The Twelve O'clock Chapters 29-33

29.

Got out of bed, had a brisk shower, sang a couple of loud choruses of “O, What a Beautiful Morning,” shaved, got dressed, hurried downstairs to the kitchen, set a place for myself at the dining table and was in the process of delivering eggs and bacon to the table, when the front doorbell rang. Before I could answer, whoever was outside began to pound on the door with such urgency I knew immediately who it was: Lulu, right? Right.

She’d come to pick up Cotton Tail. “Sorry about last night.” she said, sweeping him into her arms and hugging him. “We had to get out of there. It was scary.”

“You didn’t look scared,” I said. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

“In the beginning, yes,” she said. “It was very exciting, but you saw how those people were acting, screaming like that. Howard said we should get out, and so did Dora, and I agreed with them.” She said they’d seen me dancing with Florence. “We figured you’d get somebody to take you home.”

“I walked,” I said.

“You walked? No.” She began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she said, snatching a piece of bacon from my plate. “Do you mind?”

“That’s rude.”

“You made toast, I hope?,” she said.

“I’ll make it.”

“And coffee?”

I made rye toast, two more scrambled eggs, and instant coffee.

“Instant?” she said.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

“I don’t think so. It’s not good for me.” She’d finished off my bacon.

“I’m out of bacon,” I said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, as I set the toast and the new eggs I’d made on the table in front of her. “Do you have butter, and jam, if it’s not too much trouble?”

“Apricot?” I knew I had apricot jam.

“No raspberry? Or strawberry would be okay. Not my favorite, but it’s acceptable, much better than apricot or peach.” I brought her the apricot jam. She looked displeased but thanked me.

I’d given her two slices of toast. First she carefully buttered each slice, then, despite her objection to apricot, smeared both slices with a thick layer of jam. “Isn’t that pretty?” she said, licking the excess jam from the edges of the bread. Very pretty, I thought, staring dreamily at her adorable tongue in action.

Yet the whole of Lulu’s personality and manner wasn’t nearly as attractive or interesting to me as her impossibly sensual mouth, which was my problem and not hers. A brash, pregnant, twenty-six-year-old, she was much too spoiled and demanding for me to feel comfortable with. Her lisping, inelegant accent, out of Congleton, her mid-England birthplace, was cute enough, but sometimes so thick and peculiar I didn’t know what she was talking about.

From previous conversations with her as well as with Dora I’d learned that Dora, who’d been born and raised in Reigate, a London suburb, and spoke semi-posh, middle-class Londonese, had recognized Lulu’s neediness and panic the instant she sat next to her on that British Airlines flight they’d taken from London to New York. Repeatedly she was forced to listen to Lulu complain about the horrible mistake she’d made, when for airfare and three hundred dollars in advance, she’d agreed to come to America to take care of her Aunt Ella, her mother’s stone-deaf sister, who had a reputation in the family for being short-tempered and obstinate. No one had ever succeeded, Lulu said, in having an enduring relationship with Aunt Ella, including two ex-husbands, four cocker spaniels, and an undersized chimpanzee that did tricks to commands in Latvian, which Aunt Ella didn’t understand and stubbornly refused to learn.

Fortunately Dora, an exceptionally patient listener with an enormous heart for anybody like Lulu who was determined to take advantage of her, also had an enviable talent to listen intently without listening at all and didn’t feel ignored or offended if the advice she gave went totally unheeded. Though outwardly relaxed and cheerful, she, like Lulu, was frightened to death the plane they were on would shortly crash into the Atlantic Ocean and secretly welcomed Lulu’s unstoppable complaint against Aunt Ella, which distracted her from worrying not only that she wouldn’t survive if the plane did crash, but also that her cousin Mitchell and his wife Simone, who’d invited her to stay temporarily with them in their two-bedroom apartment in Queens, while she got settled in New York, had changed their minds about meeting her at New York’s International Airport.

