The Twelve O'clock Chapters 34-51

34.

The telephone was ringing again. This time it was my office mate, Eric Daly. “Help,” he said, "I don’t know what the bum wants from me.”

He’d just finished a three-hour session with a client, a guy who owned six apartment buildings in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. “I gave him what he asked for,” he said, “and still he isn’t satisfied.”

Dissatisfied customers are an occupational hazard for appraisers. Eric knows this, and so do I. I’ve had plenty of them.

When I worked for the bank, I had managers who said my values were too low to get them the high-dollar mortgages they thought they were entitled to. At the government agency I later worked for some taxpayers said my values were too high, that I was forcing them to pay more taxes to the government than they wanted to pay. Yet I was the same appraiser then as I am now, five years into my own business, using the same methods, the same principles, and the same approaches to value.

Most people who hire me say they’re pleased with my work. This doesn’t mean I don’t have dissidents to deal with, a few of whom say I’m pathetically untalented as an appraiser, especially those who seem determined to shift the burden of their money problems onto somebody else.

The worst example I can remember happened when a friend of mine, the managing partner of a small accounting firm, Doug Fetcher, asked me to do an appraisal on a lumber mill and warehouse complex in Piedmont, Oregon. Half of the substantial fee was up front, so I immediately told him yes.

The western regional office of Piedmont’s parent company, Rhode Island Pacific, was located in San Francisco on Sunderland Street. My contact at Rhode Island Pacific was a vice president in charge of parity solutions named Sanford Golub. A peppy, outgoing guy, he had a glass right eye and an ugly drinking problem. He welcomed me. “Does the eye bother you?” he said, pushing his face at mine and tapping his cheek under his right eye. “If you’re uncomfortable, I’ll wear my patch.” He produced a black patch from his jacket’s breast pocket and dangled it in front of my nose. “I like to warn people. I’m third generation glass-eyed.”

On a long table behind Golub’s desk were boxes of records, reports, and photographs that, he said, would give me a complete picture of the current condition of the company’s Piedmont plant. There was also a tall box of rolled-up maps. He pulled out one of the maps and spread it across his desk. “I can read this without my glasses,” he said, taking off his glasses. “Even the smallest print is clear as a bell. The other eye, the left eye, is very powerful, always has been. When I was born, the missing eye was a hole in my head. They had to pry open the socket to put in my first glass eye – a different shade, because the color of my left eye has changed.” He insisted I peer closely into both his eyes.

A young woman with dimples and stiff hair came into the room, carrying a box with an assortment of cards and papers. “The eye intimidates her,” Golub said, after the young woman exited from the office. “Does it make you feel uneasy? Have you noticed it’s blue?”

“It is blue,” I said, which seemed to elate him.

“Help yourself,” he said, motioning toward the boxes on the table. “You can have copies to take home if you need to study them.”

For the next three and a quarter hours the two of us sorted through piles of papers and index cards of various colors, which Golub eagerly retrieved from the boxes. The photographs he gave me to look at showed immense amounts of deferred maintenance throughout the Piedmont complex. Almost every building appeared to be heavily damaged. “Worn out,” he said. Neglected, I thought. “The value loss to the company,” he said, “is obvious in the photographs and easily detected at the site. I’ve surveyed it personally many times.”

At twelve-thirty sharp an alarm buzzer went off. “I’m taking you to lunch,” he said. “I’m ready to faint. You must be starving.”

“I hadn’t thought about eating,” I said. He excused himself, while he put a couple drops into his glass right eye. “Keeps the lids moist,” he said. “Very important.”

35.

Golub took me to the Voyager Restaurant on Broadway. “I come here whenever I can get away for lunch, which isn’t often,” he said. “Best asparagus soup in town.” We had to wait for a table, though he’d made a reservation for us. “Par for the course,” he said. The lobby and the bar area were crowded. There was barely room for us to squeeze in at the end of the bar. “What will you have?” he said.

“Water,” I said.

“Water?” Golub said. He looked surprised.

“Ice?” the bartender said.

“Lots of ice,” I said. To Golub I said: “I don’t drink alcohol. I’m sorry.”

Golub laughed. “Do you mind if I have something?” He ordered a double martini. “Keeps the blood moving,” he said.

The restaurant’s walls were lined with road signs. “From all over the world,” Golub said. “The entire fifty states, as well as Helsinki, Madrid, Paris, Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, the works, and most of them are autographed by somebody famous from each of these places.”

“I’ve only been to London once,” I said.

He pointed out the London sign to me. It said Piccadilly.

“Exciting,” he said, “to be in London.” He’d traveled extensively for the company in Europe and Asia. “Parity is an issue everywhere.” He explained how it was his responsibility “to make sure the company doesn’t get screwed. Whatever methods I decide to use are fine. I’ve got my one and only boss in the Empire State Building in New York, which is our international headquarters. Nobody else in the company knows what I’m doing, and they don’t ask me questions, because I’m under strict orders not to tell them anything. What the big boss wants from me is deniability, in case somebody from somewhere swoops down on us and starts pointing fingers at him. He can truthfully say he doesn’t know what this guy, namely me, is doing, which is perfect, because, otherwise, he’d cramp my style.”

When we finally got seated at a table, Golub ordered a second double martini. “I’m thirsty,” he said, grinning mischievously at me. We both had asparagus soup and a shrimp salad. Before we began to eat, he finished off the second martini, downing most of it in one long swallow. Red-faced, slurring his words, he said: “It’s been arranged. I’ve already selected the value that’s appropriate. The Assessor has agreed to change it.”

“The Assessor?” I said.

“Took his daughter out a couple of times, legitimately,” he said. “Too plain, but she interested me, and nobody was paying attention to her. She also was willing to take money from me. Not much, a couple of hundred, a couple of times. That got her daddy interested, which was my intention in the first place.”

“You paid him off?” I said.

“Not yet. It’s a delicate situation. The daughter gets it, and she passes it on, unless she prefers to run away to Honolulu without him.” He laughed again. “Meanwhile, all I need from you is a value to support the assessment I want.”

Shrugging, he took a large slurp of soup. “Business is business,” he said.

“Not for me it isn’t,” I said.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said. “The company has to defend itself, doesn’t it? These people take advantage, and all we want is to be treated like everybody else. It’s my job to deal with government agencies. What’s so bad about that? You’re much too sensitive.”

When we got back to his office, I told him I wouldn’t do the appraisal. He was outraged. “You knew the circumstance, didn’t you? Why did you waste my time?” He called Doug Fetcher in L.A. “You sent the wrong guy,” he said.

Doug asked to speak to me. I explained what had happened. “It’s fixed,” I said. “I won’t do it.” Doug was sympathetic. He apologized to me. “Would you mind returning the advance I gave you?”

I put down the phone. Golub was glaring at me. Slapping his hand over his good eye, he growled angrily: “Get out of my sight!”

36.

The next morning I put Doug Fetcher’s advance into an envelope and sent it back to him. That alone depressed me, because I could have used the money to buy a replacement for my broken-down refrigerator, or pay off the loan on my car. Rejecting Golub so abruptly made me realize I had a responsibility to warn the citizens of Piedmont that their Assessor was being bribed to cut back the assessed valuation on a high-tax-yielding property in their community. Did I do so? What proof did I have? My word against Golub’s, or my word against the Rhode Island Pacific. They’d skin me alive.

Eric was the only person I’d told about Golub and what he’d tried to do to me. Now Eric was in the same boat, with that rotten apartment house owner who was threatening to bite off his head. While I’m single and solvent and could probably survive being persecuted by the Rhode Island Pacific, Eric has a wife, three children, two cats, a Great Dane, and a monumental mortgage to take care of and couldn’t in a million years tell the apartment house owner to jump in the lake as I’d done with Golub.

Of course, Eric has a reputation as a low-ball appraiser, which makes him vulnerable to people like the apartment house owner, because he processes market value information from a conservative or pessimistic point of view that yields low and sometimes marginally provocative values that other appraisers, me included, disagree with.

When I was working for the bank, I had to take an appraisal-training course given by two guys who were local certified real estate appraisers. Market value, they kept pounding into my head, has four main elements: the highest price in terms of money, a willing buyer, a willing seller, and full knowledge of the uses of the property and the advantages and restrictions of the marketplace. This means, they said, that willing buyers and willing sellers have to be open and honest with one another for the market to succeed. Underhanded dealings are out, monopolies are out, secret payments like subsidies and tax breaks are out, lying is out, cheating is out, and phony advertising has to be out, or the entire market falls apart.

