The Twelve O'clock Chapters 61-74

61.

The next morning when I reported for work, the King was waiting for me, obviously angry. “She (meaning Billie) told me off in front of my friends,” he said, his face twitching nastily, “Don’t ever let her do that to me again.”

“You were harassing her,” I said.

“My business, not yours,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I love her.”

His eyes narrowed. “You’ve got guts,” he said. “Which I admire.” Then acting as if he thought he was doing Billie and me a big favor: “I also intend to apologize to her.”

“Not necessary,” I said.

“My responsibility,” he said sharply. We stared at one another until I said I was sorry she’d embarrassed him. When his spirit seemed to brighten, I told him how anxious I was to get started on the Periwinkle feasibility study. ”Provided you still want me to do it?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t, did I?” he said, again sharply.

“How about tomorrow? Can I start tomorrow? Would it be okay if I drove down to Periwinkle tomorrow to look at the property? Is that okay?”

“Sure, it’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be okay?” he said sharply. “I’ll notify my father you’re coming.” He buzzed Shiller, asked him if the Periwinkle file was ready for me.

The briefcase I got from Shiller contained copies of Perwinkle deeds, soil analyses, drainage surveys, old and recent maps of cultivated areas, previous appraisals and feasibility studies, estimates of the purchasing power and buying patterns in the surrounding area, notes on housing stock, commercial and industrial availabilities, price ranges, plantings, farming yields, per capita income, etc.

There was also a thick file on Kenneth Leonard Conrad, the King’s father, tracing him from his birthplace in Sidney, Australia, to London to Philadelphia, where he met and married Mary Elizabeth Ryan, re-named Mary Joseph at the convent. Kenny, the King, was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He was nineteen months old, when the family moved to Connecticut and settled in a small clapboard house on Fourth Street in West Cayslip. Five and a half years later, as I’ve previously reported, nine weeks after Kenny’s seventh birthday, Leonard packed his clothes and taro charts and disappeared, breaking poor Mary Elizabeth’s heart, as I’ve also reported. In addition, Leonard’s file contained photographs of floral-clad Tahitian women, plus self-photographs taken in various countries as he toured the world, searching for his lost magic, which ironically he found at the end of his journey on a Periwinkle hill.

During my five-hour trip to Periwinkle Leonard’s reputation as a magic maker was hanging over my head. How can I compete with a guy who claims to be in regular contact with space ships? It’s a wonder my anxiety about meeting him didn’t distract me into a major car crash. The route south from Los Angeles was heavily-trafficked, with intermittent speed-ups and slow-downs that produced numerous traffic jams, the worst of which were a four-car collision and helicopter rescue outside Glendale and an Orange County police chase that backed up traffic for more than fifteen miles.

Within minutes after I arrived at Periwinkle and parked VIV on the narrow parking strip inside the property’s wood-picket gates, Leonard came limping out of his small house’s screened-in porch. A victim of feet-numbing neuropathy, he’d been sitting in a rocking chair, waiting for me. He was 76, he said, twenty-three years older than the King. None of the photographs I’d been given looked anything like him. The most recent, he told me later, he’d taken thirty-two years ago in India, at age 44, when he had long brown hair that he wore in a ponytail, typical of the era, as photographs of the1970’s show. In the most flattering photo of him he was as lean and trim as his son is today, had a slim, Errol Flynn moustache, and was wearing a narrow tie, a dark blue one-button sports coat, and gray or tan stove-pipe legged pants.

Now, on the day I met him, he was stooped and overweight, had a potbelly and a flabby double chin, his nose had thickened, and the corners of his crack-lipped mouth were damp with saliva. The thick hair on his head had been replaced by salt-and-pepper stubble across his scalp and down his long sideburns. A dense gray-black beard covered his chin, jaw, and portions of his neck. His formerly white, even teeth (as shown in the 1970 photographs) were chipped and stained, and his breath was intensely sour. He was wearing tinted bifocals and said a doctor had recently told him he needed a cataract operation. His hands were trembling. Did he have Parkinson’s? I asked. His answer was “maybe.”

Yet he hadn’t lost his big, very big, ingratiating grin. That grin, as soon as he turned it on, made friends and visitors like me smile and laugh with him, no matter how anxious we might feel about his poor physical condition.

You ask what kind of outfit he was wearing. Tattered jeans that were worn out from too many washings and a faded yellow tee-shirt under a brown tweed jacket with a wrinkled single vent at its back. Buttoned, the jacket was so tight Leonard winced every time he took a step, while his vent flapped up in a raised stabilizer position as if he was readying a spectacular magic trick to soar upward into the sky.

Living on the property in addition to him, he said, were four old guys with no other place to go. Two of them, Louie and Victor, he’d met in Las Vegas; Eddie he’d met in Palm Desert, and Olaf in Ojai. All four were homeless and broke, too old and weak to hold down jobs, and waiting for someone to come along to take care of them. Their heart-of-gold man was Leonard who said that often during his magic-seeking career he was dependent on people he didn’t know or hardly knew him, and yet they were kind and generous to him.

The four old guys were housed in two dilapidated shacks and shared an outhouse. In return for shelter and three meals a day they built large planter boxes, filled them with dirt, and grew vegetables for their dining table. It was a happy arrangement. If surpluses were produced, Leonard sold them to local food markets. The proceeds from the surplus sales paid some of Leonard’s planting expenses. The remainder was pocket change for his friends, Louie, Eddie, Victor, and Olaf.

We got into Leonard’s jeep. He gave me a tour of the mostly dry, mostly dusty, weed-covered acres. In the distance were mountains with broad swathes of greenery along their bases and thin veins of snow or ice at their summits. The air smelled sweet, and we both took relaxed, deep breaths. Leonard talked about his plans to switch his vegetable production to organic. “Future markets,” he said.

The last stop on our tour was the magic hill. Perhaps forty-feet tall, it appeared to be solid rock or hard slate-colored clay. Ladders, flimsy scaffolding, and various-sized platforms had been installed on all sides of it. “Me and my friends built them,” Leonard said. “Took us a year before we were able to climb on them. The platforms were the worst, but they’re stronger than they look. If you’re stuck someplace, you can always depend on them to keep you from breaking your neck. The ladders are okay, but we’ve got to do more to secure the scaffolding. Bring in somebody who knows how to design and construct it, for instance, which we didn’t, though Louie still claims he knew what he was doing, but we wouldn’t listen to him, or I wouldn’t listen to him, which isn’t true either.”

Leonard’s eyes shined with excitement, when he told me about the radiation. “Goes off the scale,” he said. He’d had some radiation experts from the Inter-Galactic Society check out the radiation’s intensity, and somebody by the name of Purtz or Turtz, who wrote a book about UFO sightings, make informal radiation measurements that exceeded Leonard’s wildest dreams. He showed me his logbook on the number of extra-terrestrial sightings the hill had attracted. Several steel cabinets were filled with Leonard’s space ship films and photographs, showing what he said were the lights and sky tracings of UFO’s approaching the hill.

“Staggering, isn’t it?” he said.

“Extraordinary,” I said.

“You’ll see for yourself,” he said. “Tonight, I hope.”


62.

Meanwhile, sometime during my five-hour drive to Periwinkle, the front doorbell rang at my Holloway apartment. Billie was home alone. She’d spent the afternoon writing a speech about global warming she was planning to make at the Forestry Club. “No breeze, no trees,” was the speech’s title. Two weeks ago a reporter from the L.A. Times had interviewed her. The Sunday after the interview the reporter’s article had appeared in the Times. Billie had received E-mails about the article from all over the country as well as England, Europe, and Israel. Aaron Meyerson, Israel’s most famous tree protector, had telephoned to congratulate her on her spirited defense of the forests.

The doorbell rang again. Damn,” Billie said she said, as she hurried to the front door.

“Hi, there,” the King said, smiling tentatively, as if he was expecting her to slam the door in his face, which she was tempted to do. Instead she politely welcomed him.

“I’ve come to apologize,” Billie said the King said, as he followed her into the apartment. His nervousness, she said, was so intense she could almost smell it over the slick after-shave lotion he was wearing. She intended to take a bath, and the tub water was running. She ran upstairs to turn off the water. “I just knew he’d try to overwhelm me with bath-taking jokes, when I came back down to the living room. I was wrong. He didn’t even smirk. Doesn’t that seem unbelievable to you, so out of character for him, which doesn’t mean he didn’t ask me questions about your career and experience as an appraiser.”

“I have great faith in him,” she said he said. “This is a strategic time for him to join the company. We’re in great need of professional help, and he’s the most talented guy I could find.”

Yet none of this questionable praise of me was recorded in his autobiography. In the chapter he devoted to apologizing to Billie, he stuck strictly to his outrage against her for humiliating him. “No excuse,” he said in the autobiography, “regardless of what she claims I did to her.”

The boyfriend (meaning me, I presume} was this close to getting sacked for defending her. And what about Miss Peevy,” he said, “wasn’t she pathetic? Getting a big laugh from the crowd by making cheap finger gestures at me, as if she was still expecting me to go to bed with her. Can you imagine having sex with such a woman? How did I ever do it? Now maybe somebody understands why I love fucking these damn teenagers so much, one of whom I actually married, didn’t I? Who would do something like that, if I weren’t sick in the head?

“Did I ever find true love, you ask? Sure, but I was too stupid and too selfish to take advantage of it. When was that? My mother, whom I rarely agree with, says I shouldn’t have run away from Lucy Spike, the mother of my daughter Hildie. Lucy loved me, Mama says, though she was so powerful and assertive she also frightened me. This I don’t deny, but what was I afraid of? Was she too determined and smarter than I am? I admit it was thrilling, when we won Roseland’s overall dance championship, but as soon as she told me she was pregnant, whatever love I was feeling for her vanished, which surprised me, and never again did I do anything I’m aware of to revive the strong feelings we’d had for one another.”

A tragic mistake, Mama says, and she blames me, which I agree with. Lucy was patient and forgiving, while I complained constantly about being trapped by the ordinary demands she made on me. Whenever we were alone, for example, where we should have been enjoying one another’s company, I was cranky or remote or both, until finally she told me she wasn’t willing to take such bullshit from me, and once Bruennhilde was safely and happily born, announced we didn’t have a future together, so we split, mindlessly, Mama says, because I preferred the financial agreement I’d concocted with company lawyers to the compromises I might have had to make if I’d persuaded Lucy to change her mind and marry me.
I’ve told you Mama also said it’s too expensive to tolerate poor people and then blamed me for the poverty they created for themselves, as if I had a choice to go against the free market, when the company wouldn’t last a minute, if I did. There’s no janitor in any one of our shopping centers who deserves a nickel more than what he contributes to the success of the organization. I admit Mama is right that poverty can’t be ignored. It has to be paid for. Either the company pays for it directly through un-free-market wages, or passes onto the community the costs of disease, poor health, substandard housing, crime, prison, abuse, tension, stress, which, in my opinion, was the most corrosive of all. Who then gets stuck with the bill? Mama as well as me and every other taxpayer who enjoys or takes advantage of this country’s fantastic benefits, unless you’re clever enough to do what’s necessary to reduce or eliminate the tax burden you suffer from. What was Mama’s reply to this self-serving crap? That she didn’t raise her boy to be a villain, but she did have a brother, my uncle, whom I considered the most brilliant person I’ve ever known. He managed to overcome this kind of conflict, didn’t he, by limiting the damage he did, while maximizing the good, and dammit, that’s my motto, regardless of how disappointed my mixed bag of accomplishments make Mama feel about me.

Of course, remember, I also had Wagner to contend with. Lucy, after all, was a faithful festival-chaser. This meant Hildie had sacrifices to make, when her mother’s scheduling conflicts occurred. Not that the King was required on such occasions to take over child caring duties, but, as he reported in his autobiography, he did feel obligated to be available to Hildie more often and for longer periods of time, no matter how busy he was with company business. In addition, during her first months in Brentwood, he quickly realized she was now more important to him than his commitment to his job, and that, he knew, was resented by some of his staff executives, who openly complained that she (Hildie) shouldn’t have been permitted to distract him from his corporate responsibilities.