Well, Mitchell and Simone did meet her at the airport as they’d promised, but after staying with them for four miserable days, during which Mitchell tried twice to climb into the bathtub with her, Dora moved out of their Queens apartment into a depressing, sparsely-furnished room in a cheap hotel on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan’s upper Westside. Six days later, Lulu, driven nuts by Aunt Ella’s jealous accusations that she was talking too much to the neighbors, got her own depressing room in the same cheap Manhattan hotel.

Over the next nine days, they explored New York together. Walking, bussing, and subwaying the length of Manhattan from the Battery to the Harlem River, touring places and neighborhoods recommended in the travel guides they’d bought, including the Aquarium, the Statue of Liberty, the Stock Exchange, Greenwich Village, Delancy Street, SoHo, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, the Empire State Building, Broadway and Forty-second Street, Rockefeller Center, Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues, Harlem, Grant’s Tomb, the U.N. Building, the Riverside Episcopal Church, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They also took an “exhilarating” (Dora’s description) ferry ride to Staten Island, made several “disappointing” excursions into Queens and the Bronx, walked expectantly across the Brooklyn Bridge (“very exciting”), strolled through Prospect Park to the Brooklyn Museum (“very nice”), rode the subway to Coney Island (“noisy and fun”), wandered the narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights to find the Victorian brownstone Walt Whitman had lived in and the Brooklyn Eagle building where he’d worked (“historic and impressive”), then sat on a bench on the Brooklyn Heights’ promenade, as two powerful tugs maneuvered a large cargo ship into an East River dock.

Staring glumly across the river, past the tugs and the cargo ship, at the dazzling Manhattan skyline, they reluctantly decided neither of them could cope with New York. Stripped of its glamour and hype, it was too much of a failure for both of them. Not that all of New York doesn’t work; some of it succeeds brilliantly. But gigantic flops are everywhere. What makes them think that they, coming to New York so innocently from less aggressive, less competitive Britain, could tolerate the noise, congestion, filth, crime, racism, rudeness, indifference, poverty, pollution, bad housing, slums, excessive wealth, discrimination, and worse by far, being incarcerated eight hours a day, five days a week in one of those concrete skyscraper monstrosities that New Yorkers are so excessively proud of. Telling one another that night when they returned to the hotel they’d have to get out of this dangerous, fraudulent city, they immediately made reservations to fly to L.A., as if what they expected to find in L.A. would save them.

And it did! In L.A. they met Howard.

“Because I’d gotten plane fare and three hundred dollars in advance,” Lulu wrote in her diary, “I’m in heaven, and so is Dora. Coming to New York was such a fantastic dream for both of us. Except Dora’s cousin in Queens began to resent her, and my Aunt Ella on Sixty-eighth Street was jealous anytime I tried to have a conversation with anybody. So we talked about moving in together, Dora and I, but we didn’t have jobs and were panicked we’d be trapped eight hours a day, five days a week, in one of those concrete monstrosities Manhattan is covered with. Even worse were the awful guys we kept meeting that we couldn’t trust no matter what they told us. One morning, after I'd had a terrible argument with my aunt, and Dora’s cousin had given her a week to find another place to live, we decided to go to L.A.

Immediately, before we knew what kind of place L.A. is, a whole series of miracles happened to us. On Fountain Avenue we found a great apartment in a gorgeous Tudor building that’s exactly what we were looking for. We also got a couple of okay jobs that don’t pay too badly. Dora bought the Pontiac with money from her brother. Then we really got lucky, I mean luck, luck, luck, just poured in on us, changed our entire lives, beginning in the drug store where I work. I met this guy who wanted to buy something and needed to be waited on, so, of course, I waited on him. Turns out he - his name is Howard Neville - lives on Fountain Avenue in the same apartment building Dora and I live in. Isn’t that astounding? We’re on the second floor and he’s downstairs in apartment six. Also, Dora is working for a dentist, and Howard is a patient of the same dentist. What a coincidence, right? And marvelous for everybody, especially Lulu and me, because pretty soon we started sleeping together, making love, the three of us.”