Also, appraising is an art, at least I think it’s an art, no matter how many numbers, comparable sales, rents, interest rates, building costs, square-footages, and maintenance deductions are involved with it. Three experienced appraisers like low-ball Eric, cautious me, and some high-baller who believes in his heart that the market has nowhere to go except up, can use the same market information on the same property and arrive at three completely different value conclusions, all of them legal, straight-forward, and sincere, depending on how each of us interprets the evidence we find in the market, how we estimate the market’s present condition and future growth, as well as the kinds of training and appraisal experiences each of us has had, how we slept last night, what we ate for breakfast, and whether somebody is giving us a hard time, like the overwrought property owner who is trying to shove a directed verdict down Eric’s throat.

“I’ve got to talk to Judy about it,” Eric said, sighing woefully. Judy was Eric’s wife. From long experience with them I knew she was an unpublicized full partner in his appraisal business. She also had a real estate broker’s license and sold real estate part-time.

Eric sounded stressed and angry. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I said.

“You bet your ass I am,” Eric said.

“Will you be coming to the office?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet,” he snapped, as if I were to blame for the mess he was in. “Stop poking your nose in my business,” he said irritably, then hung up the phone. For maybe ten miserable minutes I sat at my desk, staring into space and wondering why anybody would want to be a real estate appraiser and have so much hostility and disappointment to put up with:

What a way to make a living,
Plucking values from the air,
Claiming that you’re truly giving
Market values that are fair.


37.

The next time I looked at the clock it was almost three-thirty. I’d been making poor progress on my brewery appraisal. In three-plus hours I’d be on my way to Sherman Oaks to pick up Billie. I gathered together the brewery appraisal report and was clearing room for it in the filing cabinet, when the office door flew open, and Al’s sister, Rhonda, stomped in. She was furious. “I have needs,” she said, “and he doesn’t give a damn.” Al had told her he’d lost his job at the parking garage. I immediately made excuses for him.

”He was really trying,” I said. “He didn’t mean to get fired. I was there. I watched it happen. He was doing his best.”

“His best?, at somebody else’s expense, right? and I’m sick and tired of it.” Tears filling her eyes, she gave me a short, bitter history of how Al had taken advantage of their mother and how she and their mother had put up with his selfishness and irresponsibility. “It’s a disease he got from my father, who didn’t work a day in his life, as long as my mother was willing to hold down two jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. I’ve had enough of Al doing that to me.”

Taking a deep breath, snuffling back her tears, she took my left hand, squeezed it gently, then guided by me, eased herself down onto my lap. “I miss my mama,” she said, resting her cheek against my forehead. “I’m very lonely.” Instantly I got an erection.

“Al thinks we’d make a great couple,” she said, laughing softly. “Did he tell you that?”

Indirectly, yes. What he’d told me was to find somebody who was uncomplicated like his sister Rhonda. He’d also said Rhonda was too old for me, so I shook my head no, wondering at the same time, as she kept shifting around on my lap, if she could feel how perversely erect I was and whether she was pleased or offended by it.

Frankly this was the first time I’d ever looked closely enough at her to notice what an attractive woman she was. I mean, I knew she had straight, blonde hair, but hadn’t realized it was a luminous shade of white-blonde and it was thick and long and cut stylishly. Same for her bright, pale skin, her mellow brown eyes, and her pink, moist-lipped mouth, out of which she was presently exhaling heavily garlicked breaths that were a major turn-off to me. My erection began to wilt.

“Harry’s been extremely good to Al,” she said, snuggling her cheek against my ear. “Does he appreciate it? Has he ever thanked Harry?”

Until now, I’d also overlooked her small, shapely breasts. I think she’d always worn loose blouses that concealed them. Suddenly I was tempted to ask her to have sex with me. We could do it here, I thought. I’d lock the door. I had a strong hunch Eric was so annoyed at me he wouldn’t be coming to the office this afternoon. We could take a chance, if she was willing. My erection started up again.

Then Billie’s face popped into my head. Hadn’t I been telling myself I was madly in love with her? In three hours weren’t we scheduled to have dinner together? How could I face her if I’d just had sex with Rhonda? Wouldn’t Billie spot my faithlessness? I’m an open book. She’d see my guilt as soon as I walked in the front door. Isn’t this proof I can’t be trusted? My erection abruptly drooped.

“It’s been very nice,” Rhonda said, squirming to her feet. “Don’t tell Al, okay?”

I promised not to tell him. “Can I have a rain check?” she said, puckering a kiss at me.

“When?” I said.

“Soon,” she said, as hurrying out of the office, she flashed a dazzling smile that got me going again. My erection had revived.


38.

Oh, was I depressed. By the time I got back to the apartment I could hardly look at myself in the mirror. True, hormones were probably the main culprits, but doesn’t such duplicitous conduct also say something nasty about my weak character? If Rhonda had given me the slightest encouragement, wouldn’t I have been all over her, despite my self-proclaimed love for Billie, and that’s reprehensible, isn’t it?

On the way home I did a couple of small errands: picked up my gray suit from Mr. Lopez, and my shirts from his next-door neighbor, Hop Sing. Lopez was a dry cleaner. Hop Sing and his family ran the hand laundry. I’d been a customer of both for almost six years, out of habit mostly.

When I first met Hop Sing, he and his wife had four kids. Now six years later they had eight. The oldest, an intense-eyed boy, age 15, was a senior in high school. The youngest, a seven-month-old girl, was named Li Lu whom Hop Sing was very proud of. Often, when I brought in shirts, or came to retrieve them, he’d ask his wife to hold up Li Lu for me to see how pretty and bright-eyed she was.

The hand laundry was located in a long, narrow store building that had a plate glass display window at its street entrance. In the front third of the store were the public counter as well as the ironing tables and Li Lu’s crib and playpen. Behind a partition that separated the public area from the remaining two-thirds of the store was where the family ate, slept, and studied. Mr. Lopez told me all of the kids were terrific students and big studiers and did whatever they had to do to earn a living and keep themselves healthy. The laundry, including my shirts, Mr. Lopez said, was washed in large, aluminum tubs and hung out to dry on clotheslines in the shallow yard behind the store building. Hop Sing and his wife were the chief ironers, and he (Hop Sing) and their sweet smiling thirteen-year-old, whose American name was Elaine, waited on customers.

Hop Sing’s laundry business obviously operated on a shoestring. Everything about it seemed dingy and pessimistic. The walls of the store desperately needed to be painted, the counter’s linoleum top was worn out, and the concrete floor in the public area, though I don’t think it was dirty, could have used a polish, or a cheap rug to cover it, if Hop Sing could have afforded to buy a cheap rug, which I doubted, until one afternoon when I confided to Mr. Lopez how worried I was about the Hop Sing family and its dismal existence.

“They’re thriving, aren’t they?” Mr. Lopez said. “And what about those kids? Smart as a whip, every one of them, including little Li Lu. I guarantee, by the time she gets to the first grade, she’ll do what all of them are willing to do, study hard and be the best student in every class she takes. You ask how Hop Sing’s going to pay for it? Thrift,” Lopez said.

“Thrift?” I said.

“Doing without, saving every nickel he can get his hands on, putting what he saves into something that’s going to make him more money than he started with.” Mr. Lopez motioned to me to follow him outside.

We stood at the curb in front of the hand laundry. Pointing to a small, two-story office building on the other side of La Brea past Lexington, he said: “Belongs to him.”

“Hop Sing?” I said.

He pointed to the service station at the corner of La Brea and Santa Monica. “His also,” he said.

“The service station?”

“Just the land.”

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“In addition,” Lopez said, wiggling his right index finger at me. “He owns a four-plex on Fountain and a duplex on Detroit.

“Unbelievable,” I said, glancing back into the laundry. Hop Sing and his wife were at adjoining tables ironing shirts, Elaine was at the counter making entries into an account book, and Owen, the oldest son, was at another table behind the counter, wrapping packages of finished laundry.

“Still think you need to feel sorry for them?” Lopez said.

Maybe not, I thought, because that kind of commitment, that single-mindedness, that long-term determination to sacrifice for a common goal was completely out of my league. In fact, I hardly understand it, especially when it involves an entire family of ten people who make up their minds to do what one guy, their husband and father, Hop Sing, says is good for all of them. I didn’t grow up like that.

The Hop Sings, I decided, had a special core and a secret music my family didn’t have. Compared to them, we drifted idly, on our own steam, without the togetherness that made them shine so uniquely.

Never once can I remember going after anything with the Hop Sings’ intensity, no matter how much I thought I wanted it. What I did instead was to wait for opportunity to come to me. Even with the women I seduced, my pose was to remain reticent, hanging back until some aggressive, frustrated female found me, then we’d have a disaster together.