These same executives also demanded the Siegfried twins be banned from the Brentwood estate. In the four days the twins stayed with Hildie before the King expelled them, the Siegfrieds’ transgressions the executives found most intolerable were not speaking when spoken to, sleeping, belching, and picking their noses in public, scribbling words like puke, shit, and snot on inside walls and other inappropriate places, shouting obscenities at security guards and other night workers, and whenever possible, which was almost always, ignoring what company elders told them to do. In short, they were acting like rebellious nineteen-year-olds with generational differences that seemed reasonable to them but contemptuous to the King and his executives. Hence, when the King asked for a vote, he got a unanimous verdict to run the Siegfrieds off the estate and forbid them to return. There also were ugly rumors (denied by the King in his autobiography} that the twins were seen having sex with Hildie in the King’s two-story swimming pool. Can you imagine such willful disregard of basic human propriety (if true, which the King says it isn’t). Was this the kind of arrogant conduct toward elders taught to students at Barkworth College? No wonder the King’s rapport with Hildie was deteriorating rapidly. Help!

Meanwhile, at my apartment on Holloway Drive, “the King was sitting on the couch. I’d just made tea,” Billie said, “when I heard a soft knock on the front door. Guess who? Lulu, of course, who’d spotted the King’s tomato-red Jaguar in the driveway and wanted to know if I knew who belonged to it.

“Me,” the King said, giving her a big little-boy grin. Her pregnancy was barely visible, but he commented on it immediately. “Very sexy. Turns me on.”

“The guy has no shame. She’s five-months pregnant, and she turns him on.”

Billie also said Lulu was giggling sensuously, and the King looked as if he was about to grab her and carry her upstairs to the bedroom.

To distract them, Billie said she poured second cups of tea. Signaling he wanted no more tea, the King pulled from his wallet a thin packet of photographs of his three youngest children, Jute and Morgan, age four, and Sumner, age six and a half.

“My treasures,” he said, eyes shining with pride. He then proposed taking Lulu for a spin in his tomato-red Jaguar. “She was delighted and borrowed a cardigan sweater from me,” Billie said.

They were gone two hours and came back, sporting satisfied smiles “Who knows what happened between them?” Billie said, “I suggest we don’t tell Dora or Howard.”

“Okay, with me,” I said. Which didn’t matter at all, as Lulu later told us, because as soon as she got back to their apartment she told Dora and Howard about her spin with the King.

“Fast driver,” Billie said Lulu said, “Scared I wouldn’t get home alive.” But she did, and immediately at Billie’s invitation Lulu brought Dora and Howard to our apartment to meet the King.


63.

“Remarkable guy,” Billie said the King said, throwing his arm around Howard’s shoulder. (Remember, I was still in VIV, heading south toward Periwinkle.)

“How do you keep these women happy?” Billie said the King said.

“Not easy,” Billie said Lulu said. “You love them. That’s the most important.“

The King reminded Dora she’d competed with Lulu to get pregnant first. “And you’re the loser, right?”

“Yes, but we’re still trying, aren’t we, Howard,” Dora said, “because that’s what we all want, isn’t it, for both of us to have babies as soon as possible.” Howard shook his head yes, as Dora leaned over and kissed him. “Does it embarrass anybody if I say we try to make a baby every night, and maybe five times on weekends, as long as Howard is willing, and he always is, aren’t you, Howard?” Howard’s face reddened.

“Five times?” the King said, flexing his eyebrows suggestively to signal he was making a joke. When nobody, except the King laughed, he began passing out the photos of his children, explaining who each of them was, how old they were, how often he saw them, etc., stuff, Billie said, he’d already told her.

Dora said: “Who took the photographs?

“I did,” the King said, expecting praise, I suppose, but getting none.

Lulu showed a photo of a boy to the King.

“That’s Sumner,” the King said. “Terrific kid.”

“We both want boys,” Lulu said. “Don’t we, Dora?”

“Wouldn’t mind a girl,” Dora said.

“A girl would be fine,” Lulu said.

“Fine with me,” Howard said, holding up a photograph of one of the King’s girls. “What’s her name?”

“Jute,” the King said, a big proud-daddy smile on his face.

“Jute?” Lulu said. “Odd name.”

“It is odd,” the King said. “Different. Celtic, I think, or Norwegian. Her mother picked it out, and I didn’t object. She has a cousin whose name is Jute.”

“This is Morgan, her sister,” the King said, handing Dora a photo of Morgan.

“Very beautiful, both are beautiful,” Dora said, passing the photograph of Morgan to Lulu who passed it to Howard, who compared it to the photograph of Jute.

“Lovely,” Howard said. “Wouldn’t mind a girl.”

“Girls are fun,” the King said, collecting the photographs of his children and putting them back into his wallet.

Howard scratched his baldhead that contrasted sharply with the King’s massive head of thick black hair. A skinny six-foot-two, Howard was two inches shorter and maybe fifty pounds lighter than the King.

“Hildie’s my other daughter,” the King said. “She’s 24 and lives with me on the estate. We’re not as good friends as we used to be. She’s a student at Barkworth College.”

“Barkworth College, never heard of it,” Dora said.

Lulu said: “You did tell me, didn’t you, (during the spin they’d taken in the red Jaguar) you have two ex-wives, right?”

“Right,” the King said.

“And that you weren’t married to Hildie’s mother?”

The King giggled. “Nobody told me about partnerships like you guys have,” he said.

“You need compatible people to have a partnership,” Dora said, “who are lucky and patient.”

Lulu said: “The genius who keeps us together is Howard.”

Howard grinned.

“You’re all geniuses,” Billie said she said, which got everybody laughing.

The King asked Howard about their apartment. “How big is it?”

“One bedroom,” Lulu said. “We’ll need at least two more, when the babies arrive.”

“We’d like to buy a house of our own, if we could afford it,” Dora said.

The King said: “How much down payment do you have?”

Dora’s face brightened. “You have a house to sell us?” she said.

“Maybe,” the King said.

Howard flashed a warm buck-toothed grin at the King, as Dora and Lulu laughed and clapped their hands, which, Billie reported, got everybody laughing again.

Then three days later, when I returned from Periwinkle, I sat down with the King to talk about the Periwinkle feasibility study and give him my preliminary conclusions about building a shopping center on the property.

“I’ve been considering alternative uses for the land in case the shopping center doesn’t work,” the King said, “which it may not, because as we both know it doesn’t have a large customer base to draw from, and there are already two successful shopping centers within how many miles?”

"Four,” I said.

“Doesn’t look good for us, does it?” the King said.

That was when he told me he’d been researching the possibility of starting a new town, getting a cast of cooperative-minded characters together to develop a chunk of Periwinkle’s outer acreage into a self-sustaining, farming community in which all or most of its members’ needs would be provided for by community members themselves. That is, the members would build their own houses, put in their own roads, dig their own wells, etc. The land plus the initial capital, the seed money to launch the project, the King said, would come from him.

Now this was a puzzle, wasn’t it? Here’s a guy who claims he’s a firm believer in the free market and corporate capitalism, devoting himself to milking wage earners at the bottom of the economic pile, because that is where, he says, corporate profits originate. Also, he’s fought to stop or delay even the smallest increase in the minimum wage, while advocating tax reductions, tax breaks, and subsidies for upper-income individuals and corporations.

Why, you ask, would such a guy now be saying he’s prepared to invest heavily in what sounds like a utopian, socialist scheme that could ultimately undermine his corporate capitalist philosophy?

“To make my Mama happy,” the King said, giving me a wily smile, knowing she’d complained to me about his lack of sensitivity toward people he didn’t understand. Poking his substantial index finger into my chest, he questioned me in detail about the threesome. He was anxious to find out, he said, if they’d be suitable to manage his new town project.

“The three of them?” I asked.

“Sure, especially the women,” he said. “They’re exactly the kind of people I’ve been looking for to make the project successful."

I reminded him Howard was a stock trader at the Los Angeles Stock Exchange. “You don’t expect him to commute from Periwinkle, do you?”

He gritted his teeth and glared at me. “How dumb do you think I am?” he growled. I mumbled another apology

The King said: “I have a proposition they might be interested in.”

“Oh?” I said.

“A house.”

“A house?” I said.

“Which is what they’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“You’d provide them a house on the Periwinkle property?” I said.

“If I decide I want them enough,” he said, “it’s possible.” He questioned me in detail about their backgrounds, families, education, birth places, how the women had gotten to the USA, their British accents, the jobs they’ve had, how much money they were making.

Suddenly I realized I knew a lot about Dora and Lulu, but not too much about Howard, other than he was devoted to Dora and Lulu, that he worked at the L.A. stock exchange, and that Portland, Oregon, was where he was born, or was it Seattle, Washington? “Do you want me to have him checked out?”

The King, who’d been taking notes in a small notebook, snapped the notebook shut and got to his feet. “Nope. I’ll take care of it,” he said and abruptly departed, while I had this nervous feeling in my gut I was in trouble with him again, reviving in my head my adolescent battles over signs, footsteps, negligence, ignorance, and abuse I’d fought with my frustrated parents who’d invariably shout at me some version of:

Keep off the grass,
You silly ass,
That sign is more than a token,
Keeping greenery green
Air and earth clean
A speedy Gulf Stream
Is a promise not to be broken?
It’s more than just here,
This fine plot of grass,
You dumb, silly ass,
Green has a right to be green,
Don’t trample or stamp or kick it around,
Or footsteps will turn it
Brown, brown, brown,
Footsteps will turn it brown.


64.

I almost forgot. Did Billie go to Sundazi? Yep. On schedule. Dr. Minzeezi, Billie, Annamarie Elk, and the two other students (Gladys and Vivian) who’d volunteered to go with Minzeezi to his native village in Sundazi were aboard Flying Swift’s African special at seven-forty-nine at the L.A. airport.

Billie and Annamarie Elk had been fast friends since age six.

The Elk family owned almost a duplicate of the Cooper’s 900 square-foot Valley Street tract house on the next street (Rose), though the Elks and the Coopers weren’t close as family friends, except for Billie and Annamarie, who’d graduated from John Burroughs High School in the same class.

In addition, Billie and her then-boyfriend (later husband) Tim, were bridesmaid and usher at Annamarie’s wedding to pipefitter and clarinet player, Barry Swango, who’d gotten his high school diploma from Burbank High, the year after Annamarie and Billie were graduated from John Burroughs.

Billie said Flying Swift’s African Special’s twenty-two hour flight to Sundazi’s capital city, Equerto Nantes, with brief stops in Vienna and Cairo, was tense but smooth. An Equerto Nantes airport bus transported the group to Chanleeki in Douze Province in south Sundazi. There they boarded vans that took them eighty-seven miles to Minzeezi’s native village, Reftani, where, Billie said, they received an enthusiastic hometown-type welcome.

Minzeezi, Billie said, was enormously popular among the villagers, having been born and raised in a large, supportive Reftani family, who were thrilled he’d escaped from Sundazi and gotten himself a fine education and a career as a teacher in America. When rising tensions between Sundazi’s Muslim and Christian communities put the volunteers in serious physical danger and prevented the dental clinic from being built, Minzeezi quickly revised his plans for the village, using the monies he’d collected to build the clinic to pay village debts, buy books for beginning-level students, supplement villagers’ diets with vitamins, acquire small pox and other vaccines, and provide special care for new-born babies with aggravated birth defects, while Billie and the other students continued to work among the villagers, doing whatever Minzeezi said was necessary to make his revised program successful. Billie had expected to stay in Reftani for four months, but at the end of sixty days, as tensions intensified among Sundazi’s rival factions, Minzeezi told her and the other volunteers to get ready to return to the United States. Two days later, Billie sent me a note, describing the growing crisis in Reftani and asking me to pick her up at the L.A. airport a week from Saturday.

On schedule I was waiting for her in the L.A. airport lobby. As soon as Billie was released from customs, like actors in some romantic movie we fell into each other’s arms, hugging and kissing, as we stumbled across the terminal. Our hearts thumping idiotically (by her testimony as well as mine), we continued to cling to one another, skidding and lurching toward the parking lot, where VIV was waiting for us.

And that night what great sex! We hardly slept, if we did sleep, in fact, I don’t remember sleeping at all. She wanted me hungrily, as I wanted her, so who could waste time sleeping? The next morning, we were surprised when, still locked in one another’s arms, we looked out the bedroom windows and saw the dawn softly lighting the sky.

Coincidently, the day Billie returned from Sundazi was the fifth-month anniversary of her moving into my Holloway apartment, if you also count the two months she’d spent in Reftani with Minzeezi. Contrary to my fears I’d lose her if she went to Sundazi, our two-month separation seemed to bring us more solidly together.