She laughs softly. “Makes me proud to think about it, I mean, we’ve been absolute flops, Lulu and me. She’s twenty-five years old and has been divorced twice, twice! And I’ve had more rotten love affairs, I mean, seriously bad love affairs, where I get so hurt, I can barely bring myself to think about it. Eventually, it becomes painfully obvious that neither of us, neither Dora nor I, can handle a full-sized, breathing, walking, talking man so why shouldn’t we settle for half?”

Half of what?

“Half of a man,” Lulu says, staring intently at me. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”


30.

When Lulu finally took off with Cotton Tail under her arm, I was relieved. An hour and forty-three minutes of resisting those awesome lips was enough. That she’s pregnant has kept me from coming on to her, I suppose, because I do feel obligated to respect her as well as her unborn baby and also Howard, who is obviously a decent guy. Deserting me at Tess is my only objection to how the three of them have treated me, which otherwise is fine.

At one-thirty that afternoon I’d promised to pick up my friend Al at the Olympic Public Parking Garage, where he was working as a parking attendant. This was another new job for him. Much to his annoyance his sister Rhonda’s boyfriend Harry had recommended him for it. Naturally Al had insisted on creating as much of a riot as possible at the garage to impress his twenty-three-year old Latino boss, Miguel Colon, that he was a free- thinking, independent operator who couldn’t be pushed around.

Al’s first crisis at the garage came when Miguel gave him the shift schedule for the upcoming weekend. “I don’t work weekends,” Al told me he told Miguel.

“It’s a rule,” Al said Miguel said. “New employees work weekends. Everybody has to do it.”

“I’m sorry,” Al said he said, giving me a sarcastic-sounding version of what he claimed had happened in his meeting with Miguel. “It’s an ancient tradition that nobody in my family has ever worked on weekends. They’d feel desecrated if I did, so you can hardly ask me to go against what my ancestors have fought so valiantly to preserve.”

“I think I can,” Al said Miguel said.

“Not unless you want to risk the wrath of the Czars,” Al said he said.

“Do you want this job or not?” Al said Miguel said.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Al said he said.

“Then you’re working Saturdays and Sundays, eight a.m. till two, okay?”

“Can we talk about it?” Al said he said.

That night Al called me. “Is this a democracy? Where have the choices gone?” Miguel, he said, had given him a five-day schedule. “I’m off Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The guy’s power hungry, but I didn’t flinch. I’ve got a strategy. He’ll soon be at my mercy. It’s just a matter of time. ”In addition, Al said, Miguel had given him a copy of the garage’s dress code: dark pants, black or brown, a white shirt, and black shoes, all of which Al said he’d strenuously objected to. “Why?” I asked, knowing he owned a pair of dark brown pants and more than one white shirt.

“Four white shirts,” Al said he said.

“And black shoes? Do you have black shoes?”

“Two pair,” Al said he said. “Both in reasonable shape.”

“So what’s the problem?” I said.

“The black bow tie,” he said. “The company supplies it. I don’t like anything around my neck.”

“You wear a shirt,” I said.

“A collar’s the limit. No bow tie.”

“You’ll get canned again,” I said.

He shook his head no. “I intend to survive.”

On Thursday he started at the garage. That night he called me from Schubert’s. “You should have seen the guy’s face,” he said. “There I was in all my glory, brown pants, black shoes, that damn bow tie in my back pocket, and the prettiest blue shirt he’d ever set his eyes on.’

“Blue? Not white like you were supposed to?”

“Definitely not white,” he said, clearly proud of himself. “The guy couldn’t believe it.”

“What guy?” I said.

“Miguel, who thinks he’s the boss.”

“He is the boss, isn’t he?”

“In some respects, of course, but not over somebody like me, with my experience, which he doesn’t have, okay? So when he sees me in the blue shirt, he says, Al, I guess you don’t understand you’re supposed to wear a white shirt. There are no exceptions.” Then he asked if I’d read the dress code he’d given me.

“I studied it,” Al said he said.