That’s why meeting Billie as I did and pursuing her with such energy and purpose was so exciting to me. To risk losing her now to prove something ridiculous with Rhonda or anybody else, was not only unthinkable, it was also dumb, and I refuse to be dumb about women anymore, when I have this glorious chance, which may never come again, to be in love with a woman who, I think, is perfect for me.


39.

Brinnggggg. That was the telephone. From the bedroom closet, where I’d just hung up the suit Mr. Lopez had cleaned and pressed for me, I hurried to the phone beside the bed. Calling was Evelyn Von Heuger. “She’s going to be late again,” Evelyn said. “They’re at the new hospital. The Supervisor is doing a review of what’s been accomplished so far.”

The full message from Billie was that the Supervisor was trying to resolve a major dispute with the hospital’s chief administrator over construction costs, that because the dispute was more complicated and emotional than anybody had anticipated, Billie was going to be held up again, instead of my picking her up in Sherman Oaks, to give us more time together, she’d come directly to my apartment in West Hollywood, and that she’d probably arrive at seven o’clock, or at the latest, seven-thirty, if that was agreeable to me.

“Definitely okay,” I said.

Evelyn sounded relieved. “She’s a peach, isn’t she?” she said. “You’re very lucky. I hope you know that.”

“I do,” I said.

“I expect she told you,” she said, “I was her first friend in the office. Learned all the routines from me. Types like the wind. Can’t keep up with her. And if you ask the Supervisor, he’ll tell you how much he trusts everything she tells him. That’s why she’s at the hospital with him. Do you realize she was seventeen years old when she came to work for us? Never forget the outfit she was wearing and how scared she was. Could barely look anybody in the face, but didn’t stop smiling. Lit up the entire place, so we knew we had a winner.”

I asked her about the Supervisor’s meeting at the hospital.

“Trouble,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. “Too many contractors overcharge, don’t deliver what they promise, then squawk like hell if somebody asks them to account for what they claim to have done. Billie’s job is to listen to their arguments, and if the Supervisor needs more information, to get it for him. He’d go down the tubes without her. She’s very sharp.”

Evelyn described fondly how perceptive and analytic Billie was, how quickly she picked up detail and meaning other people didn’t see or understand, and how she has this extraordinary ability to recognize almost instantly what’s important in a situation and to organize a strategy to deal with it. She also described the light blue, jeweled-neck, slim-skirted dress Billie wore when she first came to work for the Supervisor. “Much too mature for her, though she always looked smart and youthful despite being stuck with a wardrobe her mother had made for her.”

I remembered, but didn’t mention, what Al had said about Billie, that she was probably too sharp and too strong-minded for me, and that I should keep away from her. Then Evelyn said her husband was arriving shortly. She was going with him to take back a pair brown shoes he’d bought that didn’t fit. “He can’t admit he’s made a mistake. I have to do it for him,” she said, laughing noisily. “I kind of like taking things back. Odd, isn’t it?”


40.

By the time we hung up, it was almost ten minutes to five. If Billie does show at seven, or even seven thirty, I had two hours plus to get ready. I decided first to take a shower and shave, if I needed to shave, which I did. Then maybe later, I could lie down and rest. I was peeling off my clothes, when suddenly I thought I could smell smoke, a very light smoky odor, but definitely smoke.

I pulled open the bedroom window, sniffed at the outside air. It didn’t smell smoky. I left the window open, then hurried downstairs to the living room, which did smell smoky. I opened the front door, stepped outside onto the front steps, took several deep breaths. No smoky smell. Has to be in the apartment, I thought. Where? The dining room smelled smoky, and so did the kitchen, but there was nothing on or in the stove, and the electric refrigerator, which could have shorted and produced smoke, I suppose, seemed fine.

In the rear hall off the kitchen the smoke smell was faint. Outside in the backyard as previously in the front yard there was no smoke smell at all. The area around the garages was also smoke-smell-free. Where was this sucker coming from?

Ah, I thought. Under the stairs behind the kitchen was a large storage closet that was accessed through a door in the rear hall. This was where I kept junk I couldn’t throw out, furnishings I had no use for, and a dozen or more cardboard shipping boxes filled with old newspapers, magazines, journals, and assorted other valuables I probably wouldn’t ever look at again. The light in the closet was a large, naked 100-watt bulb that was turned off and on by a long white string that dangled from the base of the light fixture.

Yanking open the closet door, I pulled the white string, snapping on the 100-watt bulb, then began to sniff vigorously among the discarded treasures. The smoke smell was even fainter than it had been in the kitchen and the rear hall. The closet floor contained a trapdoor that went down to the basement where the furnace was located. To get at the trapdoor I had to shift some of the boxes, a large picture frame, and a non-working vacuum cleaner. When I lifted the trapdoor and peered warily into the basement, the only light I could see came from the furnace’s flickering pilot light.

A narrow, straight ladder ran down from the closet to the basement’s concrete floor. On a post inches from the ladder was a black-toggled light switch. I flipped on the switch, lighting up the basement, which was empty, except for the furnace and some tools that didn’t belong to me. The air in the basement seemed clear. Nowhere could I smell smoke, though I carefully sniffed the basement’s corners, its posts, along the building’s foundation, giving special attention to all four sides of the furnace, even squeezing behind it, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything that might be the source of the smoke smell.

As I climbed back up the ladder to the closet, I was mystified. Was I hallucinating the smoke smell? Or was my nose playing tricks on me? Not knowing what else to do, I lowered the trapdoor, restored the picture frame, the vacuum cleaner, and most of the boxes to what I thought were their original positions, and exited into the rear hall, shutting the closet door behind me. What I forgot to do was to turn off the closet’s naked light bulb.

I had left the front and back doors open, which was probably the reason the smoke smell in the kitchen and the dining and living rooms now seemed much diminished to me, though at the time I didn’t consciously connect fresh air from the outside with the diminished smoke smell. Even after I’d closed both doors, the air in the apartment seemed improved, so I decided to forget about the smoke smell, as if I expected it to disappear miraculously, and hurried upstairs and took a shower.

Well, the miracle didn’t happen. When I came out of the shower, the smoke smell had increased. Throwing on my bathrobe, I rushed downstairs, through the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, and into the rear hall. Pulling open the closet door, I could hardly believe what I saw. The closet and everything in it were completely in flames!

Immediately, without hesitation, which I give myself credit for, I raced to the telephone in the dining room and dialed 911. An operator answered. I shouted FIRE! into the phone, gave her my address, one time only, before slamming down the phone and rushing back to the hall closet. Now the flames were from floor to ceiling. Somehow, despite my panic, I noticed that to my left, just inside the closet door, leaning against the wall, was a small, rolled-up carpet. Desperately I reached for the carpet. Grabbing it up, unrolling it simultaneously, I swung it over my head and slammed it flat-out onto the flames. The instant the rug hit the floor, by some great, extraordinary good-luck, the fire was snuffed out!


41.
.
Except that some of the debris was still smoldering. What do I do about it? Should I throw water on it, or try to stamp it out? I rushed back to the kitchen and was filling a pot with water, when I heard a siren coming toward me, only minutes after I’d called 911. Amazing! How was this possible? Then I also heard what sounded like a fire truck rumbling up the hill on Holloway and wheezing to a stop at the curb directly below my apartment. Seconds later my front door was being banged on.

The door-bangers I discovered, when I pulled open the front door, were four anxious-faced firemen, wearing boots, shiny black slickers, and traditional, clumsy-looking fire helmets. Two of them were carrying axes. “Where’s the fire?” the tallest guy said.

“It’s out,” I said.

“Out?” he said, looking at me skeptically.

“It was in the closet,” I said, pointing toward the rear hall. “I put it out.”

Led by the tall guy, the firemen brushed past me. I followed them, until the tall guy held up his hand. “Wait there, “he said. Waiting nervously in the kitchen, I heard lots of noises from the closet. It sounded as if the firemen were chopping or bashing the closet’s contents. Then stuff was being carried from the closet and dumped into the back yard. When the tall guy returned, he said: “You did okay. It’s taken care of.”

I told him the whole story, how I’d smelled smoke, how I’d searched the apartment and couldn’t find where the smoke smell was coming from, and how when I went down to look for it the second time, the whole closet was on fire. I also told him I had no idea how the fire had started, which wasn’t exactly true, because I did remember I’d forgotten to turn off the closet’s naked light bulb. After I’d closed the trap door, had I also carelessly pushed a cardboard box against the light bulb while I was shifting boxes back to what I’d thought were their original positions? Yikes!

I then told him about Billie. “It’s our first big date,” I said, a large whine in my voice, as if I’d decided I was being victimized by some outrageous tragedy beyond my control.