Of course, the King didn’t intrude into Billie’s life until after I took the appraisal job with Shopping Center Enterprises. Billie also didn’t remember introducing the King to Al, or Al to the King, but the next thing we heard was that Al had taken the King to Schubert’s Parlor and Nate Binders Delicatessen on Fairfax. That Al was such a hotshot among the celebrities in Schubert’s as well as Nate Binders was so impressive to the King he decided he needed Al to join his musical extravaganza, either in the cast as mc or off-stage as a production consultant.

“I’m available,” Al said. “However he wants me.” Al then asked me to represent him as an agent in negotiations for his services to the King.

“Pass,” I said.

“Aw, come on,” Al said. “What kind of friend are you?”

I reminded him the King was my boss. “Do you suppose I can suddenly announce I’m representing you against him?”

“Sure, why not? If you were a real friend, you’d do it without making such a fuss about it.”

“Spare me,” I shouted, meaning, in plain English, fuck off, which Al understood perfectly. With a pathetic look on his face, he slinked out of my back yard, never to be heard from again for at least forty-five minutes, when he called, without guilt or doubt in his voice, to borrow thirty-five bucks to buy an incense holder from a guy who might be getting a part on a sitcom.

I wasn’t sympathetic, especially when he threatened to call the King. “I’ll tell him you told me to do it,” he said.

Three weeks later, Al gave the King advice about hiring a director for the extravaganza. He recommended the guy who’d sold him the incense holder. “What could I do,” Al said. “He didn’t get the job on the sitcom, and he does have experience as a director. In high school, I think.”

“You’re nuts,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Al said. “I’ll train him myself.”

Fortunately for the King he’d accumulated a roster of experienced musical comedy directors. Among them was Julian Sasspool who’d directed recent Broadway revivals of “Brigadoon” and “Bye, Bye, Birdie” and even more importantly, in case, over and above his powerful resume, he needed additional directing credit to influence the King, how about “Forty Second Street?”

Julian got the job. During the King’s two weeks of rigorous candidate screening, Julian’s qualifications had outstripped the competition, and because the King was convinced Al would be an asset to the extravaganza, Julian reluctantly promised to audition him to play the mc.

In six weeks Julian wrote the book for the show. He also brought four guys from New York to adapt the score, auditioned Al in the King’s office (not on stage) so Al was relaxed and charming and irritated Julian who was expecting him to choke up and eliminate himself. Two weeks later, Julian proclaimed to the King he’d had a great idea to energize the extravaganza. “The mc,” he said excitedly, “I’m making him a girl.”

“A girl?” the King said he said. “You mean a woman?”

“Sure, why not? Makes sense, doesn’t it? You’re not against women in the cast, are you?”

“We’ve got lots of women in the cast,” the King said,

“That proves it,” Julian said. “I know it’ll work.”

The book the King said he liked. He also liked the score. The adapters from New York hired an orchestra in L.A. to accompany and rehearse the extravaganza’s chorus. On a tip from me the King asked the Picassos to write special music for the show, another intrusion initially resented by Julian, but when he and the score adapters met the Picassos they were so pleased, particularly with Manny, they turned conducting the show’s orchestra over to him. In addition, the adapters brought from New York a high-priced stage choreographer and five dance coaches.

The question in my mind was who pays for all this expensive talent as well as their expensive travel back and forth from New York and elsewhere?

The taxpayers was the King’s answer, at least as much as possible, with an army of lobbyists, employed by Shopping Center Enterprises, appealing to local agencies, state and federal legislatures, for tax write-offs and other special treatment to shift the extravaganza’s production costs from the King and Shopping Center Enterprises to the general public.

When the Good Faith Foundation Against Corporate Favoritism protested to Congress against the federal advantages being granted to the King and Shopping Center Enterprises, a Congressional hearing was scheduled to investigate the Foundation’s opposition to the tap-dancing extravaganza.

To counter the Foundation’s claim that the extravaganza was a frivolous and self-aggrandizing publicity stunt that didn’t deserve tax write-offs or other special treatment from the federal government the King introduced a witness named Holyoke Tugfeld, the world’s leading expert, the King said, on international tap-dancing, who testified that the Babylonians had invented tap-dancing, that many Biblical characters, including Noah and Moses, were tap-dancers, that President Buchanan was a tap-dancer, that Simon Bolivar, Robert E. Perry, Alexander Bell, Saul before he became Paul, Lenin, Nero, DeGaulle, Socrates, Karl Marx, and Queen Victoria were all renown tap-dancers, and that tap-dancing and its protagonists, such as the King, deserved to be honored and rewarded as major contributors to world and American cultural history. To support this thesis, Tugfeld distributed to each of the Congressional panel members a copy of his extraordinary thousand-sixty-three page book, “Warm Hands and Itchy Feet,” that he’d taken fourteen years to write, after compiling a large warehouseful of data on the universal meaning and power of genuine, deep-seated, moralistic tap-dancing, that so traumatized the Congressional panel members they voted to give the King double the tax breaks he was asking for.

The driving force behind the King’s campaign to obtain tax breaks for the extravaganza was Miss Peg Peevy. She’d put the whole package together, the King says in his autobiography, after she discovered Tugfeld on the campus of Nibdock Tutorial College in downtown L.A. where his data warehouse was located. Phoning Tugfeld, she made an appointment to meet him late Wednesday evening, the only time, he said, he was available to meet with her. “Pretty spooky,” she said.

His office was in the bell tower on the warehouse roof. To get to it, per his instructions, she took a narrow staircase up to the warehouse’s loading platform. At the center of the platform were large double doors. Pressing the bell button on the left loading door, she waited until she got a signal from Tugfeld to enter the building.

The signal came promptly, and the left door swung open. Over the intercom he told her to follow the painted yellow line that ran from the left loading door through the central storage area to an elevator in the warehouse’s rear wall. The storage area contained stacks of boxes of various sizes that cast heavy shadows in the poorly lit room. “Very, very spooky,” she said.

The elevator, despite sounding sick and underpowered, safely delivered Peevy, still spooked, to Tugfeld’s bell tower office. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “Should have met you at the loading platform and escorted you here. The lighting is poor, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said irritably. “I’m fine.”

“I see that you are,” he said in a mellow, solicitous voice.

She laughed.

“Don’t know what I was expecting,” she later told the King. “Turned out to be a pussy cat.” She described Tugfeld as dark, thick-haired, pink-skinned, with a scruffy black beard and large, sunken, dark brown eyes. “Perfectly comfortable with him,” she said.

“How old?” the King asked.

“Says he’s thirty-eight,” she said. “Looks, in my opinion, much younger, and is obviously athletic. Played minor league baseball for ten years, part of one season, sixty-three games, in the majors.

“Which team?”

“Detroit, Detroit Tigers, right?” she said, apologizing for not knowing enough about baseball teams to talk sensibly about them, as she extracted from her briefcase a notebook containing the complete record of the places and positions Tugfeld had played, plus his batting and fielding averages during his ten years in baseball.

Also in the notebook was a detailed account of Tugfeld’s academic history. He’d gotten his B.A. at UCLA, his master’s from Oregon State, and his doctorate in comparative cultures at Idaho’s Snowdown University. This was his fourth year on the Nibdock’s faculty. His rank was assistant professor. He was teaching two courses in comparative cultures and one on arctic folklore. She’d talked extensively, Miss Peevy said, to the chairperson of Nibdock’s comparative cultures department, Olivia Roanoke, who rated Tugfeld topnotch as a teacher and researcher. His tap-dancing thesis, Roanoke said, was superb as were his earlier projects, “The Pigeon-toed Gavotte of Cooz’s Pieyard People” and “Inca influences on Peruvian Sway Dancing.”

The King says in his autobiography he was overwhelmed by the breadth and detail of the record Miss Peevy’d put together. “On such short notice,” he said, as he examined the notebook. “Who else but you would even think to do something as comprehensive as this? Unbelievable.” He took her hand and kissed it.

“She’s too much,” he said, describing in his autobiography the beautiful qualities in Miss Peevy’s character that she’d exhibited so brilliantly during her “spooky” meeting with Tugfeld – her willingness to take risks, her ability to think on her feet, her resourcefulness, her curiosity, and, above all, her determination to persevere until “she finds the best answer to the problem she’s made up her mind to solve.”

Miss Peevy also got full credit from the King for the defensive strategy she’d devised to track down Tugfeld and organize his tap-dancing testimony before the Congressional Committee. “She has such great talent for getting me out of deep trouble,” he said, recalling the strategy Miss Peevy had devised, when he first arrived in Los Angeles, to outmaneuver Claudia Titus and her parents who were threatening to have him arrested.

You may remember the seventeen-year-old candy maker who wanted to be a movie star whom the King drove across the country when he moved the company’s headquarters from Connecticut to California? Well, her name was Claudia Titus. That he’d nicknamed her Claudia Tits isn’t surprising, considering his record of insensitivity toward women as well as Titus’s spectacular bosom that she flaunted at anybody who even glanced casually at her.

When her parents announced they were demanding the King should marry Claudia, hinting she was actually 16 instead of 17 when he drove her across the country, or pay them $50,000 cash to compensate them and her for the injury he’d done to her person and reputation, the King complained to Miss Peevy that Claudia and her parents wouldn’t have a case against him if he’d listened to his mother who’d been telling him to find a woman to marry him. “What my mother says is true,” he said. “I need a wife to give me balance, to protect me from myself, after messing up like I did with Lucy.”

“Sounds risky,” Miss Peevy said, “unless you already have somebody in mind? Is Lucy available?”

He shook his head no. “She’d never agree to it. Wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

“Any other candidates?” Miss Peevy asked.

“How about you?” the King said.

“Me?” Miss Peevy said. “Why me?”

“Loyalty,” the King said.

“Loyalty?” Miss Peevy said.

“Who else is clever enough to show me how to get rid of these Tituses?” he whined. “They’re tormenting me.”

“Simple,” Miss Peevy said. “Pay them the fifty thousand.”

“Against my principles,” the King said, again shaking his head no, this time emphatically.

“Wait a minute.” Miss Peevy said. “Giving them fifty thousand is against your principles, but marrying me, based on your estimate of my loyalty to you, is okay?”

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” he said. “We work together, depend on one another, and I know from experience I can trust you. I can, can’t I?”

“As long as I’m doing what you pay me to do, sure,” she said.

“Compensation is not a problem,” he said. “You’ll continue to get your full salary, whether you marry me or not.”

“That’s very generous,” she said, smiling glumly.

The next morning Miss Peevy began an investigation of the Titus family. Through her contacts in Washington, D.C. she traced Dominick Titus’ career in the Army and discovered he’d been posted as a military attaché to the United States’ A.I.D. mission in Guatemala, where he met Yolanda Sarbo, then a credit consultant for the Wyoming Fruit Company. Dominick and Yolanda were married, after a passionate three-month courtship, in an elaborate ceremony at the A.I.D. mission. The Wyoming Fruit Company, Miss Peevy also learned, had paid the overall cost of the three-hundred-plus-guest wedding party. Eleven months later, Claudia was born, making her not 16, not 17, but 22-years-old, when the King brought her to California.

“You’re off the hook,” Miss Peevy reported to the King. “They can’t get you arrested for child molestation on the road or when you invited Claudia to the Beverly Wilshire, because she was already an adult and had the right to choose, of her own free will, to accompany you on the trip and visit you at the hotel, so you’re not guilty of any crime and you’re not obliged to pay them anything.”

“The Glendale house I gave Claudia, can I get it back?” the King asked greedily.

“They’re living in it, aren’t they?” Miss Peevy said.

“Yes,” he said, making an annoyed face.

“Could start them squawking again if you try to take it away from them.”

The King’s frown deepened. “This doesn’t change how I feel about you,” he said gloomily. “I still want you to marry me.”

“You do?” she said, staring quizzically at him, as if she couldn’t figure out what was going on in his head.

“I need you, and I need to be married.”

She attempted to smile, but couldn’t.

“Look,” he said, “ the $50,000 Claudia and her parents tried to extort from me is yours. You’ve earned it, and your job as my number one executive assistant you can have as long as you want. What do you say? Marry me, please.”

“This is so dumb,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“Will you?” he said, kissing her on both cheeks.

“Don’t I at least get my lips kissed?” she said.

When he hesitated, she yanked his head toward her and kissed him on the lips. “Not too bad,” she groaned, putting her arms around him.

They hugged one another clumsily.

“And if you want to get rid of me at any time,” the King said, “I’ll go, I’ll disappear, I guarantee it, just dump me, no fuss, no protest whatsoever.”

“I don’t intend to dump you,” she said, not understanding why he’d be talking about dumping him, when she’d just agreed to marry him.