“You did?” Al said Miguel said. “Then why are you wearing a blue shirt?”

On Tuesday, his first day off, Al met me at the Pancake Palace for coffee. Each day, he said, since he began to work at the garage he’d worn a different colored shirt, never a white shirt, and the other parking attendants were complaining he was taking advantage of Miguel who, they said, was too soft-hearted for his own good. Al laughed, making an impatient face. “It’s still a tug-of-war between me and him.”

“That’s silly,” I said.

“But I’ve got a plan, don’t I? From blue I go to green, then to pink, then to purple, then to red, while the guy’s temperature keeps rising until he’s got to make a change.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“He’s exasperated, for which I apologize, because he’s a very sweet, nice, decent, good guy.”

“Then why are you tormenting him?” I said.

“To make him realize who he’s dealing with,” he said.

It was my turn to laugh. “But you’re pushing him too hard,” I said.

That got a big guffaw from Al. “You should have seen the guy Monday morning,” he said, “when I came in wearing black pants, black shoes, and a gold shirt.”

“A gold shirt?”

“Then finally, finally, finally, just in the nick of time, the guy says, Al, you’re on the edge. I’ve come to the conclusion that working in this garage isn’t what you want to do in life, even temporarily, so you’d do me a big favor, if you’d please (with emphasis by Al on the please) take the next half hour and decide whether you want me to fire you or not. And that was it.”

“What was it?”

“He’d said the magic word that I’m always a sucker for.”

“What word?” I said.

“Please.”

“Please?” I said. He laughed again.

“In a half hour I came back and told him, okay, I get the message. Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll run down to the shopping center and buy me a classy, pure white shirt, and from now on I’ll even wear that bow tie you want me to wear. Then like the great kid he is, he shakes my hand, and I feel I’ve done a good deed.”

“He didn’t fire you?” I said.

Putting his arm around me, he squeezed my shoulders.

“I beat him at his own game,” he said. “How could he fire me?”

That’s so great. Here’s a guy who hardly has a nickel to his name, has no friends except his sister Rhonda and me, can’t resist telling people off or putting them down, is perpetually contrary, difficult, uncooperative, sarcastic , and silly, mostly out of his distorted sense of humor that does more damage to him than anything else, and can seriously say to me, less than a baby’s breath away from being canned from his job, “I beat him at his own game,” and “how could he fire me?” Is this fearlessness or stupidity, contempt or escape from reality? Whatever it is, I’m constantly amazed he can talk such nonsense and get away with it, which, of course, he doesn’t.

In contrast, compared to Al, I’m predictable and uncomplicated. What you see and hear and anticipate in me is exactly what you get. At least that’s the kind of propaganda I prefer to put out about myself, in case somebody is contemplating asking me to stand up in front of the class to recite the pledge of allegiance. No question I’ve been a willing accomplice in many of Al’s teasing escapades, including that embarrassing episode at Schubert’s, involving Audrey Frost – poor Audrey, and her friend, Pam, which I’m still ashamed to think about, though his telling them I’d popped a lobotomy out of his head with a button hook was pretty fumy, wasn’t it? Or was it?

Funnier, Al said, was the Olympic Terrace Shopping Center. Almost a half-mile long, anchored in the middle as well as at both ends by major department stores, between which on two levels were double rows of shops, restaurants, and a food take-out plaza, “it’s a very hilarious place. Practically everybody connected with it is nuts.” He was talking about the center’s management, its retailers and suppliers, and also its customers. “All of them are competition crazy.”

Adjacent to each of the department stores was a three-story, inter-connecting parking garage. Entrances to the end garages were off the shopping center’s side streets, while the middle garage’s main entrance came directly from Olympic Boulevard. Drivers get confused, Al said, about which garage to park in. One of his duties, which he described to me in detail, was to direct people who were lost in the garage to a parking space that was closest to their destination in the center. “It’s a heavy responsibility,” he said. Then we both broke out laughing.