He made a sympathetic face at me. “When’s she coming?” he said.

“Seven or seven-thirty” I said, still sounding whiney.

He glanced at his watch. “Gives us two hours,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything. Won’t even know it happened, unless you tell her.” He laughed. “Then it’s your problem.”

Over the next two hours the tall guy and his crew emptied the closet, carting out to the back yard what remained of the boxes and all the junk I’d been storing. They also swept and dusted the closet, and also the rear hall and the kitchen. Then while two of the crew were inspecting the apartment, from the basement to my upstairs bedroom, looking for what might have caused the smoke smell, two other firemen brought in two large fans to blow out the apartment.

“She won’t smell a thing,” the tall guy said, grinning at me.


42.

Later, when the crew was packing up the fans and getting ready to take off, the tall guy said: “I think I’ve seen you someplace before. Schubert’s? You go to Schubert’s?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“We’re also in show business,” he said. “Four of us. We sing. Write songs. Clark’s drums, Manny’s sax, Hen’s guitar, I’m bass.” He introduced me to Clark and Hen. “Manny’s off today. We call ourselves the Picassos. We think we’re pretty good.”

“Very good,” Hen said, flexing his bushy eyebrows at me.

“Why Picassos?” I asked.

“Manny’s idea,” Clark said. “He paints - ”

“Who paints?” I said.

“Manny paints,” Clark said.

“What does he paint?” I said.

“Fire,” Hen said.

“Fire?” I said.

“What fire does to things that get burnt and how different something looks when it’s burnt from how it previously looked before it got burnt,” the tall guy said.

“Ashes,” Clark said.

“He paints ashes?” I said.

“The patterns ashes make,” Hen said.

“If Manny was here today,” the tall guy said, “he would photograph the fire damage in the closet. Then depending on what kinds of patterns he finds in the photographs, and whether the patterns make some kind of sense to him and how he sees them connected to one another, he makes a painting, which is what, he says, Picasso does, takes something, breaks it down, then reassembles it into a painting with a unique point of view.”

“It’s what we’re trying to do with our music,” Clark said, “break it down and give it a different structure and a different sound.”

“The Surreals is the first name Manny wanted for us, or the Surrealists,” Hen said. “Then he wanted Cubists, or Cubes.”

“I like Cubes,” Clark said.

“So do I,” Hen said.

“We originally did jazz only,” the tall guy said. “When we thought we were going to be the Cubes, we experimented with Cuban themes and a Latin beat, which we’ve kept, even after we switched from Cubes to Picassos.”

“Bill vetoed Cubes,” Clark said.

“Bill?” I said.

“Me,” the tall guy said. “Cubes, I thought, was confusing.”

Clark asked if I liked the name, Picassos.

I nodded yes.

“We can give you a sample, if you want,” Hen said, “of the kind of music we do.”.

“Now?” I said.

From a pocket in his overalls, Hen pulled out a small, black-covered notebook, which contained, he said, the lyrics of all the songs they’d written for themselves. “Manny writes most of the music, we all write the words, which is why I carry this notebook around, to jot down ideas I have for lyrics as well as changes to lyrics I think we should make, not that we always make them, because if anybody disagrees, we stick with what we have.”

What should we sing?” Bill asked. Their choice was quick and unanimous. “It’s called Untitled 7,” he said, “because, like Manny says, the overall meaning of everything connected to it, its ideas, its sounds, its rhythms, and even its title, depends strictly on the imagination of whoever listens to it.”

“You, for instance,” Hen said, a sly grin on his face, as Bill handed me the notebook. The page the book was open to contained the lyric for Untitled 7.

“Sing along, if you like,” Bill said.

“Nooo!” roared Clark. “In this small kitchen I don’t want him singing. How do you expect me to concentrate?”
Bill apologized. “The kitchen is small,” he said. “It might be distracting, if you did sing.”

“I won’t sing,” I said.

“And don’t laugh,” Hen said, which broke up everybody, including Clark, who produced a pitch pipe from inside his raincoat. “I’m always prepared,” he said, waving the pipe over his head, as he and the other Picassos huddled together at the rear of the kitchen. When he blew into the pipe, sounding a note, they all tested their voices against it.

“Nifty, isn’t it?” Hen said. Then he gave them a crisp downbeat: a one and a two and a…, that started me reading silently and them singing loud and clear:

Don’t ever be late on Wednesdays,
Said the possum to the lamb,
If I had wings, I’d fly there,
On an iceberg to Japan.

Don’t ever say no on Thursdays,
Is what I’ve always been taught,
Why is your sister missing
The sunshine she’s never brought.

Time for a coconut,
A blueberry tart,
A fly in the soup,
A horse and a cart,

A mustache that’s black,
A plum and a yam,
The advice I give
Is as good as I am.

Don’t ever fall down on Fridays,
If temptation isn’t your thing,
Sleep prettily, my darling,
Then up on your feet and sing:

Choo-choo-cha-chee,
Chee-cha-choo-cha-chee,
Choo-choo-cha-chee,
Chee-cha-choo-cha-chee.
A night transformed is a new day dawned.
Choo-cha-choo-cha-chee.


43.

What can I say? They were terrific, the three of them, singing with such confidence and uninhibited joy to me, their lone audience, in my cramped kitchen, their powerful voices their only instruments, no bass, no guitar, no drums to accompany them, and yet the performance they gave, I thought, was remarkable, which was exactly what I told them.

“We’re not that good,” Clark said, snickering sarcastically.

“Manny makes us sound much better, doesn’t he, Bill?” Hen said.

“Manny’s got a great voice,” Bill said, giving me an innocent look.

“You did like the song, didn’t you?” Clark said, winking at Hen, who, I thought, was staring oddly at me.

“Not your cup of tea, right?” Hen said.

“No, of course it is” I said, “I’m fascinated.”

“Why fascinated?” Clark said, making a snide face at Hen, which I assumed was meant for me. Both these guys were difficult to take. I couldn’t read either of them, mainly because I didn’t understand what they wanted from me.

“The words, the lyric,” I mumbled, determined to avoid an argument with them.

“Hen wrote most of it,” Clark said, a crooked smirk on his face, which I resented, but didn’t complain about, because I was too polite or too insecure to speak up to him. In contrast, Bill seemed open and relaxed and was easy to have a conversation with.

“Maybe you know somebody,” Bill said, “who could help us get work some place, anyplace, as long as we can play music together.”

“I’ll talk to Al,” I said, gulping hard, which apparently none of them noticed.

“Al?” Bill said.

“A. Lonzo Kipp,” I said, giving them Al’s showbiz name. “He knows everybody.”

“That’s great,” Bill said excitedly, whopping me on my back.

Clark dug a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. The card said Picassos and contained a telephone number. “The number’s mine,” Bill said.

“We need a break,” Clark said, “especially from somebody with clout who’s willing to listen to us perform.”

Hen agreed. “We’re star material,” he said, guffawing loudly.

They’d been appearing some weekends at a club in Torrance, Bill said.

“We also did two benefits for the fire department,” Clark said, “and maybe six weddings, and that birthday party in Hawthorne, right?”

“Exposure is important,” Hen said,”which we don’t get enough of.” They’d finished the clean-up. Hen and Clark were lugging one of the fans out of the apartment. I shouted thanks to them. Then Bill gave me a lecture on fire safety, warning me about the danger of a more destructive fire, “if somebody doesn’t find the source of the original smoke smell,” which, he said, could be as simple and easily replaceable as a wall plug or a junction box.

“I’ll call Reggie,” I said.

“Who’s Reggie?” Bill said.

“Rental agent at the management company,” I said.

“Good, but don’t put it off,” Bill said sternly. “You could be sorry.”

Bill was the last to leave. We were on the front steps, shaking hands, when Billie appeared, looking shocked, having seen fire trucks on the street and now a fireman at my front door.

“It’s okay,” I said. I introduced her to Bill.

“You’re Billie,” he said, a bright grin on his face, “I’m Bill.” Then turning to me, he said: “Don’t forget what you told me, that you’ll talk to Al about us.”

“Definitely, I promise, I will talk to him,” I said, which made me feel ashamed of myself. Al can’t get himself a job. What could he possibly do for them? I should never have mentioned Al. It was a dumb mistake. I’d betrayed the Picassos in advance.

We watched Bill walk slowly down the garden steps. When he reached the street, he turned and waved to us. “What a fantastic guy,” I said, waving back at him. “They’re all fantastic.” The fire trucks, we could hear, were rumbling and wheezing impatiently. Then we heard them move away from the curb and start up Holloway Drive, their sirens already chirping, as they turned down Mercer Street and headed for Santa Monica Boulevard, while (I imagined) the Picassos and everybody aboard the trucks, were singing merrily to a powerful Latin beat:

“Choo-choo-cha-chee,
Chee-cha-choo-cha-chee,
Choo-choo-cha-chee,
A night transformed is a new day dawned,
Choo-cha-choo-cha-chee.
Cha.”