“My mother will be very happy,” he said, and she was.


65.

“At last an adult,” Mary Joseph said. A fan of Peg Peevy since Miss Peevy first came to work for the King, Mary Joseph had observed Peevy’s repeated displays of generosity and love toward the company staff, and hoped her son Kenny appreciated how lucky he was that an adult woman was willing to be his wife.

The rumor that the King and Miss Peevy were getting married swept the office. Within minutes the staff organized a party for them. The greeter and donator of a dozen bottles of champagne to the party was Mary Joseph. When the soon-to-be bride and groom arrived, Mary Joseph gave a speech thanking God for answering her prayers. She spoke about her three years in the convent, saying how privileged she was to have done God’s work among the nuns and priests at St. Veronica’s, who were so kind to her, giving her wise and comforting advice that enabled her to resolve strong conflicts in her heart between her love of God and her maternal duty to her son, Kenny, the King.

The power of prayer, she said, was the driving force of her life. Otherwise, without prayer, her connection to God would be jeopardized, and her hope for Peg Peevy and the King’s future together would be diminished or lost. She asked the group to pray for the success of the King/Peevy marriage. We had thirty seconds of silence, during which any one who knew a prayer, or was able to make up a prayer, or reconstitute a forgotten prayer, prayed, I presume, then we gave Mary Joseph a standing ovation, as Peevy and the King swept her into their arms, and all three began to laugh and weep.

“Hail to the groom! Hail to the bride!” Shiller shouted, tears streaming down his cheeks, as the King, Peg Peevy, and Mary Joseph got a standing ovation from the laughing/weeping crowd.

When the group’s ovation finally simmered down, the King announced he and Peevy would be married in mid-December. “We’ve agreed on December 16,” he said to another standing ovation.

Mary Joseph proposed that her favorite priest at St. Veronica’s, Father Duquette, be invited to perform the wedding ceremony. The King says in his autobiography he was positive Father Duquette was a great guy and would have been a fine asset to the wedding, but that he preferred to ask his tennis and pinochle playing chum, the Reverend Ozzie Brickmanski, founder and chief pastor of the West Los Angeles Gift From God Community Church, to officiate at the wedding. This was okay with the bride, the King said. At least she didn’t disapprove, though Mary Joseph had trouble hiding her disappointment. The King said he begged his mother to forgive him for preferring his long-time chum over Father Duquette and sent a large donation to St. Veronica’s on behalf of Mary Joseph.

The best man was Ed Shiller. The King’s daughter, Hildie, was Peg Peevy’s maid of honor. The Reverend Brickmanski’s ceremony, as requested by the King, was straightforward and simple, not much more than “do you take this man, do you take this woman, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Over in about 16 minutes, the rush to husband-and-wifehood was a major disappointment to Mary Joseph. “No time for God’s grace,” she said. “That reverend should be ashamed of himself.”

At the church, after the ceremony, the first of many banners was unfurled, hailing Peevy as the Queen, the logic being if the groom’s the King, the bride must be the Queen. Wedding guests laughingly bowed and curtsied to the bride, addressing Peevy as Queen Peg, or your majesty, or your royal highness, as a blushing, overwhelmed Queen Peg tried futilely to stop “the Queen bit,” which, despite her protests, continued for two days until the King and the Queen departed on their honeymoon.

Honeymoon? The King had booked Peg and himself, with her consent, for six nights into the Horizon House, a handsome, lavishly furnished thirty-room hotel on the ocean in Laguna Beach. This was sweet time for both of them, and gradually Peg began to feel she was in love with the King. Early mornings as well as just before sunset they took leisurely walks along the beach, holding hands and nuzzling kisses at one another. They also swam a lot. The King, a nervous swimmer, jumped in and out of the shallow end of the hotel’s 120-foot swimming pool, while Peg, a powerful swimmer and multiple trophy winner, swam daily laps in the pool and most afternoons long distance in the ocean.

The King reports in his autobiography how much he admired Peg’s swimming prowess. Standing on the beach or beside the pool, he watched as she churned fearlessly in the water, contrasting her smooth stroke and confident style to his own feeble efforts to remain afloat.

Source of those feeble efforts? This, the King also reports on in his autobiography. He was six or seven, he says, when his father and his uncles, except for his sainted Uncle Floyd, took perverse pleasure in kidnapping him, carrying him kicking and squirming to the marsh waters off Gerritsen Beach, where they dunked him, forced him underwater past his ability to hold his breath, as he struggled desperately to free himself from them and get to the surface. Their excuse? To teach him to swim by making him confront his panic about drowning, when his real panic about drowning was being drowned by them. What did they accomplish? Permanently squelched his desire to improve as a swimmer, instilling in him a strong fear of swimming that kept him away from deep ends of pools and confined him to skipping, with trembling lips, in the last gasp of waves as they broke harmlessly against the beach.

The hotel’s pool manager, a young woman, no more than 20, tanned and talkative, and also a powerful swimmer, offered to give swimming lessons to the King, who describes in his autobiography how shy he felt about becoming her pupil. The manager’s first name was Leaf, and the King was quick to make jokes about her, calling her fig leaf and maple leaf and new leaf and relief, which he thought was very funny, embarrassing Peg, who asked him finally to knock off teasing Leaf, because, she said, he was being disrespectful to her (Peg) and his jokes at Leaf’s expense weren’t funny.

Why, you ask, would Leaf offer to teach the King to swim? Wasn’t his wife, the Queen, a champion swimmer, perfectly capable of giving him lessons? The drawback was the King’s ego and hot temper. He couldn’t take orders from anybody, especially from the Queen, and swimming instructions were a form of orders, weren’t they, so he reacted badly, provoking an argument anytime she told him to do something, and that included telling him how to swim. Peg was happy to turn his swimming lessons over to Leaf for the four days they had left at Horizon House. “I can start him in the right direction,” Leaf said, though she still had his super-sensitive ego to contend with and didn’t expect to accomplish much to overcome his fear of swimming in the few hours a day she was planning to spend instructing him.

Meanwhile, during Peg’s afternoon swims in the ocean, she often could see the King and Leaf on the beach, peering intently in her direction. Sometimes Leaf would make gestures as if she were explaining or commenting on Peg’s form or speed, or on the condition of the ocean, its swells or choppiness or current or drift.

Thursday, the third day of the King and Queen’s stay at Horizon House, the Queen and Leaf swam a stretch of the ocean side by side. On the beach, at the edge of the water, the King waited quietly for them. Occasionally he’d wave to them, swinging his arm in a wide arc over his head. At dinner that night he told them how thrilled he was watching them perform so skillfully in the ocean, while he continued to feel stifled by it.

“Mind over matter,” Leaf said. “What I hope to do is get him to look at swimming positively, without the burden of his childhood experience. Your father and those uncles who did such emotional damage to you should be ashamed of themselves. Today you could have them arrested for child abuse, and they’d deserve it, wouldn’t they?”

The King proposed inviting Leaf to come to Brentwood to set up a company swim clinic. Sounded like a terrific idea to Peg, and she eagerly endorsed it. Leaf was flattered and on the spot accepted his invitation. She was divorced, Leaf said, had no children, and most of her family, including her parents, resided in Bozeman, Montana. Six weeks later, Leaf arrived in Brentwood. Peg Peevy volunteered to get her settled in the community, introducing her to Ed Shiller and others on the staff she’d be working with, arranged for her to be signed up as a new employee, found her an inexpensive furnished apartment on Lilac Street, south of Pico Boulevard, and put her in charge of the employees’ Olympic-size swimming pool, located on a four-acre site in Westwood, five miles from the King’s Brentwood complex.

Taking over full responsibility for the King’s swim training, Leaf met with him daily in the executive swimming pool behind the garages on the main parking lot. She planned, she said, to make him a better swimmer by reorienting his attitude toward swimming, which the King responded to quickly, so quickly she was able to move him, in the third week of his swimming lessons, from the shallow to the deep end of the executive pool. A month later she had him cautiously swimming the length of the pool. Three weeks after that he was doing laps, not too confidently, but very determined to succeed. In four months he was no longer afraid to stick his head under water. The following week Leaf concentrated on teaching him to breathe properly. By six months she’d convinced him to trust himself as a swimmer, which brought enthusiastic congratulations from Peg Peevy to both him and Leaf.

The next month the South Seas aquarium, its kelp, vines, and fish, were cleared out of the two-story tank that was the back wall of the King’s office. As soon as the South Seas water was pumped out of the tank and replaced by fresh seawater, Leaf swam swiftly to the tank’s bottom, then Peg jumped in, taking the King with her. Though he lasted less than halfway to the bottom, he and Peg as well as Leaf were exhilarated by his bravery. Throughout the following weeks he swam in the tank with Peg or Leaf, until finally he had his breathing under control and was able to swim alone round-trip from the cupola on the office roof to the tank’s bottom, always under the supervision of Leaf or Peg. Two weeks and four days later, nine days before Christmas, Leaf assembled the management staff at the executive pool, told them she’d decided to graduate the King as a full-fledged, accomplished swimmer. When the applause for the King died down, she tapped her belly and calmly announced to the stunned crowd she was pregnant and that the father of the baby in her belly was the King, who got a confused gasp from the crowd, when he proudly confirmed he was about to be a daddy for the second time.

Well, first daughter Hildie was furious, Peg Peevy wasn’t surprised, and Mary Joseph grumbled about heading back to the convent, a complete failure. “He’s out of his mind, isn’t he?” Mary Joseph said.

Sensing the crowd’s sympathy surging toward Mary Joseph and away from the King, Shiller, ever the boss’s faithful protector, said: “Steady now. We can’t afford to make waves.”

Hildie said: “This is so unfair.”

Peg Peevy said: “Am I supposed to take off my crown and disappear? No, never, I’m not the type, no matter what he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, which I doubt, considering his newest distraction.” Already a line was being formed to shake the King’s hand, while he was circulating among the crowd, brazenly seeking out his mother, Mary Joseph. Slipping his arms around her, he surprised, dazzled, disarmed, entranced her with a single whispered word:

“Grandma!”


66.

That same night in Periwinkle was half-mooned. Frogs, in nearby ponds, were groaning. Crickets, on the dusty flats, chirped. Bats flapped across the cloudless sky. The air sizzled with magic. “And more importantly,” Leonard said, “ radiation, so thick I can taste it, but then I’m keener than most in being stimulated by atmospheric changes.” He glanced at me. “You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Not quite,” I said.

“Will come,” he said, “provided you concentrate, get from it what you give. No free passes.”

“Nothing’s free,” I said, taking a deep breath.

“You make an interesting point,” he said.

Louie appeared. Tall and emaciated, he had trouble looking me in the eye, until Leonard introduced him. “Meet Louie,” Leonard said. “Number one guy.” Hanging on to Louie’s arm, Leonard shuffled down from the screened-in porch and shook my hand. “Fiery hours ahead of us,” he said.

“I’m excited,” I said.

“The sky is prime, crackling, throbbing with tension,” he said, pointing toward the star-filled sky. “Can you feel it?”

“Perhaps,” I said, “I do feel something.”

“Good sign,” he said.

“Ah, yes,” I said, scanning the sky like a co-conspirator.

“True magic,” he said.

Louie said he also was feeling true magic. “Swells my heart, shrinks my breath,” he said, breathing heavily.

“Deep breaths for everybody,” Leonard said, as Eddie, Victor, and Olaf joined us.

We all breathed deeply.

“Again,” Leonard said.

I took several deep breaths and felt wobbly in my knees from the tension.

“Are you okay?” Leonard said. “Your face is pale.”

“I’m fine,” I said, though my knees did feel wobbly.

The six of us, following Leonard’s lead, shuffled toward the magic hill. Handicapped by his feet-numbing neuropathy, Leonard rocked sharply when he walked, while I, impeded by my wobbly knees, mostly stumbled. Louie, Eddie, Victor, and Olaf graciously kept propping us up.

“Don’t worry about me,” I mumbled, despite being worried about myself.

The forty-foot magic hill was impressive. When I told Leonard I thought I could feel its vibrations, he and his companions applauded me. “You’re opening up,” Leonard said, revealing he’d had a similar growth experience the first time he saw it. “I knew I was home.”

Then I noticed the ladders and the scaffolding Leonard and his friends had built on the magic hill. Whoops, I thought, how will I ever manage to climb that, and if I do climb it, what will prevent me from falling off? Spotting my sudden fright, or maybe anticipating it, Leonard assured me the scaffolding was sturdier than it looked. “No tumbles have been taken, and we’ve been on it collectively hundreds of times.”

