst open and five year old Zoe ran in with Abraham, a lethargic Basset hound. “Mommy, mommy Carmelita is going to take me to get ice cream!” Carmelita ran behind the child, breathless. “Sinõra, I told her no. But she wants to go.”

The reporter smiled at the child, a courtesy so often extended without sincerity, to impress a parent. “What’s your favorite flavor Zoe?” the reporter asked as if the question were of supreme philosophical import. “I don’t know” Zoe answered.
“That’s not very nice Zoe.” Lopez Camilla instructed. “You like Rocky road. Tell Ms. Palazzo that’s what you like.”

“I don’t know if this is a good time for your Carmelita,” said Palazzo.

“It’s a fine time for her. She doesn’t start dinner until 5.30,” said Margarita. “Zoe–Go play with your Barbie dolls honey. You cannot have ice cream before dinner. Let the grown ups have some private time.” Zoe nodded in compliance with the request and walked out sucking her index finger and dragging a pink security blanket.

Carmelita was sweating and felt embarrassed. She entered the high sanctuary of the living room with its tea service, high-beamed ceiling, floral sofas, and symmetry in a filthy t-shirt and dusty jeans. She grabbed a napkin and wiped her face and poured herself a glass of water. There were parcels stacked atop a rigid high back chair against the wall. Margarita removed them and sat down. “Yes ma’am. What would you like to know?” Carmelita asked.

“How long have you worked with the clinic?” the reporter asked.

“Oh, let’s see. I think five years,” she answered.

“No dear,” Lopez-Camilla interrupted. “You came to the US in 1993 and you worked there only six months when I met you.”

“Oh, you’re right Madam. It’s over eight years.”

Palazzo wrote down Carmelita’s answer. “How did you approach Councilwoman Herrera and convince her to enact “La Flora” in that community?”

“I introduced her to Councilwoman Herrera.” Lopez-Camilla answered.

“So next Friday you and the Councilwoman and the entire clinic are going to be honored at the Biltmore and you will receive an award for outstanding community service. How does that feel?”

“An honor. I feel not so big for so great a recommendation,” Carmelita said.

A child’s piercing scream filled the room. Carmelita bolted from the room and ran to find Zoe while the mother sat calmly. She came back holding Zoe who was crying and holding her nanny tightly. “I’m sorry. She fell down and hurt her knee. I have to go put band-aid on it. Don’t cry honey. Don’t cry my little Zoe!” Nanny and child left the room while Lopez-Camilla poured honey into a fresh cup of Earl Gray. “More tea Liza?”

“Oh, no thank you. I feel like I’m here on the worst day of your life!” the reporter said.

“You’re almost right! First my husband smashed his new Audi as he was pulling out of the driveway. He was on his way to a meeting with Arturo Herrera to discuss a new Angelina Jolie project. Of course, he missed the meeting. He was so upset. Now I have an injured daughter. Can you forgive me?”

Ms. Palazzo stood up. “No. I’ve been here too long. I think I’ve gotten enough. Thank you so much for your time. I know the Chandlers appreciate this. They really think the world of you.”

“I hope,” added Margarita, “that we’ll see you at the Hollywood Film Awards on Sunday. My husband is getting an award as well for ‘The New Hee Haw Show.’ Lopez Herrera could not resist the plug.

Ms. Palazzo slipped into her cardigan sweater. “That’s the funniest show on TV. I watch it all the time. What channel is on it again?

Mornings

Carmelita always woke up first in the household. She could barely sleep past 5.30am, her dreams tortured with kidnappings, killings and other unspeakable horrors of her Colombian past. She had come to Los Angeles to escape that. Though her bedroom was above the garage, to Carmelita it was a palace. It was in the back of the property, and between her and the main house stood a yard with a pool, surrounded by lemons, oranges, olive trees, lavender, jasmine, palms, a brilliant red bougainvillea and an always gurgling fountain. It was a Garden of Eden. A devout Catholic, she prayed just as the sun was rising and the first droplets of orange light freckled the lawn.

After she put the good book down, it was the beginning of a long day full of chores and busy work. She had to take Abraham for a walk. Then she fed the dog.

Carmelita fixed breakfast for the little girl, and attended to Zoe’s needs—like changing her from pajamas into clothes, cleaning her up in the bathroom. Lopez Camilla did not allow Zoe to wear clothing that had been in the dryer. She claimed that allergies from fabric softeners might harm the child. These were one of the many prohibitions the mistress of the home legislated.