44.

The smoke smell had persisted. Billie was on her knees, sniffing at the wall plug beside the couch in the living room. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Doesn’t smell.”

We talked about the 911 operator. “Imagine,” I said, “I yell Fire, give her my address, and slam down the telephone.”

“Great concentration. I couldn’t do it,” Billie said.

“Should send her roses or a box of candy or something,” I said. “How do I get her name, or is it against the rules to put her on the spot like that?”

“I’ll find out,” Billie said. She’d make a contact for me through the Supervisor’s office.

Billie had already decided we wouldn’t go out to dinner. “You need to keep the windows and doors open,” she said, “to let air circulate through the apartment.”

While I vacuumed the living and dining rooms, she made us tea and cheese sandwiches. We ate the sandwiches at the dining room table. “I’m not touching the closet or the back yard, till after I talk to Reggie,” I said.

“You could have been killed,” she said, reaching across the table and taking my hand.

“Burnt to a crisp,” I said, “except for my trusty rug which I owe my life to.” I told her about a guy I’d grown up with in Brooklyn, whose father was reading the paper at breakfast one morning. Spotting the name of a long-lost cousin who’d been killed when his house was destroyed by fire, the father called to his wife Anna, “Hey, Anna, guess who was ‘boint’ to a crisp?”

We did the dishes together. It was after midnight. Billie had a long drive over Coldwater Canyon to Sherman Oaks. She’d been up since five. She’d met the Supervisor in his district at seven-thirty and could hardly keep her eyes open. “Would you mind if I stayed?” she said.

“Here?” I said.

“I’m being too pushy, aren’t I?” she said.

“No, no, it’s fine, of course, you can stay,” I said.

“Not if you want me to go,” she said.

“What makes you think I want you to go?” I said.

“The way you act,” she said.

Which may have been true, but only because I was worried about us moving too quickly before we were together long enough to get to know one another. How can I possibly explain such a thing to Billie without making her think there’s something seriously wrong with me?

“I still think I should go,” Billie said.

“Look,” I said, “I was brought up a Catholic. I went to St. Rose of Lima grade school and St. Augustine’s high school, both of them in Brooklyn. I just think that the first thing I should be concerned about for the future of my life is making sure I don’t lose you.”

She laughed.

“I’m making you laugh?” I said.

“You’re not going to lose me,” she said.

“But that’s not my experience,” I said. “When I rush into something, it always turns out badly, and I don’t want that to happen to us.”

She laughed again.

“Will you stop laughing?” I said.

“You’re so sweet,” she said, slipping her arm around me. “Let me explain how I feel, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“First of all, I don’t want to be in love, or to make a commitment about being in love. It’s much too soon for me. I’m not divorced yet. I hardly know what it means to be on my own without having somebody else to answer to. I’ve got a lot to think about. My parents want me to move back with them, which I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to do. I have too much to learn about myself. What do I do next? Where do I go from here? I’ve been in night school for nine years. Now I think I want to go to UCLA and get a degree in something that will get me a job and a career I can love. What I definitely don’t want to do is to kill myself by falling asleep while driving over that damn canyon to Sherman Oaks. You understand what I’m talking about?”

“Yes, okay, I said you can stay, didn’t I? I want you to stay.”

I then had a short debate with myself about who’d sleep on the couch and who’d sleep upstairs in the bed. “Don’t you want us to sleep together?” she said finally. “We don’t have to make love, if that’s your problem.”

“It’s not my problem. I want to make love,” I said.

She started to laugh again. “You’re a very complicated person,” she said.


45.

We made great love. Billie shook her head no. “It wasn’t love,” she said. “It was sex.”

“Same thing, isn’t it, if you love somebody?” I said, as she sat up in bed, shaking her head no again. For the next three quarters of an hour love/sex was what we argued about. She said sex, I said love, even though she’d already told me she didn’t want to get involved with love, because she wasn’t ready for it, and yet I persisted and made her talk about it. What did making her talk about love do to our glorious night together? Put a huge damper on it that we may never recover from, which was extremely serious to me, and embarrassing. How dumb can I get?

While she took a shower and got dressed, I made coffee and toast for her. She gulped down the coffee and passed on the toast. She was going back to her apartment in Sherman Oaks, she said, to change clothes and pick up some papers she’d been working on for the office. She was due to meet Supervisor Klein at eight-thirty at a tenants’ meeting in Inglewood. “I’ll just make it,” she said.

I walked her out to her car. Her Vanden Plas Princess was parked on the private road behind the buildings. It was a few minutes after six a.m. The morning sky was yellow. We hugged, exchanged kisses. I reminded her we’d slept less than two hours. “Take it easy on Coldwater,” I said.

Glumly I watched her climb into the Princess and start up its engine. Rolling down the driver’s window, she took my hand and kissed it.

“Don’t worry,” she said, fluttering her eyelids at me. “I’m wide awake.”


46.

For the next three hours, worrying the entire time about Billie and the trip she was making to her apartment over Coldwater Canyon, I re-swept and scrubbed the badly smoke-stained rear closet. I also cleared out the back yard, carrying most of the debris, in maybe two-dozen trips, to the trashcans at the back of the lot. This morning, I remembered, was pick-up time for the trash collector. By noon all evidence of my small tragedy would be history, except I did salvage a couple of boxes of magazines and books and some treasured junk I still couldn’t part with that I piled in the yard and covered with a plastic tarp.

At eight sharp I phoned Reggie at the management office. A half hour later he arrived to inspect the damage. A compulsive knuckle-cracker, he listened patiently to my story about the fire, probably because it reminded him of five stories of his own, involving fire and narrow escapes. “I myself was the luckiest,” he said, cracking his knuckles noisily as he spoke. One evening five weeks ago, on a Sunday, Reggie said, crack, crack, I was soaking in the bathtub, when suddenly I heard this terrible banging on the bathroom door.

What could that be? Reggie said, simulating the bang, bang, bang on his door by vigorously cracking the knuckles on both his hands: crack, crack, crack. His wife Louise, Reggie said, had gone to the movies with her sister Daisy. The front and back doors were locked, he said, because before he’d gotten into the tub, he’d carefully checked them. Had someone broken into the house? Was he about to be attacked? Crack, crack. Scrambling out of the tub, draping a towel around himself, he eased open the bathroom door. Immediately the banging ceased. Outside the door, bellowing frantically and making panicked eyes at him was Kahana the cat, a dark gray Abyssinian he and Louise had brought back from Maui.

Realizing from the desperate way Kahana was twisting her body at him that she wanted him to follow her, he cautiously did, crack, crack. When they reached the kitchen, he was startled to discover that the aluminum pot he’d been boiling kidney beans in and had completely forgotten about, as well as the gas burner under the pot, were enveloped in flames. Kahana, crack, crack, must have noticed that the pot was on fire, and deciding the fire needed to be put out, crack, crack, had banged on the bathroom door until she’d gotten his attention.

Only vaguely, Reggie said, did he remember turning off the gas burner. Stronger was his memory of snatching up the pot and precariously holding onto it as he stumbled to the sink, crack, crack. Dousing the flames with water he remembered clearly. Then when he glanced back at the stove, he remembered seeing that the fire around the burner was also out, crack, crack, as Kahana, looking pleased with herself, began to rub sensuously against his leg.

“Cats are smart,” I said.

“Smartest,” he said, crack, crack.

I told him that somebody had once told me cats are closer genetically to primates than any other animal. “Love cats,” he said, crack, crack, crack.


47.

By the time we’d finished discussing cats, including three of his and a red tabby named Squirtie, who was my best pal and shadow when I was a teenager, Reggie had sniffed most of the wall outlets in the apartment. “A couple of them are suspicious,” he said, crack, crack. He’d already talked to an electrician. “Soon as you called me I called him. Good guy, very thorough. Also I told him I want that fixture in the closet replaced. No more naked light bulbs. You should have informed me instead of waiting for disaster to happen, which is your responsibility but I’m not going to charge you for it, crack, crack, though I could, you know, and would, if you hadn’t acted so fast to notify the fire department.”

We discussed the 911 operator and how brilliant I thought she was.

Knuckle-cracking enthusiastically, Reggie said: “Great people. Very prompt and very responsive in any dealings I’ve had with them.” He then said he’d told the electrician what I said the fireman had told me about the smoke smell. He gave me the electrician’s card. “He should show up late this afternoon, or sometime tomorrow morning.”