With a small assist from Louie I swung onto the ladder and headed upward behind Leonard. His confident climb made me feel secure, and the ladder itself did feel more stable than it looked. “Holding on helps,” I said.

When we reached the highest platform, Leonard waved toward the distant mountains, zeroing my attention on the veins of ice at their summits. “See, they’re purple,” he said. That’s not normal, this time of the year, normally they’re blue or silver. Purple means UFO’s in the area. Better get settled. Could be up till dawn.”

As instructed by Leonard, I’d brought a large pad and green, red, and black pens. “We’ll each keep score according to a scale I’ll teach you as we proceed, okay?”

“Sure, okay,” I said.

“Make any additional notes that seem appropriate,’ he said, his large hands cupping both his ears. “They’re definitely on their way. Can you hear them?”

I strained to hear what he said he was hearing, and from his companions’ rapt faces, they must be hearing. In addition, all four of them were feverishly making notes.

“Space ships!” Leonard yelled, and damn it, seconds later, I thought I was seeing space ships, or if not exactly seeing them, knowing they had to be surrounding us. In any case, I forgot to make a record of what I thought I was seeing, and Leonard forgot to teach me how to do it. His pad and his companions’ pads were marked with wild scribbles that doubtless had meaning to them but looked like wild scribbles to me.

Leonard’s face was red and covered with sweat. “I’m parched,” he shouted.

From the platform’s built-in ice chest Louie snatched a bottle of beer, handed it to Leonard who popped off its cap and instantly guzzled it. Louie, Victor, Eddie, and Olaf each took a beer. Louie indicated I should help myself. “Do you have a coke?” I asked.

“A coke?” Leonard said. “Do we have a coke?”

“Have a beer,” Louie said, handing me a beer.

When I refused, Leonard said: “Don’t you drink beer?”

“I don’t drink alcohol,” I said.

“Beer’s not alcohol,” Louie said. “It’s beer.”

“It is beer,” Eddie said, flashing a crooked-tooth grin at me.

Leonard and the others were noisily toasting one another. “It’s beer! It’s beer!” they cheered drunkenly. By the end of the evening the ice chest was empty, and everybody, except me, had seen scores and scores and scores of space ships, while I was still hoping to see my first.

“Not one?” Leonard asked, thick-voiced and peering dazedly at me.

I shook my head no.

He apologized. “I’m very, very disappointed,” he said, swaying and rolling his eyes.

“Me too,” I said, as he sank slowly to his knees and passed out in a heap on the top landing.

I appealed to Eddie and Victor to carry Leonard down from the landing and out to the magic hill’s yard. Because the six-foot Leonard weighed more than three hundred pounds, they dropped him twice, but still managed to get him into the yard, without waking him.

They also untangled a passed-out Olaf from one of the ladders, where he’d been hanging upside down. Carrying him outside to the yard, they deposited him between Leonard and a loud-snoring Louie, who’d crawled from a lower platform in the house to the yard and had, like Leonard, collapsed into a deep sleep.

An hour later, the entire gang, all six of us, were asleep in the yard. My guilty conscience, I suppose, snapped open my eyes before dawn, at five after five. Much work to be done, I hazily realized. I can’t do it alone.

Fortunately I was able to wake Eddie, a relatively light sleeper, by jiggling an open beer bottle under his beer-sensitive nose. He was cheerful enough, had a face full of docile smiles, a pair of rubbery legs, and seemed to understand I needed him to help me.

How? By getting Leonard on his feet and walking him briskly around the yard, while I packed some clothes for him.

As soon as Leonard was awake enough to listen to me, I tried to convince him to drive back to Brentwood with me.

Leonard resisted, which I guessed he would, pleading he couldn’t leave the magic hill, while the energy from UFO’s was at such a high pitch. He was convinced, he said, he was on the verge of making direct contact with a space ship drawn into a powerful earthly orbit. “I may have a chance,” he said, “if conditions remain favorable, to find my true magic.”

And that was exactly what happened. Leonard, his friends, and I were on the magic hill. As we stared intently at the half-moon sky, an illuminated vehicle appeared, which could have been a plane, a helicopter, a missile, or a huge banana-shaped balloon, though Leonard immediately identified it as a space ship.

We watched tensely as it hovered overhead, then suddenly swooped down toward us, screeching to a terrifying stop at the top of the magic hill. Leonard didn’t hesitate, leaping aboard the vehicle, which instantly reversed its engines, and in a split second was gone, zooming Leonard to his ultimate fate, his long-sought, long-desired magic destiny.


67.

The rejected Peevy, dethroned in less than a year, banished from the royal court by the King who shipped her, his discarded Queen, not to the tower but to Reno, Nevada, with a generous allowance, specific instructions to file for divorce, and a strong reminder that his pre-marital dictum “to go, just dump me, no protest whatsoever” went, in fairness, both ways, and consequently he was expecting her to step aside cheerfully as he’d been prepared to do, had circumstances between them occurred in reverse.

A few days after his fourteen-month marriage to Peg Peevy was terminated by a Reno divorce decree, the King trooped his pregnant bride-to-be, Leaf Orlando and their small wedding party to Ozzie Brickmanski’s Gift From God Community Church in West Hollywood, which had grown in nine years from a backyard barn to a marble-and-bronze mini-cathedral, seating 1805 parishioners, its upscale congregation committed to extending the church’s as well as Brickmanski’s clout in the community. Having a reputation for being swift and dogmatic, Brickmanski stuck close to the scriptures and claimed he had direct contact with Jesus. “Regularly converse with Him,” Ozzie said, which amused the King, because he didn’t believe for a minute his tennis-pinochle-playing partner could be chatting with Jesus, and still play tennis and pinochle so poorly.

“I’m nothing if I’m not fast,” Ozzie said. The King/Leaf Orlando wedding ceremony lasted nine and a half minutes. “Speed gets you to God quicker. That’s my motto for all my services. Even my sermons are short and to the point. Wasted verbiage is the devil’s work and clearly against local ecumenical rules, as my parishioners will readily attest. “Ask them if you want confirmation.”

“Not necessary,” the King said. He was already worried about Leaf Orlando. Marrying him had changed her. She was no longer chipper and cooperative as she’d been her first months in Brentwood. The King acknowledged her pregnancy contributed heavily to her foul moods and extended depressions, but after the baby was born and she continued to be cranky and demanding, she was even more difficult to live with. Their relationship got worse, when her mother moved in with them, bringing with her the bald, non-talking parrot she’d adopted when her roommate in San Diego walked out on her. “How can you abandon a bald parrot?” she asked.

The bald parrot, whose name was Twiggy Ironside, had some terrible parrot disease that caused her to pull out her own feathers. “They say it’s rampant among orphaned parrots,” Leaf’s mother, Bess Ironside, said.

When Bess mentioned the name Ironside, Leaf glowered defensively. “I was never an Ironside,” she said. “He was my third step-father. I hardly knew him.” “Blame it on me,” Bess said. “I hated to be without a man, and now, since I’m alone, I’ve settled for a parrot, okay? Which gives me responsibilities.” She explained that the parrot, not having feathers, slept in bed with her. “Under the covers. Otherwise, she’d freeze to death.”

The King was sympathetic, until the parrot crawled into bed with Leaf, and Leaf couldn’t bring herself to dislodge her. “I can’t be rude,” Leaf said, which meant that the King who had no desire to sleep with a bald parrot, was forced to sleep on one of the couches in his office.

Without consulting the King, Leaf recruited a couple of porters to carry Bess’s bed and the baby’s crib into the bedroom, so four of them – Leaf, Bess, the baby Sumner, and the parrot – were clustered together in one room.

Fortunately for the King, Sumner was a dream-come-true. That his blue eyes and broad forehead resembled Bess more than anybody in the family was a drawback overcome by Sumner’s pug nose and winning smile. Ozzie baptized Sumner at the Gift from God church; Shiller and Hildie were the God-parent witnesses Though she continued to disapprove of Brickmanski, Mary Joseph, the proud grandma, attended the baptism, watching jealously, as Leaf and the other proud grandma, Bess, entered the church, Bess carrying Sumner, which really hurt, to feel deliberately left out, as the King was feeling daily, except for the hour in the morning and the two hours in late afternoon when Leaf brought Sumner to his office.

Leaf’s snippy attitude toward him was hard for the King to take. He didn’t mind being exiled to the couch as much as he did having to deal with her over his visiting hours with Sumner. In fact, she was consistently so nasty to him he tried to limit his contacts with her and concentrate his energy on corporate problems, some of which he attributed to challenges from Mary Joseph on wages for workers and union representation.

For instance, Uncle Floyd’s concept of unskilled wage payments was based strictly on the market, which he’d defined as the available supply of unskilled workers and the lowest price necessary to hire sufficient numbers to get the job done. Mary Joseph had raised the question of paying a worker a wage he/she could live on, or a living wage, as against Uncle Floyd’s market wage, to which the King was committed philosophically and practically. How could he abandon his belief in corporate capitalism when he was so heavily indebted to it, regardless of how much pressure he was getting from Mary Joseph and her pro-union allies, Nora Swift and Nellie Newton?

The portable stage was set up on the outdoor parking lot of the West Los Angeles shopping center. The director, Julian Sasspool, the four music adaptors from New York, Manny from the Picassos, the conductor, plus the choreographer and the five dance coaches Sasspool brought to L.A. to organize the dress rehearsal. With so much attention on them, the dancers responded energetically. The small audience assembled to watch the dress rehearsal was thrilled, vigorously applauding the dancers who took more than a dozen well-deserved bows. Even Leaf Orlando and her mother, Bess, were pleased.

Opening night was scheduled for Thursday a week later. Critics were invited from the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the L.A. Times. The King picked up the cost of bringing all of them to West Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, the night before the opening performance, Nora Swift, representing the minimum wage workers at the West Los Angeles shopping center, including twenty one of the tap-dancing extravaganza’s twenty four members, announced that the minimum wage workers were calling an immediate strike and that the cast, in solidarity with the company’s minimum wage workers, would not perform on opening night.

Panic! The critics were coming, and the cast won’t perform!

Nora Swift referred the King to Nellie Newton who said she recognized he had financial problems but so did the striking employees, which was why the union was anxious to work out a settlement with him. The union was not interested in punishing the company or endangering it. What Nellie wanted was a formula that would enable both sides to prosper. To show good faith, while the King and Nellie Newton continued to negotiate a long-term solution, the striking dancers agreed to dance in the extravaganza’s opening night performance.

Saved! The show can go on! Its near-shut down wasn’t revealed to the critics or the large audience at the hugely successful opening performance. The direction, the book, the score, the music, the choreography, the dancers, the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, all got praised, and the celebrity audience, mostly the King’s posh friends and supporters, was delighted with not only the opening performance but also the splendid opportunity each of them had to be seen by one another in their latest designer evening dress.

Yet having to accept union restrictions to open the show was a violation of the King’s image of himself as a staunch adherent of Uncle Floyd’s anti-union principles. Mary Joseph, he knew, was celebrating the union’s victory, while he, the King, was feeling humiliated about it, and still he had a painful negotiation ahead of him, though Nellie Newton, as he discovered, was gentle, unhurried, and easy to work with.

He told Nellie frankly what a disgrace it was for him to accept being dictated to by a union. “No one is to blame except me,” he said. “I’m a sell-out, aren’t I?”

“That’s bunk,” Nellie said. “You did what you had to do, and the outcome on stage was sensational, wasn’t it?”

“Sure, but look what a mess I’m in. I’ve got you and the union on my back, despite my solemn promise to Uncle Floyd, who founded this business, that I’d keep organizers out of the company and make no compromises involving unions under any circumstances. I apologize for sounding so harsh, and, believe me, there’s nothing personal in this as far as you’re concerned.”

“Of course, I believe you,” she said, “provided you understand my job is to assist you in developing a rightful place in the company for the union, which I assure you is here to stay and must be considered in all future negotiations, regardless of the strong feelings you apparently have that you’re failing to uphold company policy, or what your Uncle Floyd proclaimed was company policy, which may or may not be how he actually performed, when under pressure from an outside union.”

The King took Nellie to lunch at a restaurant in Westwood. They sat on the patio under a green umbrella, and for the next three hours he told her the story of his career in the company, holding back nothing, answering every question she asked, as well as the implications of some of the questions she didn’t ask. (All of this is contained in his autobiography.) They discussed Uncle Floyd’s hostility toward unions as well as Mary Joseph’s strong feelings on behalf of unions, which, he said, had put a heavy burden on him, because he’d tried to avoid disagreements that might damage what had always been a loving relationship between him and his mother.