I’d promised to pick up Al at the garage at one-thirty. I arrived twenty minutes early. He was working at the street-level entrance off Olympic Boulevard in the middle garage’s information booth. Well, I saw immediately he was in a great mood. Giving me a big smile, he signaled me to park VIV in the employees' section in the middle garage's basement, which I promptly tried to do, despite being stopped by some guy, probably another parking attendant, who said I had to go upstairs to the public parking area, until I told him Al had sent me, which didn’t seem to make him happy.


31.

That Sunday afternoon, about an hour after Lulu and Cotton Tail had exited from my apartment, I went to the parking garage to pick up Al. Despite the nonsense he’d been telling himself and me, and, worse still, his sister Rhonda, about “beating him at his own game” and “how could he fire me,” Al was animated and upbeat, determined, as he told me later, to show those “dumb” people he worked with, as well as Rhonda and her “rotten” boyfriend Harry, who’d gotten him this “miserable job,” that he wasn’t “a useless flop, no matter what they say about me.”

“You’re transformed?” I said.

“Never!” he said sharply, a seldom-seen-by-me, uncynical grin on his face.

We were in the traffic control booth inside the garage’s Olympic Boulevard entrance. Most of the stores in the center were having “gigantic” sales, and traffic in and out of the garage was heavy. I’d arrived twenty minutes early and was sitting on a bench under the surveillance camera at the rear of the booth, watching Al perform, not as his difficult, combative self, but remarkably, I thought, in the role of devoted, energetic parking garage attendant, greeting shopping center customers, giving them directions, answering their questions, then sending them off happily after they’d done their shopping, until, maybe six minutes before his shift was scheduled to end, when this agitated, red-haired woman in a pink Mercedes pulled up to the booth’s in-lane window, apparently confused about which section of the huge, multi-tiered. three-entranced garage she was in, and shouted excitedly at him: “Young man, young man, where am I?”

“You’re in Disneyland, lady,” Al shouted back at her, in a booming, imperious-sounding voice, thinking, I suppose, he’d made a joke, but getting himself instead into big, big trouble, because the woman began to scream, claiming he’d insulted her, demanding to speak with his supervisor, and stubbornly refusing to move her car out of the in-lane, preventing new arrivals from getting into the garage.

Rushing to the control booth from his second-tier office, Miguel, the boss, who’d seen Al on his office’s camera monitor being screamed at by the woman, tried first to calm her, then to get Al out of her sight. “Would you please leave?” he hissed at Al, but Al didn’t leave, acting as if he thought he could tease the woman out of her anger, which also didn’t work.

“What does she want from me?” Al said, as Miguel was appealing to the woman to move her car out of the incoming lane, or allow somebody else to move it for her. She agreed finally to let one of the other parking attendants drive the car to a safe area, which an attendant did, while Miguel escorted her to Palmer Greig’s office. Palmer Greig was the garage’s boss of bosses.

“What a rotten sense of humor.” Al said, staring innocently at me. Then he burst out laughing. “How could I resist? She was asking for it, wasn’t she?”

When hostile-faced Steve Sissel, Al’s most outspoken critic at the garage, showed up for the next shift, he brought a message from Miguel. Al was wanted in Palmer Greig’s office.

“This is ridiculous,” Al said, shaking his fist at the surveillance camera. “I absolutely don’t intend to apologize.”


32.

Well, he did apologize. I’d parked VIV on a side street across from the garage. That’s where I waited for him, while he met with Palmer Greig. As soon as I saw him crossing Olympic, I knew from his morose face and droopy shuffle that something bad had happened to him. “They dumped me,” he said, as he got into the car. “Can you imagine? I’d apologized to her, because I felt sorry for her. She’d misunderstood what I was saying. That’s how convincing I was. My whole performance was exactly on the money, at least in my estimation.” I noticed his chin was trembling. “I was brilliant,” he said.