“I might not be here,” I said.

“Then I’ll take care of it,” he said, crack, crack, pulling up the closet trapdoor and starting down to the basement, as the front doorbell rang.

It was Al. “What did you tell my sister?” he said, eyeing me disapprovingly, as if she’d told him I’d made a pass at her, or said something negative about him, which I might have, but didn’t remember.

I’m in trouble, I thought.

He burst out laughing. “I’m not complaining. I really like what you told her,” he said.

What had I told her, I thought, that he liked so much?

“Took the pressure off,” he said, ”she knows I’m trying to do my best at the parking garage, because she thinks you wouldn’t tell her something that wasn’t true. Not that I’d ever intended to make the garage my lifetime occupation, but it did feel good to have a job that gave me some satisfaction, not too much obviously, as long as I can take a check home once a week that put a smile on Rhonda’s face and made her understand I wouldn’t do something stupid on purpose to give the boss an excuse to get rid of me, which she says I always do, but I don’t, unless some guy puts me in a situation I can’t tolerate, then anything is possible.”

I told him about the fire in the hall closet. He was surprised but not too interested. The only thing he wanted to do was talk about Rhonda. “She’s not going to kick me out,” he said jubilantly. “I’m saved, and you did it.”

Reggie called to me from the closet. “Can we talk?” He’d decided, he said, to send a painter to paint the closet’s fire-scorched walls. “We’ll pay for it, crack, crack, which means I’m taking into consideration what a good tenant you’ve been and how I can trust you in the future to report to me when something needs to be done and not put it off until I’ve got an emergency to deal with, okay?” Then he asked me about the tools in the basement.

“Don’t belong to me,” I said.

“We’ll pick them up,” he said, closing the trapdoor.

I introduced him to Al. Instantly they didn’t hit it off. Both wanted my undivided attention. Al could wait, I decided, so I followed Reggie upstairs, where he resumed cracking his knuckles and sniffing wall plugs. “The one beside your bed is suspicious,” he said. He advised me to keep the bed lamp unplugged until after the electrician had completed his inspection. “Don’t worry, but you’ve got to be cautious, okay?” he said, crack, crack.

While Al was poking through my refrigerator, I went outside into the courtyard with Reggie. He asked about Al. “Actor, isn’t he?” he said, crack, crack “Can spot them a mile away. Always trouble.” He thought he remembered Al had tried to rent an apartment in a building he managed on Bellows Drive. “Slick, isn’t he, too slick. Almost had me fooled.”

Making a series of angry knuckle cracks and sour faces, he described some bad experiences he’d had with tenants who were actors. “Once you let them in, they’ve got rights, and no matter how much rent they don’t pay, or how much damage they do, or how many neighbors they don’t get along with, you can’t put them out. You have to follow a legal procedure that’s expensive and takes time, which is why I try to keep them, and everybody like them, out of my apartments, and why I didn’t rent to your friend.”

Wise move, I thought.

“This doesn’t mean I have animosity toward him. Personally I like actors,” he said, crack, crack. “A lot of them are very creative and pleasant people, but I don’t want them occupying my buildings, okay?”

Yet he was a movie fan. His favorite movies, Reggie said, were two Henry Fondas and three Cary Grants.

Al, we both noticed, was intermittently peeking at us through the dining room window. “He’s getting anxious,” Reggie said, crack, crack, the next time Al’s face appeared at the window. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll keep in touch, okay?” We shook hands. I watched him, as he hurried up the garden steps toward the parking lot.

When I returned to the apartment, Al said: “He recognized me, didn’t he? Whatever he told you about me is his version, not mine. I’m glad I didn’t get involved with him. Hates actors.”

“Says he’s a movie fan,” I said. I told him about the Henry Fondas and the Cary Grants he’d said were his favorites.

Al did his Fonda and Grant imitations.

“Terrific,” I said. I’d heard his Fonda and Grant before. Both were passable, more not bad than terrific, but terrific, I knew, would please him.

“Who’s this?” he said, droplets of sweat appearing on his forehead and upper lip. In a high, thin, scratchy, non-Grant voice he began to describe the plot of one of Grant’s movies. When I didn’t immediately identify whose voice he was imitating, he switched to a description of Reggie’s apartment building on Bellows Drive.

“Stop,” I said. “Say it more slowly.”

“Don’t you get it?” he said.

“Reggie?” I said.

“On the money,” he said.

“That’s remarkable,” I said.

“Needs practice,” he said, in his Reggie-sounding voice.

“Very close,” I said.

“Close?” he said, a puzzled look on his face.

“Clear,” I said.

“Clear?” he said. “You do recognize it’s him, don’t you?”

“Sure, absolutely,” I said.

He seemed relieved. Then tilting his head Reggie-like toward his left shoulder and speaking in his Reggie voice, he said: “Also cracks his knuckles a lot and flutters his eyelids when he gets stuck for a word or can’t quite come up with the sentence he wants to say, right?”

Then Al began to crack his own knuckles. Compared to Reggie’s powerful cracks, Al’s knuckle-cracking was feeble.

“Never learned properly,” Al said. “Quit too soon.” He explained that when he was ten years old, his mother had forbidden him to knuckle-crack, saying it would fracture his bones and if he didn’t stop before he was eleven, bring on incurable arthritis, so reluctantly, he said, he did stop, except sometimes, as he was growing up, he experimented with knuckle-cracking secretly, but not often enough to revive his original curiosity about it, until he went to rent that apartment on Bellows Drive, met Reggie, and saw and heard what an extraordinary knuckle-cracker Reggie was.

Al was giving me another sample of his knuckle-cracking, when he was interrupted by a loud, single knock on the front door that was suddenly thrust open, as an out-of- breath Reggie rushed into the living room. He’d forgotten his keys, he said, left them on the kitchen table. While I fetched the keys from the table, Al aimed an elaborate knuckle-crack at him, which he eagerly reciprocated. “A nasty habit,” Reggie said, “but I’m hooked.” He explained he came from a family of highly talented knuckle-crackers. “My Aunt Sheila, my father’s sister, was county champion nine years straight, retired undefeated.”

“I’m just learning,” Al said, as they exchanged combative-sounding knuckle-cracks.

“Duets are fun,” Reggie said, grabbing the keys from me In a robust voice he began to sing: “Yankee Doodle Went to Town, A-Riding on a Pony,” then Al and I joined in: “Stuck a Feather in his Hat, and Called him Macaroni,” then in an energetic knuckle-cracking duet, Reggie and Al knuckle-cracked alternately and in unison: Yank, Ee, Crack, Crack, Crack, Crack, Town, Crack, Crack, Crack, a Crack, Crack, Stuck a Crack, Crack, in his Hat, and Crack, Crack, Mac a Crack, Crack….

“In national as well as international competitions,” Reggie said, “contestants get points for style, execution, and the clarity of their cracking.” He showed us several crisp cracks were big point-earners in contrast to a couple of weak, muffled cracks, which he also demonstrated, that might actually cause a contestant to lose points. He then critiqued Al’s style and execution. “Hands too flat and stiff. Have to look delicate and pliable.” He suggested Al should cup his hands and hold his thumbs more toward his forefingers “And above all, relax, okay?” Al tried a few cracks, and they did sound sharper and, as Reggie said, “brighter.” He then treated us to a spectacular demonstration of fancy knuckle-cracking that clearly impressed Al who stopped sneering at him, and instead looked genuinely disappointed, when Reggie yanked open the front door and exited into the courtyard.

Glumly we watched as he walked past the dining room’s front and side windows back up the garden path toward the parking lot. As soon as we heard Reggie’s car start up, Al began to knuckle-crack again, and we both began to sing: Yank, EE, Crack, Crack, Went to Crack, A-Riding on a Crack, Crack, Stuck a Crack, Crack in his Hat, and called him Crack ARONI.

YANKEE DOODLE, KEEP IT UP
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP
AND WITH THE GIRLS BE HANDY.

FATHER AND I WENT DOWN TO CAMP
ALONG WITH CAPTAIN GOODING
AND THERE WE SAW THE MEN AND BOYS
AS THICK AS HASTY PUDDING.

YANKEE DOODLE, KEEP IT UP
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP
AND WITH THE GIRLS BE HANDY.

YANKEE DOODLE, KEEP IT UP
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP
AND WITH THE GIRLS BE HANDY

CRACK, CRACK!!


48.