Nellie was impressed. She hadn’t expected to hear such frank, self-critical talk from him. When he attempted to get personal information out of her, she clammed up. “I don’t do that,” she said, “This is your show.”

“True,” he said, “though being described as a show is slightly offensive, especially when you refuse to open up to me.”

“Sorry,” she said, “that’s my rules.”

“Which means you win, right?”

“Right,” she said, grinning like a winner.

But through private contacts the King already knew a lot about her. How old she was, for instance. Twenty-six. That she had two brothers and two sisters under nineteen and that she was their major financial support. That she was born and raised in Minnesota. That she had a master’s degree in social work. That her first job with the union was in the members’ health section That the deformity of her right hand occurred at age twelve when she fell on the ice. That several of her knuckles were shattered. That she’d had three complicated operations to repair the knuckles That she still had pain in her hand. That the fuzzy gloves and long-sleeved shirts and sweaters she wore were to hide the deformed hand to keep it from becoming a topic of conversation. That she blushed easily and had an infectious self-deprecating sense of humor. That she’d not been married, had had a couple of live-in partners, and once had had a love affair with a married man (her boss) that scandalized the union’s health section.

“Did your Uncle Floyd ever doubt his attitude toward unions?” she asked.

“No, never,” the King said, “at least not to me.”

“There must have been some time when he was conflicted about having to deal with us,” she said.

“If he was, he didn’t tell me about it,” he said. “What he did was teach me to be firm, to keep my emotions out of decisions I was responsible for, and not allow myself to get into situations I couldn’t control.”

“You have unionized suppliers and sub-contractors, don’t you? What do you do about them?”

“I don’t deal with them. They’re not my problem,” he said.

“No compromises? Is that how your Uncle Floyd handled them?”

He was watching her eyes. They seemed flirty to him.

“Is that how he handled them?” she repeated.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We didn’t discuss it.”

“Maybe you should think about it,” she said.

I am thinking about it, he thought. Her eyes were definitely flirty.

“I can probably help you,” she said.

“Do what?” he said.

“Find out what your uncle did when a supplier or sub-contactor had a strong union connection he had to contend with.

Flirty eyes, flirty eyes, flirty eyes, flirty eyes, the King thought. “Does that sound reasonable?” she said.

“Sure,” he said, his heart thumping foolishly, as she peered (he thought) flirty-eyed at him.

That evening his last managers’ meeting was over by seven forty-five. He had a tough time paying attention to the meeting’s agenda, being distracted by his intermittent speculation about the flirtyness of Nellie’s eyes. He had his two-hour visit with his beautiful boy, Sumner, and when he got back to the office, finished off some low-priority paperwork.

Lying down on the couch, he switched off the lights and prepared to sleep, but couldn’t close his eyes. Nellie’s flirty-eyed face kept whirling in his head. By morning, after a sleepless night, he realized he was feeling a sudden, powerful, irrepressible emotion he hadn’t expected to feel again.

“I’m in love,” he gasped.


68.

Mbda La’ster came to Los Angeles from Denver. Sponsored, as I’ve previously reported, by the Tall Tree Lending Foundation, she’d been touring cities throughout the United States to raise money for Tall Tree to support its program of small entrepreneur loans.

Three delegates from the Hools’ peace organization picked up Mbda La’ster at the L.A. airport and drove her in a caravan of five vehicles to the Century Plaza Hotel. Ned and Sally Hool were at the hotel to greet her. Prior to her arrival in the United States, Mbda had spent ten days touring Western Europe, making brief, profitable (for Tall Tree) stops in Stockholm, Vienna, Turin, Nice, Paris, Budapest, and Warsaw.

Her last European stop was London to participate in a week’s worth of meetings and rallies as well as celebrity dinners and gatherings, at which wealthy donors contributed more than a half million pounds to Tall Tree. Made her head spin.

Remember, as she kept reminding her audiences, Tall Tree had lent her $100, which she’d used to triple her earnings by buying an ox and a small wagon to replace the water cart she’d been dragging from village to village and customer to customer.

True, she expected the ox and wagon to be in her future after some unknown (to her) number of months of sweet living among big spenders in Europe and America. Yet she’d acquired tastes, hadn’t she, and estimates of her own worth, as well as a strong belief in the enduring value of her family and friends, which, in her opinion, more than compensated for the loss in luxury she would suffer, if she gave up, or was forced to give up, being Tall Tree’s poster person, though that didn’t happen until six months after she’d concluded her American tour and was back in East Africa.

On both her European and American tours her cousin BeBe Kwanda accompanied her. A comfort to Mbda, BeBe was a staunch supporter and wise advisor. They talked over in depth every decision Mbda had to make. While in Los Angeles, they conferred frequently with the Hools, who provided them relief and sometimes shelter from the upper class audiences Mbda was catering to on behalf of Tall Tree.

There was no question in Mbda’s mind she had a prime obligation to raise money for Tall Tree and to adhere to the schedule of meetings and appearances Tall Tree had arranged for her.

In addition, she had very important home village responsibilities to worry about. Her five children, for instance, ages 3 to 14. (During the past ten years two of her other children had died from malaria.) Mdba’s husband’s sixty-nine-year-old parents were the five children’s caretakers, while her husband, Amon, worked as a steel worker in India. Like Mbda, Amon was allowed two short vacations a year. On each vacation Amon met Mbda in their East African village, moved into his parent’s thatched-roofed house with the children and were amazed at how much each of them had grown and changed between visits.

Often Mbda was panicked during her negotiations with Tall Tree’s executives, members of its board of directors, and others with clout affiliated with the organization. Here she was an African third-grader standing up to Tall Tree’s big shots to convince them to grant concessions not only to her and her family but also to her village community to provide health and educational benefits, sharply augmented food allotments, plus improved housing and better transportation for the families of the village children.

Mbda was proud she and BeBe had been able to negotiate such favorable deals for the village, but also was worried the whole thing, every bit of it, could suddenly unravel. Why? Mainly because of cultural misunderstandings among the competing groups who’d drafted the basic agreement that had brought them together. The East Africans and the Europeans/Americans often used vocabulary the other side couldn’t understand. In addition, both sides made assumptions that prevented problems from being solved, or they didn’t recognize where their assumptions were leading them, or refused to admit their assumptions were taking them to wrong conclusions, or in wrong directions, or were unaware how their assumptions affected their judgment and influenced the outcome of decisions they were making based on information and assumptions unfamiliar to them.

“It can be a mess,” Mbda said.

“It’s always a mess,” BeBe said.

“We’re in it again, aren’t we?” Mbda said.

BeBe nodded yes, grinning innocently.

“But not like we assume they assume we are.”

“Or they assume we assume they are.”

“I agree,” Mbda said.

They stared gloomily at one another.

“We’ve got to talk,” Mbda said.

“Talk? To whom?”

“Them.”

“Them?”

“How else do we prove we’re not addicted to fancy hotels, dinners in our honor, or being told how great we are by people who clearly don’t give a damn about us?”

BeBe shrugged.

“What I love most about Tall Tree is standing on the hotel balcony and having the crowd cheer us, which gets my heart pumping, then being with the Hools and their friends, sneaking off to Hool house on Saturday afternoons, getting completely away from Tall Tree’s stress and tension, and feeling safe for a couple of hours. Meanwhile, I think I’m a fraud letting these people who apparently trust us to make assumptions about them making assumptions about us that seem ridiculous to me.

BeBe took Mbda’s hand and squeezed it.

“Shouldn’t we have conversations,” Mbda said, “with Tall Tree’s local sponsors who are open to having a conversation with us?”

Several women appeared approachable, including a forty-six year old professor who taught history and women’s studies at Memphis State. Called Shirl by her friends and colleagues, her full name was Shirley Caldwell Pink. She had two daughters, Rene, 16, and Cora, 21, and a husband, Elvis Pink, an ex-teacher, who operated a successful plumbers’ supplies business in East Memphis.

“Men are not swift like women,” Shirl said, addressing a student rally at the State College. “To keep from falling too far behind, they try to control women by dragging their feet and flexing their muscles. This is a problem in my own family. We have a truck, which my husband Elvis uses primarily in his plumbing business.” Standing up and waving, Elvis got a foot-stamping ovation from the crowd. “We also own a station wagon, which I drive,” Shirl said ”Knock wood, I’ve not had a ticket nor an accident and I’m not a liability on our auto insurance. Yet I guarantee this brilliant man I love and for twenty-two years have been happily married to, is convinced like most men I know, that he’s a safer, more dependable, and more skillful driver than I am, claiming he not only has the right but also the duty to demonstrate his masculine superiority, by taking the steering wheel from me and driving himself to keep me from wrecking the car, or worse, as if most women, including me, aren’t better, calmer, and less hysterical drivers than men.”

Throughout Shirl’s speech during which she giggled repeatedly and took affectionate peeks at Elvis who was jumping in and out of his seat, pumping his fists vigorously at whatever she said about him, making protesting faces, shouting at her, and laughing loudly, while she ignored him most of the time, talking over what he was saying or sharply contradicting it.

They were like a crack vaudeville team, breaking up the crowd with their stock comedy routine, which was obviously hilarious to them as well as to Mbda and BeBe, who were sitting directly in front of them, in row three’s center seats.

Elvis introduced Mbda and BeBe as “our collaborators from East Africa.” When Mbda and BeBe got to their feet and bowed, the student audience roared their approval of them. The next morning Mbda and BeBe met with Shirl in the college cafeteria and laughed until noon about male drivers, and how smug, irritating, and presumptive even Elvis was about his alleged superior driving abilities as compared to Shirl’s.

A week later, in L.A., Mbda and BeBe received a note from Shirl, containing a description, backed up by a clipping from a Memphis newspaper, about two righteous guys (neither of them Elvis), speeding on a freeway outside Memphis. One guy, driving a souped-up Chevie changed lanes, cutting off the other guy, also in a souped-up Chevie, provoking a hundred-mile-an-hour chase that ended up with both cars crashing into the rear of a school bus crowded with kids on their way home from school. Six kids and both Chevie drivers were killed, the newspaper clipping said. Shirl concluded her note with a couplet, its top line cribbed from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

The couplet read:

“All the world’s a stage,
To act out his/his road rage.”


69.

What’s next for the King?

Well, first of all, the flirty-eyed stuff didn’t pan out, because flirty-eyes herself (Nellie Newton) had been flirty-eyes since age eight, when her flirty eyes earned her more attention and praise from her susceptible-to-flirty-eyes father than her three sisters and two brothers combined. That the King believed he was in love with Nellie, he soon realized, was his heart talking and not his head, while his tolerance of Leaf Orlando, her mother Bess, and the bald parrot, Twiggy Ironside, was rapidly growing thin.

The day after the King decided to pack the three of them off to Reno, with two lawyers, a wad of cash, and specific instructions to divorce him immediately, plus a bigger wad of cash to persuade them to leave Sumner at the Brentwood house with him, a housekeeper, and a baby-nurse, he received a call from his autobiography collaborator, Nancy Nightingale. She was in Monaco, where, financed by the King, she’d gone to get an abortion, which she’d changed her mind about, when she learned she was pregnant with twins. “Can’t take that much risk,” she said, telling him she’d made up her mind to return home, seven months pregnant.

Great! The unborn twins, the King knew, were his. Writing his autobiography together, they’d had frequent rest periods, which they’d mostly spent lolling in bed. He had a clear memory of the morning she’d said to him: “I think I’m pregnant, no, I definitely am.”

Nancy’s original plan was to make a clean break from the King and settle permanently in Monaco. She’d bought a condominium and a two-year-old Mercedes, quickly made new friends, and had started to write a book about casino gambling, but the prospect of aborting twins had stopped her cold. When the King offered to bring her back to California, so she could have the babies in L.A. and also said he was willing to take full responsibility for her as well as the twins, this seemed to Nancy the best and most reasonable recourse. That she’d be giving up her babies to the King broke her heart, but his resources were far greater than hers, and she knew the twins would be safer and better cared-for with him than they could possibly be if they remained with her, so Nancy returned to America and moved into the King’s house on the Brentwood estate shortly after Leaf Orlando, Leaf’s mother, and the bald parrot vacated it.

The twins were born at the Simon Griffin Pavilion, a maternity hospital in Beverly Hills The delivery took place in the hospital’s emergency room, with a full, highly trained staff, in case something unexpected and life-threatening had happened to Nancy and/or the babies.