The woman, who’d accused him of insulting her was Rachel Veronica Obermacher. Three days a week she had a radio talk show called Conquering Fear. Her motto was Stay Cool. “First thing she does,” Al said, “is to ask me to forgive her for getting so upset at what, she says, was the rude way I’d yelled at her. Naturally I reciprocated, saying I’d meant no disrespect, and that I’m a regular listener to her radio program, which is a total exaggeration, because maybe I’ve heard it twice or less, except I had this idea in my head I’d seen her before. In Schubert’s, I think, a week ago Friday.”

“A week ago Friday? Where was I?” I asked.

“You didn’t show up,” Al said.

“I didn’t?”

“No, but that’s not important now. What I’m trying to tell you is that a week ago Friday she comes into Schubert’s with this other woman.”

“What other woman?”

“The woman she was with. How should I know?” he said, his voice rising impatiently.

“Do you have to talk to me like that?” I said.

“I’m just anxious to tell you about her.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“Which is what I’m trying to do,” he said, turning sharply toward me. “I’m sitting at that small table near the front door, okay? As they walk past me, I see they’re looking at me, I mean, really looking at me, both of them, like they can’t take their eyes off me, and I’m doing the same to them, until they get seated against the back wall. Then every time I look in their direction, they seem to be watching me, especially Rachel Veronica. This doesn’t mean I expected her to recognize me when she sees me again in the garage, right? Except a couple of times, while Greig is talking a blue streak at her, I notice she’s taking very slow, slightly smiley peeks at me, like she’s trying to figure out who I am and why I look familiar to her, if I do look familiar, which maybe I don’t?

“At the same time, I see, she’s beginning to back away from Greig like she’s already heard more than she can stand about the glories of the garage’s code of conduct that requires employees, he says, to be polite to customers, as if employees being polite to customers is so extraordinary he should get a medal for it. Not that I’m saying such a code doesn’t exist, though personally I’d never heard of it before. What Greig is hoping to do, I suppose, by claiming that enforcing the code is one of his top priorities, is to persuade Rachel Veronica that she shouldn’t blame him, or the garage, for what he says is my inexcusable lack of judgment that was insulting to her. He’s about to repeat himself for the fourth time, when suddenly she announces she’s decided to forgive everybody, including me, and including him. Twenty minutes later, as she’s getting ready to leave, she squeezes past Greig to shake my hand. I even get to kiss her cheek. That’s when she gives me her card with her autograph on it.”

“Nice,” I said.

Al shook his head no. “She’s up to something. Makes me nervous,” he said, stuffing the card into his shirt pocket.

We were heading east on Olympic Boulevard. At Fairfax Avenue I turned VIV north toward the Hollywood Hills. “The guy I feel sorry for is Miguel,” Al said. “He’s stuck with Greig, unless he does what I did and gets himself fired, which he can’t afford to do, when he’s got a wife, two kids, his mother, and his sister to take care of, and he’s the main breadwinner. They have to eat, don’t they?”

On Greig’s orders, Al said, “Miguel gets the duty to escort Rachel Veronica back to her car. As soon as they’re gone, Greig tells me he’s had her car washed. Better to surprise her, he says, than a lawsuit. Does he really think, if she did intend to sue him, she’d sell out for a car wash? Even worse is the stupid pep talk he gives me about being a team player. Then, in his weasel voice, sounding completely insincere, he congratulates me on not getting into an argument with Rachel Veronica. Immediately I begin to worry. Am I looking less dumb and more dependable to him? Is my ridiculous career at the garage about to skyrocket? That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid, isn’t it?”

"Remember, I’d put in a bunch of suggestions, gave them to Miguel in writing to give to Greig, which Miguel did, and when I ask Greig about them, he says he’s still considering whether it’s practical to have somebody in a jeep or on a bicycle (my number one suggestion), roaming through the garage and reporting back to the three control booths which floors and which sections of the garage have parking-space vacancies so that incoming customers can get to them as quickly as possible and not waste time looking for a place to park, when they could be shopping in some store on the mall, which, Greig says, is a fabulous idea, but might cause more confusion than it’s worth and would probably be too expensive to operate.