Carmelita dodged a minefield of laws that made her role onerous at times. She cooked breakfast, for example, but could not microwave because that was “dangerous” to Lopez Camilla. Jorge, the husband, only drank filtered water, and Carmelita had to lug the enormous 5-gallon Sparkletts container from the curb to the dispenser. When the owners awoke, Carmelita had to again watch over Zoe as both Mr. and Mrs. exercised on step masters and watched Matt Laurer (an old friend from NBC) on the “Today” show. As Jorge showered, Carmelita had to lay out his freshly ironed suit, tie and dress shirt on the bed and slip quickly out of his room before the half-naked master emerged from the toilet.

In addition to the domestic routine, Carmelita worked three days a week at the Crenshaw clinic. Latina-American Congresswoman Hilde Herrera took a special interest in Crenshaw. Carmelita’s work with involved her in the politician’s rising career. The clinic had became a symbol of liberal complaints against so called Republican cuts in health care.

The Los Angeles Times had editorialized that the Crenshaw Health Clinic’s “La Flora” program was “perhaps the most promising vision of health care financing for poorer people enacted in the last decade.” The name was intoxicating, too, with its promise of fertility, hope and holistic lyricism. What Carmelita had given birth to in Columbia, had come to maturity in the Golden State. The powerful had quickly adopted this child whose true parentage was fast becoming vague.

A fight

“I don’t give a shit about her!” Margarita was screaming at Jorge just outside Whole Foods on Montana.

“Keep your voice down Margarita!” Jorge begged with clenched teeth. A red Lincoln Navigator swerved to avoid the feud in the back parking lot of the gourmet food store.

“I don’t have $45 to spend on a cake for her. How come she has a birthday and you remember and you forgot my birthday?” she asked.

That red SUV pulled up and a 35 ish blonde woman leaned out the window. “Hello Margarita!” she said with a perfectly capped smile.

Margarita broadcast an ear- to ear grin. “Hi Joanie! How ya doin’ kiddo?” Joanie waved a fingery good bye and sped off. The argument continued.

“I just think we should treat her to a cake! What’s wrong with that?” Jorge asked.

“Isn’t it enough that she’s having a party at the Biltmore? My god. She’s lucky to live in our home. That’s how I look at it. I’m too god-damned busy to make nicey nice with her.”

The Park along the Palisades

Blocks from the Lopez-Camilla home, along the Palisades of Santa Monica, runs a sweeping park promenade that overlooks the Pacific. Carmelita would often take Zoe for walks along the palm lined, tree shaded expanse with its sunset views, mountain vistas, joggers, strollers, and bicyclists. Despite the beauty, the carefully groomed vegetation, and the aura of groomed greenery, a sinister social illness plagued the paradise.

Scores of homeless slept on the grass, wandered the park. They pushed carts, muttering, lost, alcoholic, or in drug induced confusion. Who were these people she wondered? Where were they from? Had they once been young and loved and taken care of? How did they lose grip and fall out of society and how could they be saved? She thought of Jesus and his ministration. With mercy in her heart, Carmelita walked amongst the poor along these verdant paths at the edge of the American continent.

Walking in anger

Margarita walked home in anger. She would not ride back in the car with Jorge. He had made her very angry and to top it off, had taken his bruised Audi into the repair shop and had rented a white Toyota Celica. It was a cheap piece of crap, and she wondered if he had deliberately taken a poor man’s car to embarrass her.

Party in Hancock Park

A few nights after the fight in the parking lot, the Herreras held an invitation only party at their home in Hancock Park. It was an affair with black tie and valet parking, caterers, cocktails and scented candles. A backyard pool glowed with blue underwater lights and a pianist on the veranda played Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture.”

Margarita was bi-polar about parties. On the one hand, she could get drunk, dress up and forget her regular cares as she slipped in and out of banalities and polite talk with the hoi polloi of Los Angeles. On the other hand, it was deadly serious work, making friends and alliances with producers who could finance her films, and make things happen. Then there was the necessary work of pretending to care about causes, about the less fortunate, which earned her added respect in the community and increased her stature.