The last time I talked with Eric was on Friday, when he phoned me at the office. You may recall he was upset, because he’d just finished a three-hour confrontation with some loud-mouthed apartment house owner who was pressuring him to change the market value on his (the loud-mouth’s) property. Stuff like “you bet your ass I am,” which Eric had shouted at me over the phone, I knew, was totally out of character for him. I also don’t remember his getting abusive, or raising his voice in any other conversation we’d had no matter how contentious it was. Normally he was mild-mannered and soft-spoken, and, I thought, shrunk up defensively in his five-foot-five, 128 lb., slope-shouldered body.

It was past three-fifteen, when I got to the office. Eric was sitting at his desk, making notes from papers stacked in front of him. He’d had a message from Billie, he said. She’d called to ask me to meet her at five o’clock at the Cinema Bright Spot restaurant at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. She was inviting me to go with her to a meeting of the representatives of several peace organizations she belonged to that were planning a rally to welcome to Los Angeles Mbda La’aster, a thirty-eight year old East African peace activist and entrepreneur, who’d tripled her earnings from her water-delivery business by borrowing $100 from the Tall Tree Lending Foundation and buying an ox and a small wagon to replace the water cart she’d been dragging from village to village and customer to customer. The peace organizations’ meeting place, Billie told Eric, was Hool House, the private residence of L.A. County Library commissioner, Ned Alan Hool, the IVth, on Pritzer Street in the hills above Sherman Oaks.

When I invited Eric and his wife to join us, Eric said, glancing nervously at me, “Please understand we’re not against peace. In addition, there’s no question whatsoever that Judy and I are one hundred percent in favor of this African woman making money from delivering water, which I have no doubt is a noble occupation, but, irrespective of the cause, regardless of how worthy it is, neither of us is available to do meetings, or marches, or sit downs, or letter-writing campaigns. We both teach Bible study classes, and every Monday Judy takes baskets of food to poor families throughout Burbank and North Hollywood for the Charity Volunteer Association. “However, she believes as I do that our own family has top priority over any outside activity we might get involved with, which means we definitely don’t have time for more meetings, assemblies, or other types of commitments we can’t keep.”

Judy was Eric’s second wife. Two of their three children, the girls, Buttercup and Jewel, were from Judy’s first marriage “You know that, don’t you?” Eric said.

I nodded yes. They’d adopted, I also knew, their son, Shannon.

His voice hoarse and quavering, Eric said: “I told you, didn’t I, how I met Judy?”

”Yes,” I said.

“On a cruise,” he said.

“To Bermuda,” I said.

“Playing shuffle board,” he said. “Started a conversation and couldn’t stop, didn’t stop.” He blushed and laughed softly. “About life, love, family –“

“And the pursuit of happiness,” I said.

“Joy,” he said.

His left cheek had begun to twitch. Stress, I suppose, but why? And why was he so guilty-looking? He also seemed intent on averting his eyes from mine. Had he caved into that apartment house owner and couldn’t get up nerve to tell me about it?

“Six weeks after the cruise we were married,” he said.

“Six?” I said. “Wasn’t it eight?”

“Did I tell you eight?” he said.

‘You never said six,” I said.

“Peculiar,” he said. Then he laughed noisily. “Judy is the loveliest woman, a great friend and a great confidante. We’re of one mind about everything,” he said. “Including my profession and how I conduct it.”

Hey, I thought, he’s about to claim she gave him permission to cave, or advised him to cave, or talked him into caving.

His face was extra pale, and he was breathing heavily.

“Revising an appraisal,” he said, “is not a sin.”


49.

Which got me thinking about Moses on the mountaintop with his stone tablets, inventing sins, or at least defining them, and what a burden it’s been on my Catholic conscience, particularly since Billie had moved in with me.

“That’s such bull,” Billie said so sharply I jumped in self-defense, “as long as I was in my own apartment, we were fine, no matter how often I slept with you. I was your safety net, right, your wiggle room, in case you changed your mind about living together, regardless of how many times you invited me, begged me to move in with you, until finally I succumbed and gave up my apartment like you said you wanted me to, when that smile on your face disappeared, I hardly ever see it anymore.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, “stop exaggerating. I’m smiling now, aren’t I?”

“Barely.”

“It’s still a smile, isn’t it?” I said, but she does have a point. I’m not a big smiler, never have been, runs in my family to be serious-faced, because we’re doubters and second guessers, we just don’t smile a lot, whereas Billie can produce that big irresistible grin at the drop of a hat, a really great talent, I thought, making a quick comparison between Margaret who almost never smiled at me and Billie who doesn’t stop.

Certainly Billie was smiling now, when I walked into the Cinema Bright Spot. She was sitting in the main dining room at a small booth beside a window that looked out onto Laurel Canyon. Called the audience room, the dining room was crowded and noisy and featured high up on its inside wall a large movie screen on which were continuously playing scenes from 1910-20s silent comedies. As I hurried across the room toward Billie, I noticed Buster Keaton’s face on the movie screen, below which were three doorways to inner rooms (known as dens in the Bright Spot), one marked Actors, the second Writers, and the third Directors/Producers. All three dens also appeared to be crowded, which, I expect, happened on most days at the Cinema Bright Spot, because a significant proportion of the Hollywood/Studio City showbiz population considered themselves actors, writers, directors and/or producers, and networked regularly in places like Schubert’s Parlor and the Cinema Bright Spot, regardless of how small their reputations or little they worked professionally as actors, writers, directors and producers.

“We don’t have much time,” Billie said. “Are you hungry?”

I ordered a cup of chicken noodle soup. She had an English muffin and iced tea “The meeting starts promptly at six fifteen,” she said, glancing at her watch, as Al, followed by three high-schoolers (two boys, one girl) from his once-a-week improv session, emerged from the Actors’ den. Instantly spotting us, he directed the high-schoolers toward our table, obviously elated, dancing a few steps behind them, his eyes riveted on Billie. I could see from the rapt expression on his face he couldn’t believe (which he later told me was true) that she was so beautiful, projected so much vitality, and gave them, especially the high-schoolers, such a warm, open, enthusiastic greeting.

“I’m jealous,” he said, “she takes more notice of them than she does of me, because I’m already madly in love with her.”

This one-sided gag about his being in love with Billie he kept repeating, loudly proclaiming she would easily have chosen him over me, if he’d gotten to her before I did. “Watch yourself,” he said, eyeing me. “I’m ready to take over.”

Fortunately Billie was careful to do nothing to encourage him, or he might have tried “to take over,” which would have been an embarrassment to both of us, that is, to her as well as to me, and maybe to him also, because I knew he was a lot more sensitive than the overbearing suitor he pretended to be.

He introduced us to the high-schoolers, showing off for them with declarations of love for Billie and disdain for me. “He’s no match,” he said, reaching for Billie’s hand. She pulled it away from him, winking at the high-schoolers, who apparently thought Al was a crack-up and were guffawing noisily every time Billie rejected him and fluttered her eyelids at me.

She asked them about the improv sessions. “Fun,” the girl (Melba) said.

“How’s it fun?” Billie said.

“Improvisation,” Al said, “is venting your perception of your inner consciousness.”

“What we do is make up a story, then act it out, spontaneously, without a script,” one of the boys (Fritzie) said. He’d been in his high school’s production of “Carousal” and “Okalahoma” and was very serious about having a career in showbiz as a singer and dancer.

“We could do an improv for her,” the other boy {Bernard) said

Melba, who’d been in two shows at her high school (a different school) and firmly believed she was destined to become a famous actress, gave an example of the kind of improvisation they’d been doing in their improv sessions with Al. “I’m a girl with a problem who’s very sad and is crying,” she said. “Bernard and Fritzie have this improv to cheer me up and solve my problem.” She turned toward Al. “Or we could repeat what we did in today’s session, or if you’d give us a premise, we could try something different?”

“Sure,” Al said, nodding toward the crowded dining room, “but there are too many people, it’s too distracting. Would be better, wouldn’t it, if we invited her to one of our sessions?”

“Which one?” Bernard said in a deep, powerful-sounding voice. I knew from a previous talk with Al that Bernard at 17 was already an accomplished singer. “Great range,” Al later said. He also praised Bernard’s acting ability, stage presence, breath-control, personality, etc. “He can make it in showbiz if he wants to. Needs to concentrate more and commit himself.”

Al Fritzie said: “It’s up to Billie when she decides to come, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be there, whenever you invite me,” Billie said.

Looking enormously pleased with himself, Al glanced from Billie to Fritzie. “I’m inviting her. (then directly to Billie:) You’re invited. Yes, you are,” he said, grinning triumphantly at me, as if her willingness to come to his improv session was a warning I shouldn’t ignore.

Or at least, that was Billie’s opinion. We were in her Vanden Plas Princess. VIV we’d parked on a side street in Studio City a few blocks from the Cinema Bright Spot. We had twenty minutes to get to Hool House up a winding mountain road. “I still don’t understand Al,” Billie said, “or what he expects you to do for him.”