“Also too expensive, he says, is training parking garage attendants (my second suggestion) to give customers more personal, up-to-the-minute service. He reminds me about the guy in the white pickup truck, who’d stopped to shake my hand as he was exiting from the garage. I’d talked to this guy about some parking problem he had, and the reason he shook my hand was to thank me for being so patient with him. ‘Held up traffic, didn’t it?’ Greig says. This is why, he also says, I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass with Rachel Veronica. ‘Do you realize,’ he says, ‘what damage she could do to us on her radio program, if she complains to the people who listen to her, that you, a representative of this garage, deliberately insulted her like you did?’

“I didn’t know she was Rachel Veronica, I said, and I didn’t mean to insult her.

“'That’s absolutely no excuse. It doesn’t matter what you meant,' he shouts at me. 'Nobody in this garage has the right to talk to a customer like you talked to her regardless of who she is. What you’ve done, by every standard in this business, is irresponsible and stupid.’ I agreed with him,” Al said. “Probably it did sound stupid, but all I’d wanted to do was to cheer her up, which he refused to give me credit for.”

“Then as soon as Miguel gets back to the office, Greig tells him he’s made up his mind to put me on some kind of indefinite leave, at least until the situation with Rachel Veronica blows over. This I don’t object to. Instead I thank them both, first because they’d given me a chance to practice some of my best showbiz moves, which, I have no doubt whatsoever, has improved my acting technique, given me more confidence, and opened me up as an actor who can think on my feet, and second because I honestly appreciate Greig pushing me out the door like he did, while I’m still enjoying myself too much to quit on my own.”

“Hey, you don’t have to quit,” Al said Greig said.

“I don’t?” Al said he said. “So I didn’t. That’s when he fired me.”

Again Al burst out laughing.

A half block above Melrose on Fairfax was Nate Binder’s Kosher Delicatessen, Al’s second favorite hangout and restaurant, behind Schubert’s Parlor, of course. Binder himself was making sandwiches, when we arrived. He gave Al a big greeting. “You look pale,” he said. “Are you pale?”

Al introduced me to Binder, then ordered a corned beef on rye, “with cold slaw, plenty of cold slaw, and a sour pickle.” I ordered the same, minus the pickle.

”Hot tea?” Binder said.

When Binder’s wife Thelma delivered two hot teas to our table, Al told her about his ordeal at the garage. “Got fired,” he said.

“Familiar story,” she said, rolling her eyes at me.

“Can’t help it,” Al said. “Nobody loves me.” He put two heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar into his tea, one into mine. “You want one, don’t you?”

“One’s better for you than two,” Thelma said. Al gave her a blow-by-blow description of what had happened to him in his meeting with Greig.

“Hard to feel sorry,” she said, glancing at me, “when he does it to himself.”

As Thelma headed back to the counter to get our sandwiches, Al said: “She knew my mother, and she knows Rhonda, believes every word Rhonda says, and doesn’t believe me.”

He’d told me about Rhonda and Thelma, and Rhonda and his mother (Rhonda’s mother also), and his mother and Thelma. “All of them originally were buddies,” Al said. “Then Mama got sick of Thelma siding with Rhonda against me. She used to complain to me about it, which doesn’t make sense, because Mama had said much worse things about me than Rhonda does, or Thelma, or both of them combined.”

In past laments about his Mama Al had told me what a hard worker she was. “Two shifts, daytime nine hours at the dress factory, then a couple of hours three nights a week and Saturday afternoon at Binder’s. This is why Thelma and Nate loved her so much. She had a soft heart. They took advantage of her.”

His father, Al said, had run away from home when he, Al, was eight. “I can still see him the night he left. We were sitting around the dining table, Mama, me, Rhonda, and him. He was teaching us to play poker. He also did card tricks, which were always a big hit, especially if he’d learned a new trick and was trying it out on us.” Al carried a photograph of his father in his bulging, imitation-alligator-skin wallet. The photograph was slightly faded, and one corner of it was broken off. The image of Pa in the photograph was a head-shot that looked like Rhonda, had Rhonda’s fair hair and fair skin, her dark eyes, slender nose, long neck, and dimpled chin. “Which amazes me,” Al said, “ that Rhonda looks so much like him, and I look like Mama.” His mother had died two years ago. I’d met her only once.