Margarita stood in the middle of a speeding intersection of political power desperate to catch a ride to the top. Scanning the room, she could see Nicole Kidman and Cardinal Mahoney, Mayor Hahn and Jennifer Lopez. Dolly Parton was flirtatiously conversing with UCLA’s Dr. Harvey Fishbein, who perfected cosmetic surgery for transsexuals in the late 1960’s.
Jorge walked up to his legal wife. “I just spoke to Hilde. She’s said KCAL wants to do a story with Carmelita.”

“Carmelita? Why would they want to talk to her?” she asked with one eye on the chopped liver and Michael Eisner spreading it on a cracker.

“Stop looking at him,” Jorge said. “Listen to me. Carmelita is the reason La Flora is working. Do you want to deny her that?”

“I’m not listening to you. You want to start up trouble here? You’re not gonna get me into a fucking argument.” She walked away and went over to shake the hand of Michael Eisner. She then segued into a conversation between Councilwoman Herrera and the head of the Crenshaw Clinic, Glen Kirsch.

“Hi there Margarita,” Glen said. “ How is Caustic? I read in Variety that you may get Salma Hayek for a project next year?”
She stuffed a olive tapenade topped wheat cracker into her mouth. “You read Variety? The head of a health clinic reads Variety? Ridiculous. Only in LA!”

He didn’t seem offended. “Of course I read it. Do you know before I ran the clinic I was a screenwriter? I think I have about six screenplays in my closet in West Hollywood. I would love to show you one sometime. I mean maybe when we all meet next week at the Biltmore.”

“I was just kidding,” Margarita answered. “ I’d love to read them. Why don’t you send them over to my assistant Jenny? We’re right on the Sony lot.”

“Did you hear that KCAL wants to do a story on Carmelita?” he asked. “Isn’t that fantastic! The clinic needs the publicity.”

“Why don’t you write a screenplay about a big phony social climber who uses your health clinic to seize political power and make a name for herself!” she said with drunken abandon.

“I don’t understand what you mean.” He said.

“I don’t either!” she said laughing and walked away.

Biltmore

On the day of the party at the Biltmore, Margarita Lopez Camilla had a million things to do. She could only think of her hair, her shoes, her nails and her aching shoulders. She needed to get a massage, but then she had to be at Caustic because the editor was working on a 7-minute short film about Carmelita and “La Flora” and Councilwoman Herrera was the narrator. Editorial changes were made at the last minute. Margarita told the Councilwoman that the politician who was the adopted mother of “La Flora” should be the star of the film. The poor housekeeper would now be demoted on screen to supporting player.

That day Carmelita was her usual happy and calm self. She barely thought about her impending moment of fame on the stage that night.

Other domestic crises occupied her. The dog had shit on the leather sofa in the library. Carmelita was rushed to clean it up and spray disinfectant on the stain.

At 4 pm, Lopez-Camilla called from the 405 freeway and asked Carmelita to run out to the drugstore to buy a Lancome powder. At 5.30pm they all were supposed to leave to go downtown to the ceremony, and time was running out. Carmelita carried the cell phone with her and got into the car to drive over to buy the missing make up. As she pulled into the parking lot, the phone rang again and Lopez-Camilla said Carmelita would have to stop off at a shoe repair shop to retrieve Madam’s shoes and then to the dry cleaners to pick up the freshly cleaned gown. All of these orders came in the final hours. and Carmelita would have almost no time and preparation for her own night of honor.

A Little Bowl of Soup

As Margarita Lopez-Camilla dressed, Carmelita heated up some vegetable soup in the kitchen. Little Zoe was with Daddy in the den. The aroma of food soon filled the house. Carmelita eagerly poured herself a bowl and sat down to hurriedly ingest a few spoonfuls. It was the first time she had eaten all day.

Lopez-Camilla emerged in an exquisite black sequined gown, her red glossy lips contrasting with slicked back hair and a powdery face. She sniffed the air. “What are you doing Carmelita?”

“Huh?” asked Carmelita.

“I asked WHAT- ARE- YOU- DOING!” she yelled. “It smells awful!”

Jorge came into the kitchen. “What’s wrong? Why are you yelling at her Margarita?” he asked.

“She is cooking! My clothes, your clothes, are all going to smell like soup! How can you be so STUPID to cook food when we are all dressed and ready to go to an event at the Biltmore! My god, when people kiss me they will smell god-damned food!”