Nancy’s labor lasted 39 hours and was extremely painful. Since arriving in Los Angeles, she’d been barely able to walk under the combined weight of the twins. The babies were kicking strenuously, as if they were trying to get out the womb, when her water broke. At two a.m. the King and Henrietta, one of the nursemaids the King had hired for Sumner, rushed Nancy to the hospital.

Nancy’s doctor, Dr. Pender, decided she’d arrived at the emergency room too soon to give birth and sent her home for 12 hours, during which her contractions became increasingly irregular. At midnight she, the King, and Henrietta hurried back to the hospital.

The next hour and a half Nancy pushed unsuccessfully to deliver the impatient babies. At five a.m. the next morning a cup was attached to the first baby’s up-facing head (Jute) and she was vacuum-sucked out of Nancy’s womb. The second baby (Morgan) followed quickly, though her head was turned sideways. Giving birth was a painful, frightening, and wonderful experience for Nancy. She’d given birth to two healthy, happy, beautiful babies. How would she bring herself to go back to Monaco and leave these babies behind?

Well, she did, heading home, seven weeks later, with a stack of the King’s conscience-relieving I. O. U.’s, a signed agreement covering her visitation rights, and a hold-your-breath pledge he would permanently keep away from her.

“Sounds good to me,” Nancy said.


70.

A week after Nancy flew back to Monaco, Harlow Finstone called to remind me about Florence’s Saturday night party. “You’re bringing Billie?” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “Who else would I bring?”

“That’s up to you,” he said. “We’re having a load of people, our friends, plus a couple of dozen teenagers Tinker and Bambi have invited.” He gave me the time of the party and their address on Wilshire Boulevard. “The tenants’ recreation room in the penthouse, don’t forget, not our apartment. We’re having snacks and a light meal at midnight, catered by Ebo’s Food-To-Go.”

“The bakery guy?” I said.

“Right,” he said. “We’re also having dancing and a band.”

“The Picassos?”

“Can’t afford them. Besides, the kids picked who they wanted, some group from school.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Very noisy,” he said, sounding disapproving.

“Fun,” I said. We both laughed.

His wife, Florence, he said, was in San Diego, where, representing Blackman and Blackman, she was attending a statewide convention on land use and zoning. She was giving one of the prime speeches before the full convention and had spent two days researching the topics she was covering and writing her speech. “Couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights,” he said, “which is always a problem for her, when she gives a speech. Fortunately she zonked out on the flight from Los Angeles to San Diego. Practically had to be carried off the plane, but as soon as she woke up and got her energy flowing, she gave a helluva speech that wowed the convention as she always does, despite the exaggerated worries she’d had about speaking in advance.”

Harlow was also an accountant. “But ninety-six percent retired though I‘ve kept a half dozen clients,” he said, “who insist I represent them on certain issues that require little additional consultation, so they still have confidence in me and what we’ve already accomplished together.”

A year ago last May Harlow had had heart fibrillations “that knocked me out of the race permanently. Now all I do is walk and rest and sometimes ride my bicycle.” Organizing Florence’s party had been a big job for him. “Fortunately most of what I had to do has gone smoothly. Ebo was a pain in the neck, until I agreed to tomato (no meat) sauce for the pasta.” That damn sauce, Harlow said, was his only, or almost only, headache until the night of the party, when the building’s elevators suddenly stopped working.

We’re talking about an eight-story building, with the site of the party, the tenants’ recreation room on the ninth floor. The elevator outage didn’t happen till seven twenty, so if you arrived early, that is, before seven twenty, as maybe a dozen of us, including Billie and me, did, there was no getting-to-the-recreation-room problem, but if you showed up after seven twenty, you discovered that the elevators had quit at the sixth floor, and if you wanted to go higher to the ninth-floor recreation room, you had to walk three stories up a cork-tiled staircase in a narrow emergency shaft.

At first making such a climb seemed like a laugh, and most of the guests were amused by it, saying upbeat things such as “Will do me good,” “I need the exercise,” “Will give me an appetite,” though all of them arrived at the recreation room huffing and puffing and shaky on their feet. Some of the guests, of course, didn’t attempt the three-story climb, preferring to get back in their cabs and head for the nearest restaurant. “Good thinking,” even Harlow said.

The next big controversy occurred, when the building managers ordered Ebo to hoist the snacks and the midnight meal to the ninth-floor recreation room outside the building. Ebo protested that hoisting the food nine stories outside the building was too dangerous. The compromise both sides agreed to was that Ebo would hoist the food containers outside the building to a balcony at the sixth floor level, load the containers onto the balcony, then carry them up three floors to the roof’s recreation room via the inside staircase, the same staircase being used by the party’s guests.

“Would have been better, as it turned out, if we’d cancelled the food,” Harlow said, “but that would have disappointed Florence and maybe spoiled the party, which I was anxious to avoid, because I knew she was hoping to persuade her guests to support the Bright Beginning project she’d set up to raise funding and also develop political support to increase health and education benefits for children of low-income families.

Rumbling in the heads of the kids Tinker and Bambi had recruited for Florence’s party was as much mischief as they could get away with. While guests were laboring to climb to the recreation room, the kids lurked in the hallways off the emergency staircase plotting to scare the pants off them as well as the nervous, unsuspecting workers from Ebo’s. Guess who were the teenagers’ first victims?

Florence had arrived back from San Diego a few minutes before nine. She took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked up the inner staircase to the ninth floor recreation room where she not only got a huge hand but also a record number of donor pledges, totaling a record amount of money, more than twice the donations she’d received in her best previous years.

Then shortly after nine thirty, as Florence was making a second speech to the donors, thanking them for their generous contributions, two pair of Ebo workers were hoisting giant pots of tomato sauce to the sixth floor balcony. Loading the pots into sturdy, specially-designed, hard-wood carriers, the workers transported the pots across the balcony to the emergency staircase, entering the shaft that housed the staircase, each pair of workers carrying a large pot of thick, garlic-smelling tomato sauce. Moving cautiously, the workers were slowly approaching the seventh floor, when four teens, hiding in the hallway outside the staircase on the seventh floor, attacked them, shrieking wildly, causing them to drop the carriers, dumping the thick tomato sauce onto the staircase, transforming its cork tile into a slippery marsh of garlic-smelling tomato-sauce goo.

In addition, the teenagers’ music and dancing were total flops. The band they hired played three rock tunes badly, plus the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (you could at least recognize the tune), plus discordant versions of “I’m In the Mood For Love” and “Everything Comes up Roses,” almost too painful to listen to, but no one among the guests complained, or criticized, or threatened to cut off their contributions to Florence’s charity fund.

Remember, these were upper-class women, outrageously self-centered and snobbish, with financial resources of their own, or immediate access to somebody else’s financial resources, the snooty possessors of post-graduate degrees, who’d been remarkably cheery and cooperative during the four or more hours they’d remained in the recreation room until the school band’s awful music made them restive, and they asked Florence if she’d mind if they started home, where most of them said they had family or other important business to attend to.

Florence made another short speech, again thanking the women for their great generosity as well as their commitment and patience, unaware a group of ungrateful teenagers, hiding in the hallways on the eighth floor, were preparing to leap into the staircase, when the women began to descend, and that a second teenage group would do the same on the seventh floor, as they reached the quagmire of dumped tomato sauce, which sent them sliding and skidding and screaming down to the fifth floor, where a stunned Harlow and a crew of unprepared helpers tried futilely to rescue them.

Avoiding the teenagers, Florence traveled, via the fire escapes at the rear of the building, from the ninth-floor recreation room to her fifth-story apartment in about four minutes. Harlow was anxiously waiting for her. “We should have warned them about the tomato sauce,” he said.

“Sure,” Florence said, “but how?”

“What do you mean how?” Harlow said.

“We didn’t know about it, did we? And if we didn’t know, how could we have warned them?"

Harlow made a glum face.

“I didn’t know” Florence said.

“Nor did I,” Harlow said.
.
“Then why are these women blaming us?” Florence said.

“Ask them,” Harlow said, a large frown on his face.

“I did ask them,” Florence said.

“Oh?” Harlow said, his frown fading.

“Some of them, maybe all of them, act like they think we deliberately allowed them to get stuck in that damn goo,” Florence said.

“Why would we do that?” Harlow said.

“We wouldn’t,” Florence said, “but this has been a humiliating experience for them, so why not blame somebody for it, which is why they blame us.”

Harlow began to laugh. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

“Please,” Florence said, suppressing her own giggles.

“Preposterous, isn’t it?” Harlow said.

“Sure,” Florence said, “but what do we do to convince them not to blame us, when apparently so many of them have made up their minds we knew in advance about the damn goo –

“And deliberately didn’t warn them?”

“As if we’d do such a thing,” Florence said.

“They’re ruining our apartment,” Harlow said. “All three bathrooms are a wreck.”

“They keep taking showers,” Florence said.

“Indiscriminately,” Harlow said.

“Which I don’t care about, as long as it calms them down,” Florence said.

“Could soak into the apartment below us,” Harlow said.

“Mrs. Wolfe? Oops. Didn’t think about Mrs. Wolfe.”

“Loves to sue people,” Harlow said.

“Double oops,” Florence said.

While Harlow remained in the hall, ready to scare off invading teenagers, Florence toured the crowded apartment, being confronted in every room by frantic, demanding, semi-clad women and piles of their goo-covered clothing

In her diary, a copy of which Florence later gave to me, she wrote: “Could see immediately I was in trouble with the women and that the pledges I’d gotten from them might already be dead. Most of them ignored me, but with such intensity I had to notice I was being ignored. Cissy Vandertook, a high-powered socialite, much written about in the fashion columns, was wrapped in our living room couch’s orange and green striped scarf.

Glaring nastily at me, Cissie hissed in a sullen voice: “Hope you’ve got a damn good excuse for not telling us about that crap in the staircase.”

“We didn’t know about it!” Florence shouted.

“Bullshit,” Cissy said, “You should have known about it.”

“But we didn’t, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay, no, no, no, no!”

“I’m sorry,” Florence said she said, which further infuriated Cissie, who bitterly lectured her on what she said was Florence’s indifference and carelessness and called Harlow stupid and unfeeling, which, Florence said, got her angry.

That’s when she said she shut up, turned cold toward Cissie, and didn’t say another word to her about anything.

Oh, Florence said, was Cissie pissed. (Pardon the crude expression.) Obviously my icy silence, Florence said, was more accusatory than anything I could have said to her, and the fierce look she gave me in return so disproportionate and silly that I started to laugh and soon everybody in the apartment, including Cissy Vandertook, was laughing and my funding crisis was over, because none of them, as I’d anticipated, cancelled the pledges they’d made. In fact, a week after the party I got a long note from Cissy apologizing for her short-sighted attempt to intimidate me, which, of course, she didn’t, barely.

By seven o’clock that night at least a dozen women had taken excessive, drenching, slippery-making showers in each of our three bathrooms. Clothes, sheets, draperies of various shapes and sizes were scattered throughout the apartment. Getting the mess cleaned up was our first priority. Harlow talked to the building’s super who sent up a couple of young Latino men plus an older Latino woman to scrub the floors and the walls. In three days they’d restored the apartment to tip-top shape. “Very expensive and very convenient,” Harlow said. He suggested we give the Latinos a bonus equal to half of what the Super had paid them. Instead of asking the Latinos if it was okay with them, Harlow asked the super.

Well, apparently that was bad form. The super was furious and accused Harlow of maliciously undercutting him. Then Sunday morning early, he rang our doorbell and snarled in an uptight voice: “If something idiotic like this happens again, count me out, get your own people to clean up, okay?”

Harlow didn’t reply.


71.

Also, on Sunday morning Mbda and Bebe met with Metro Reporter Rosalind Rountable, and told her their biggest thrill, since arriving in L.A., was watching the peace marchers gather in the parking lots across from the Century Plaza Hotel. The police estimated more than 3000 marchers showed up.

In most European cities, in London certainly, Mbda said, as well as many American cities, Chicago and Denver, for instance, crowds were larger than in L.A., and in a few cases, noisier. “But this one (meaning the L.A. peace march) had an unusual spirit most of the others didn’t have, even the best we witnessed in Europe, you agree?”

“Definitely,” BeBe said.

"Most of the groups in the march,” Mbda said, “came from Southern California, right?”

“Right,” Rosalind said.

“Which gave them unity and strength,” Mbda said.