“I’d make a rotten-looking woman, wouldn’t I?” Al said.

“Poor Mama.”

But Mama wasn’t (he later told me)
Poor like I say
She was still a winner
In every kind of way
Sure, I could trust her
To put me number one
Too bad she broke my heart
And took away the fun
Of being together,
both at ease.
I blame Mama
Who never said please.
Instead she told
Me what to do,
Which I resented
Secretly,
In explaining
What a pain in the ass
I’d always been
to everybody (myself included).
Poor Mama, I said.

Amen


33.

Monday, the day after Al was fired, I was up bright and early, got dressed, had yogurt for breakfast, backed VIV out of the garage, and drove to the Jack Gordon Building on Beverly Boulevard, where another appraiser, Eric Daly, and I shared a small office. Eric, I knew, had an appointment downtown with a client and probably wouldn’t arrive till late afternoon. I had a lot of work to do on the brewery appraisal. I also couldn’t keep my mind off Billie. This was the magnificent day on which she and I were having our first dinner together. Pretty exciting, right?

Then, shortly before ten-thirty that morning, while I was still struggling to concentrate on the brewery instead of Billie, the telephone rang. It’s her, I thought. It’s got to be her. But how’d she get this phone number? Taking a deep breath, I picked up the phone. “Nigel Woodie Appraisals,” I said. “Nigel speaking.”

“Nigel,” a man’s voice answered. “This is Ed Shiller.”

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

Ed Shiller was the managing director of Kenneth King Conrad and Associates. I’d met with him in his office at the company’s Brentwood headquarters last Thursday afternoon, remember? He’d told me he was looking for an appraiser to do a market study on a project the company was developing in Riverside County.

We’d talked for maybe forty minutes, during which he continuously chomped on sunflower seeds, spitting the husks from the seeds into an ugly ashtray that he kept shifting around his desk. The resume I'd brought him contained a list of recent clients. “Is it okay if I contact these folks?” he asked, emptying the ashtray into a waste paper basket beside his desk.

“Never smoked in my life,” he said, “not one puff, showing, in my estimation, a total lack of curiosity, growing up, when every kid my age in the neighborhood, male and female, was taking puffs behind the garage, to prove they had guts enough to give the finger to people who were telling them what to do, like my mother, for instance, who smoked like a chimney, was the proud owner of this miserable ashtray, and guess what, died of lung cancer, having resisted everybody, including me, who pleaded with her to stop smoking.”

Hanging his head a beat, breathing erratically as if the wind had been knocked out of him, he apologized for spitting the sunflower husks into the ashtray. “Disgusting habit, isn’t it?”

Today (Monday) he was calling me, he said, to report that the replies he’d gotten from my clients were all positive and enthusiastic and to set up an appointment for me to meet the company’s CEO and president, Kenneth King Conrad, whom Shiller called the King.

“I thought he was three different guys,” I said. “I’m surprised.”

“That’s just the beginning,” Shiller said. “Wait till you meet him.”

What about the project?

“326 acres,” he said.

“Where?”

“Periwinkle, California.”

“Wow!” I said.

Billie and a fat Periwinkle fee!

Double Wow!

How lucky can I get?

We made an appointment for Thursday at 9:30 a.m. “King’s looking forward to it,” Shiller said.

Eagerly, maybe too eagerly, I thanked him.

He again reminded me of the time of the meeting: 9:30 on Thursday morning. I assured him I wouldn’t be late. Then we hung up. I had to take a half-dozen deep breaths before I could calm down. Periwinkle was a huge project, at least for me it was, and should mean a substantial fee.

To be summoned by Shiller to meet the “King” to talk about Periwinkle on the same day I’m having my first dinner with Billie is “fantastic,” isn’t, it?

How lucky can I get?