“I’m sorry ma’am. I haven’t eaten a thing. I run around all day, and I’m hungry.” She said.

Margarita grabbed a dish-towel off the counter and shoved it into Carmelita’s nose. “That’s what you smell like. A cook in a kitchen! That’s what we all smell like.”

The Moment

A hundred people were gathered in a mini-ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel. Some came from the clinic, working class Latinos, wearing glitzy dresses with big shoulder pads and enormous sparkling jewelry. There were also political people: Councilwoman Herrera and her husband, the Mayor and a couple of news people from TV and the print world. The esteemed publicist Gretchen Ungar was there. She had been hired by Margarita to promote “La Flora” and orchestrate a campaign to promote the Caustic Films and it’s pet cause—health care for the poor.

Later on, Councilwoman Herrera spoke of La Flora and the exciting new concept of financing health care clinics in Los Angeles and eventually in every state. “We are simply too poor in funding to continue our wasteful ways of the past and La Flora returns to the working people the care they so rightly deserve.” This line drew great applause from the crowd.

Margarita Lopez-Camilla addressed the audience. “My dear little friend Carmelita whose idea has now founded a movement to be led by the great Councilwoman Hilde Herrera.” She then introduced the short film with its quick cuts of Ciudad Sana. The audience viewed images of poor men and women of Columbia entering a health clinic, getting inoculated, filling prescriptions and smiling. A few remarked uncharitably that it looked like a propaganda piece.

At the end of the evening, Carmelita went to the rest room and emerged in a back hall behind the ballroom. Glen Kirsch ran up to her and kissed her. “You look beautiful tonight. You really deserve this honor. Thank you for what you’ve done.”

“Oh, Glen. My pleasure. I cannot take all the credit. You, the clinic and Ms. Herrera and Margarita; you all share in this honor,” she said.

“Did you like the film?” he asked.

“Oh, very much,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”

“I just thought they would talk more about you. I think most of it was about the Councilwoman,” he said. Glen patted Carmelita on the shoulder and walked back into the ballroom.

He went straight over to Margarita, sitting on the edge of the stage and smiling wearily into space.

“I just spoke to Carmelita”, he said. “I hope I’m not going to upset you. But I think she thought she should have been the star and that you didn’t feature enough of her in the movie. That’s what she thinks.”

Lopez-Camilla froze up. Her smile and tightly pressed lips went into defense mode. “Oh, I think she’s tired. She’s done so much for us. I wouldn’t worry about it. Where is she by the way?”

“I saw her back near the janitor’s area or the rest room,” he said.

Lopez-Camilla, poisoned with Glen’s indictment, went looking for Carmelita. The guests were now leaving, and Councilwoman Herrera stopped by to say good night. “I’m leaving Glen. Thank you for everything. Where’s my little Carmelita? I want to see her before I leave?” she said.

Glen answered, “She’s with Margarita back there.” Lopez-Camilla was indeed sighted talking to Carmelita. As Ms. Herrera drew closer she could sense unpleasantness.

Lopez Camilla yelled at Carmelita. “We’ll discuss it later! You’re not going to ruin my evening. I know what Glen told me so don’t lie to me!” Margarita grabbed Carmelita’s ear and pulled her against the cinder block wall.

“You’re hurting me! I don’t know what you’re talking about! Stop it!” Margarita maintained her sharp nailed hold on Carmelita’s lobe. In desperation to free herself, Carmelita took her rigid and powerful right hand and slapped Margarita across the face.

Margarita looked stunned and dropped her hand.

“May the Lord forgive me and have mercy on you. You are a fucking bitch. You will not treat me this way again,” said Carmelita. The shaken socialite almost lost her balance in the assault. Carmelita hit and ran out of the ballroom. The Councilwoman arrived just as the incident ended.

“What’s going on? Are you all right Margarita?” asked the Councilwoman.

“Yes, yes. It’s OK.” Margarita said. “I guess if you don’t make a film they like then you get a slap in the face. That’s how friends in Hollywood repay you. Well, we know what we’ve done for her and this is her moment of fame so I guess she feels entitled.”

Ms. Herrera took Margarita’s hand. “Oh, I’m sorry Margarita. Let’s talk in the morning. I spoke to David Geffen last night and he is very interested in La Flora. Let’s talk tomorrow.”