“And a common point of view,” BeBe said.

“Maybe,” Rosalind said. “L.A. has a diverse population.”

“And not everybody on the Tall Tree board approves.” Mbda said.

Rosalind looked puzzled. “Of what?” she said.

“Of us,” Mbda said.

Bebe nodded gloomily. “Which hurts,” she said.

“Gives us negative feelings about ourselves,” Mbda said. Rosalind again looked puzzled.

“Doesn’t make sense, does it?” Mbda said, “but that’s how we feel.”

They were sitting in the garden behind the hotel. The main dining room was hosting a large wedding party. Some of the guests had gathered in the garden. Mbda and BeBe purposefully were staying clear of them. Seeing the Africans’ worried faces, Ned Hool hurried to them. When they introduced him to Rosalind, she reminded him she’d written an article on Hool House that was published in Brisk Magazine. Ned remembered the article. “Wasn’t very happy with it,” he said.

Rosalind admitted her principal sources for the article, other than the Hools, were the Mayor of Los Angeles, the police, and the district attorney, all of whom she knew were hostile to Hool House. “Have to go with what I’ve got,” she said.

“Well, I don’t,” Ned said testily.

“What can I say?” Rosalind said. “I’m a reporter.” She laughed nervously. “I depend on my sources.” She laughed again, again nervously.

“Were you at the preview we had for Mbda La’ster?” he asked. “You were, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, her smile fading. “You did invite me.”

“If you remember, in our audience we had about forty members of our peace group and at least double that from the city police and the Sheriff’s Office. I have a clear memory of you sitting among the police and the sheriffs, the State’s anti-espionage squad, the FBI, and the CIA, which doesn’t make me comfortable when I think about it.”

“That’s my job. I’m sorry,” she said, holding back her anger.

“We expect to have a follow-up meeting shortly for Mbda and BeBe,” he said. “You’ll be notified, provided you have time to talk to our peace delegates.”

“No problem,” she said.

Putting together the second conference for Mbda and BeBe, Ned said, “is risky and complicated. Both women have to approve. Won’t go ahead without their full cooperation. Also, asking them about problems they’re presently attempting to cope with seems too intrusive. I’d hoped they’d talk to us on their own, but they haven’t.” A couple of mutual friends suggested Mbda or BeBe might be too embarrassed to discuss their troubles, real or imagined, “until they’re confident they’ll get an unbiased hearing from you.”

“An unbiased hearing?” Sally said.

“From us?” Ned said.

Sally shook her head. “That’s so shocking,” she said.

To Ned and Sally Hool such a reaction, unspoken or not, was insulting, though they did manage to keep their hurt feelings to themselves. Instead they shifted their attention and energy to Billie Cooper’s proposal to set up a network of self-esteem learning centers. “At each center we’ll need a director,” Sally said. Hool House flyers were distributed to nine states announcing the locations of the learning centers and the duties of the director. In the next two weeks Hool House received more than a thousand applications. Ned and Sally agreed to co-chair a screening committee to select the locations of the new self-esteem in Los Angeles centers as well as the new directors.

Other screening committee members came from Hool House volunteers. Divided into five sub-committees they were invited to Los Angeles for in-house training under Sally’s supervision. Among the applicants was a fifty-six year old former Hool House staff member named Ida Le Harrow. Tall, blonde, cheerful, and efficient,
a widow with three adult children, Ida, born in Wichita, Kansas, was presently residing in Santa Cruz, California on a six acre plot, containing two three-car garages and a large, handsomely-furnished house.

“Perfect,” Ted Hool said.

“Same for Santa Cruz,” Sally said. “Also perfect.”

Ida, they knew, had retired two years ago.

“Could be three,” Sally said. “Was worn out.”

“And disappointed we didn’t send her to Caracas.“

“Bolivia, I think,” Sally said.

“Was Bolivia, wasn’t it?”

“We should call her,” Sally said.

Ida’s phone number was on her application. Sally dialed; Ida answered, as Ted picked up the extension. They were in Hool House’s basement office.

After much excited laughter and small talk, Sally asked, “How are you?”

“Excellent,” Ida said, apologizing for having quit Hool House so abruptly. “Needed a rest.”

“Knew you were wiped out,” Sally said.

“Recovered now,” Ida said cheerily.

Sally explained the learning center director’s duties. “You’ll have one paid assistant. Remainder of your staff you recruit on your own.”

“Santa Cruz ‘s no problem,” Ida said. “Lots of turned-on people who volunteer if you’ve got something interesting for them to do.” She laughed nervously. “Do I have the job?”

Sally looked to Ted, who was on the extension. “Up to her,” Ted said

“Up to you,” Sally said.

“When do I start?” Ida said.

“What about Murray?" Ted asked.

“Murray?” Ida said.

“Murray Favor,” Sally said.

“Gone” Ida said.

“Wasn’t he the main reason you moved to Santa Cruz?” Sally said.

“No, not the main reason,” Ida said.

“You were going to marry him, weren’t you?” Sally said.

“No, never,” Ida said.

“Never?” Sally said.

“Not what you told us,” Ted said. “Is it Sally?”

Sally said she remembered meeting Ida and Murray on the Santa Cruz beach. “Seemed very close.”

“We were very close,” Ida said. “He’s an attractive guy, and I loved him.”

“Loved him?” Sally said.

Ted frowned. “Don’t now?” he said.

“Buying that damn condominium,” Ida said, “and insisting I move to Costa Rica with him made everything different between us."

Her eyes filled with tears. “Got more to worry about than him, regardless of how important he thinks he is.”


72.

The following Tuesday Sally drove to Aptos from Los Angeles. Took her seven hours to get to Ida’s house on Peaches Street. Ida had a hot meal waiting for her. Briefly they discussed Ida’s ideas for the Santa Cruz learning center. “Been thinking a lot about it,” Ida said.

“Good,” Sally said. “May need revisions, based on recent changes we’ve made at Hool House.”

“What changes?” Ida said suspiciously.

“Let’s wait till Ned gets here, okay?” Sally said.

“Sure,” Ida said, again suspiciously.

They decided to walk to the beach, which, Ida said, was a half-mile below the Peaches Street bluff from which they had a narrow view of the ocean.

Access to the beach was a fifty-foot side road through a grove of eucalyptus trees, past a children’s playground and a sewerage processing plant, an eyesore (that smelled bad).

The beach itself was gorgeous, particularly now as the red-golden sun was beginning to set. The eucalyptus-grove road funneled into an empty stretch of cream-tan-gray sand, a thousand-feet wide, between two tracts of houses built in the nineteen seventies on twenty-foot sand berms. In the nineteen eighties heavy rains hit Santa Cruz, and the berms were reinforced with protective walls. An additional rock base was installed to support the north tract’s wall. Protecting the south tract was a thick concrete scoop-like barrier that propelled incoming ocean water away from the houses behind it. The distance from the sewerage plant to the shoreline, Ida estimated, was five hundred feet. The wind was strong, and fifteen-foot waves were breaking powerfully against the beach. Ida and Sally stumbled across the sand toward the ocean. Despite the vigorous surf and gusting wind the brilliant sun was keeping the sand and water warm. Ida, carrying her sandals, dragged her toes through the unusually tepid water. Sally suggested they make a quick stop at the south tract, which they did, before heading up the eucalyptus-grove’s steep hill to Townsend Avenue and Ida’s Peaches Street house. They arrived at Ida’s house worn-out from the strenuous walk. Ida made a salmon salad for dinner. They fell asleep, too exhausted to eat it.


73.

Two days later a caravan of six Hool House station wagons pulled into Ida’s driveway. Aboard were thirty-one Hool House employees and volunteers. They brought with them the latest revisions from Hool House’s governing board. Annoyed she hadn’t been consulted in advance, Ida was mollified when she was told not only could she critique the changes but also would have a major input into how they operated. Ida was pleased.

In 1929 the Seacliff Amusement Company purchased the SS Palo Alto, a concrete ship, from an Oakland shipbuilder and had it towed down the coast to where it now sits, a half-mile north of the Seacliff State Beach parking lot. Planning to convert the Palo Alto into an amusement and fishing ship, the Seacliff Company opened the Palo Alto’s seacocks, sinking it at what today is at least a thousand feet off shore, then built a pier from the beach to the ship’s prow, before extensively renovating the Palo Alto’s interior into a plush casino, which remained popular and profitable, until the ’29 Depression forced the company to shut it down.

By the time Ida and her first husband, Myron Levy, settled in Santa Cruz in 1983, the Palo Alto was classified as unsafe and was restricted in its public use to fishing, plus seagull and seal watching, while the pier remained intact and active, without restrictions.

Sally bunked in the main house with Ida. The following Tuesday Ida drove her over route 17 to the San Jose airport to pick up Ted who’d spent most of the previous day and a half in non-stop negotiations to finalize the locations of L.A.’s learning centers. This was Ted’s second trip to Santa Cruz. He knew from his own experience as well as from what Sally and others had told him that Santa Cruz was close-knit culturally and politically.

He also knew that housing and community services, crime rates, police protection, restaurants, movie theatres, etc. of many Santa Cruz neighborhoods from Davenport in the North, Aptos, Capitola, and La Selva on the Coast, and Watsonville in the South, were remarkably similar and that the residents - the rich guys, middle-classers, and bottom-of-the-pilers - had similar income and education backgrounds.

For instance, an electrician from Watsonville, with a 21-year-old daughter, who, the electrician said, was having serious personal problems. Based on her age, Ted presumed, boy problems, right? Nope, said the electrician; she’s a Harvard medical school graduate, had volunteered to work in Argentina, and now can’t get back to Watsonville due to a visa mix-up. Or take a second friend, this one from Capitola, a retired lawyer, whose beautiful wife, a teacher, lives and works forty miles to the East in San Jose. They see one another on weekends, holidays, and vacations, and own an apartment in London. Or a third important friend, a court reporter, who came to Aptos from Los Angeles, settled near UCSC, accumulated loads of University friends, and with Ted, started a Friday lunch group, that today, ten years later, still meets weekly, having added, after inevitable attritions, several replacements to the group as devoted to its success as its original members.

Like most golf courses Delavaega is beautiful, believe me. Located in an upper-class community north of Prospect Heights, maybe five miles west of UCSC and Western Drive where a mile below the university, a half mile above Mission Street and Route One three active lunch group members and their families reside in two-story, 2500 square foot, modest small-roomed condominiums (Seth, Martin, and Arnold. Another six of the eleven active members come from Aptos, the Monterey Coast, and Watsonville, while the remaining two members are from small cities and rural areas of Santa Cruz County.

So if you go to Front Street (the Downtown Mall) or the side streets off the Mall practically anytime of day you’ll meet or see a cross section of lunch group types, young, old, and in-between, looking as if they’re heading somewhere important, or waiting for something important to happen to them. Others play music, shop, buy books, check out the Gap, sit on the Mall’s benches and depending on the season of the year and time of day, gaze at the flowering cherry that line both sides of the street, while dreaming about being loved and getting laid.



74.

This chapter is about Billie Cooper and my (Nigel Woodie’s), wedding, two and a half years ago, on September 9, in Los Angeles, at the Santa Monica County Courthouse. Madly in love with one another, we picked up a marriage license at city hall (no blood test was required. I (Nigel) called Justice of the Peace Marcel Denver, spoke to his chief assistant, Sophie Mancuso, who instructed me to bring Billie and our wedding party at 10:30 a.m. to the Santa Monica Courthouse’s back door, where she would meet us.

In our wedding party were Billie (the bride) and I (Nigel, the groom), the bride’s mother and father, the bride’s two brothers, the bride’s sister-in-law, and the bride’s seven-year-old niece. No one from the groom’s family was present. They hadn’t been invited, and hadn’t asked to come.

Billie and I (Nigel) had been living together for almost four years, traveling openly to Boston, New York, and Florida to visit my relatives, while pretending to her parents that Billie was sharing an apartment with a woman friend, so her father wouldn’t discover that I (Nigel) was her true roommate and blame her mother for not stopping Billie from moving in with me.

We drove VIV to the Santa Monica County Courthouse, parked it in the employees’ temporary parking garage across the street from the Courthouse’s employees’ entrance where Sophie Mancuso met us (our wedding party) at the jail’s back door promptly at ten-thirty.

“Are you being married today?” Mancuso asked.

“Yes we are,” Billie replied.

“What time is the wedding?” Mancuso said.

Squeezing my hand Billie answered firmly, “We’re the twelve o’clock.”