“It’s a game,” I said. “He’s cast me as his chief rival for your affection, the nasty villain of the piece, standing between you and his onslaught of charm that’s supposed to sweep you into his arms, though I guarantee he’d instantly vanish if you showed the slightest interest in him. That’s his pattern, he’s much too afraid of getting involved with a woman, any woman, regardless of how brilliant or loving she is, for more than a couple of months at a time, which is why he gets dumped so much. What woman is willing to be taken for granted at his convenience?”

“He’s very handsome,” Billie said.

“And loads of fun as long as you enjoy being teased and put down about everything,” I said.

“He does make me laugh,” Billie said.

“That’s no excuse for bad behavior,” I said.

“But what if you’re some unfortunate woman who thinks she’s in love with him and would rather tolerate his bad behavior than risk losing him?”

“Oh, come off it, that’s still no excuse,” I said. “In my opinion, being handsome is like acting for Al. He has loads of talent to be a fine actor, yet neither his good looks nor his talent is enough to give him confidence in himself, which he badly needs.”

“Badly,” she said, nodding sympathetically.

“I told you, didn’t I, or did I, about his membership in the Language Club at the Community College, and how he’s been passing himself off as a scholar from Berlin and speaking with an impenetrable German accent? You know how marvelous he is with accents, right, and German is a piece of cake for him. So here he is talking German-accented gibberish to a group of wise-ass students who probably think he’s a creep and a show-off, and what does he do next? With a straight face he asks me to translate for him. Me! Can you believe that? I go with him to a couple of meetings and I’m supposed to make sense out of something that makes no sense at all. Which is the story of my life with Al, isn’t it? He wants to be accepted, but on his own terms, and if he meets any resistance whatsoever, or suspects some one eventually is going to resist him, he comes on with such hostility, like this fake German crap, which he pretends is a big joke, and if you don’t understand the joke, you’re an idiot. Why? Why! One reason, and one reason only to cover up how insecure he is, even though he knows, as well as we know, that by pulling a stunt like this he’s ruining his chances to make friends and be taken seriously in the Language Club. I’ve talked to him about it, warned him against doing it, but he just laughs and tells me not to worry about him, which drives me nuts.”

“Poor sweetheart,” Billie said, taking my hand and kissing it, as the single-lane mountain road begins to narrow and directly ahead of us is Hool House.


50.

A seven bedroom, seven full-bath, two-and-a-half story tall, white-stucco Mediterranean-style mansion, with 17,386 square feet under its red-tiled roof, Hool House was built in 1931 by Ned Alan Hool, the First. Also containing a small theatre, a ballroom, and an indoor swimming pool, it was modeled after a manor house Ned the First and his bride, Bonnie Sewell, fell in love with on their honeymoon in Majorca. Situated on a bluff above the Baleric Sea, the Majorca house had a sweeping distant view of the golden Spanish coastline. Hool House, in contrast, was high in the California Granada Hills and had a peek-a-boo view of the San Diego-Ventura freeway. Its 22-acre site was covered with old-growth cedars and pines and surrounded by a tall wooden fence. At the property’s juncture with the road were wide iron-picketed gates between flagstone columns. Stationed at the gates were two uniformed private guards and two Los Angeles County sheriffs, also in uniform.

One of the sheriffs recognized Billie. Snapping a crisp salute at her, he sauntered over to the Vanden Plas Princess. “Love this baby,” he said, patting the Princess’ hood. “Soon as you decide to get rid of it, I’m your man.”

“Won’t happen,” Billie said.

“Someday,” he said.

“Never,” she said. “Keeping it till I die.”

That got a big laugh from both sheriffs and both guards.

“I’m due at the meeting,” Billie said.

His hand still on the Princess’ hood, the Sheriff shouted to the guards: “Supervisor Klein’s office. Billie Cooper.”

One of the guards was holding a clipboard with a roster on it. “Got her,” he said, waving to Billie to drive forward, while the other guard pushed open the gates.

Hool House’s parking lot was behind its eight–car garage. When we arrived, there were maybe three-dozen cars on the lot, not including four sheriff’s cars. Another uniformed guard directed us to enter the house through a rear door next to the garage. The meeting, he said, was in the movie theatre, one long flight down, in the basement.

The Hool family fortune had come from bookbinding. In 1910 the first Ned Alan Hool’s grandfather, Bendix Hool, had invented the reverse pinch, which revolutionized the book-publishing business and provided the Hools with mountains of royalties from its reverse pinch patents.

Since 1910, the Hools had invested their royalties extensively in California real estate that has zoomed in value, diamonds, gold, platinum, cattle, salmon fisheries, and choice stock market recommendations, all of which have ballooned the Hools’ gross assets and solidified their clout locally, in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., as well as internationally, in most foreign capitals and markets.

On the movie theatre stage was Ned Alan Hool, the IV. A short, wiry 42 year-old, with a round face, a baldhead, black-gray sideburns, and a thick black-gray mustache, he was standing behind a lectern that had a microphone attached to it, waving to the peace delegates as they came into the theatre. Billie went up to the stage and extended her hand to him. Bending down toward her, he took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. She congratulated him on going ahead with the meeting in the face of strong political opposition, then introduced me. Shaking my hand vigorously, he welcomed me to Hool House.

The eleven peace delegates, plus three guests, including me, were seated in two vertical rows at the far right of the auditorium. Then there were three or four vacant vertical rows. The remainder of the audience was composed of maybe twenty men in suits or police uniforms and two women, one of them in uniform, who were scattered among the vertical rows on the left section of the auditorium.

Leaning toward Billie, I asked: “Who are these people?”

“Tell you later” she whispered, putting her finger to her lips, as the overhead ceiling lights flickered.

At the rear of the stage behind Ned Alan Hool was a tall movie screen. On the screen was an enlarged photograph of a muscular-looking, overweight black woman with a billion dollar smile. Wearing a red-and-green flowered turban and a full-length red-and-green flowered dress that bulged prominently at her hips and belly, she was, of course, Mbda La’aster, the meeting’s soon-to-arrive-in-Los-Angeles guest of honor, whose trip to the United States was being sponsored by the Tall Tree Lending Foundation.

The ceiling lights were lowered to about half-strength, and a spotlight was turned on Ned Alan Hool. He apologized for starting the meeting a few minutes late, then gave a warm greeting to everybody in the auditorium. Pointing toward the enlarged photograph of Mbda La’ster, he described how he’d met her briefly in Geneva, Switzerland, at Tall Tree’s semi-annual convention of its participating lenders. “Lovely person,” he said, “Shy, but with obvious strength of character and determination.” He told how she’d gotten involved with Tall Tree, what her project had developed into, how successful it became, and why she was representing Tall Tree in its fund-raising campaign among peace organizations throughout the United States.

The enlarged photograph of Miss La’ster, we now learned, was the opening shot of a short film in which she addressed the audience directly, thanking us for coming to the meeting and asking us to be generous in our contributions to Tall Tree. She spoke in Swahili, her native language, which was translated almost simultaneously into English by a Canadian woman from Toronto.

Meanwhile, Billie was identifying some of the people on the other side of the auditorium. Pointing to two guys in suits in the rear row, she whispered: “F.B.I.” The guys, she said, spread out in the row in front of them were three agents from the C.I.A., an assistant attorney general, and, in uniform, four deputies from the County Sheriff’s Office. Also, seated in the rows below the deputies, she said, still whispering, were representatives of the State’s anti-espionage squad, the City Attorney, the City police, and the Mayor’s special security group.

Sally Kreiger Hool had replaced her husband at the lectern. She was outlining Mbda La’aster’s itinerary during her stay in Los Angeles. Three peace delegates, Sally said, naming the three delegates, had volunteered to pick up Miss La’aster at Los Angeles County airport and deliver her to the Century Plaza Hotel, where she would remain for six days. Tall Tree had arranged various fund-raising activities, including at least two black-tie dinners and a trip to the Ballet, and the Peace Group was sponsoring a march and rally that would take off from the parking lot of a large motel property the Hools owned on Santa Monica Boulevard, proceeding along Santa Monica Boulevard to Century Plaza Drive across from the Century Plaza Hotel.

“We’re trying to get permission from the hotel for Mbda to appear on a second-floor balcony so she can wave to the crowd,” Sally said. “Other peace groups from around California are planning to join us.” How large would the crowd be? She estimated 800-1000, “provided everybody comes.”

The Hools were now together at the lectern. I’d counted the law enforcement people Billie had identified. They totaled nineteen compared to the peace group’s 11 delegates plus the Hools, whom (according to Billie} the security forces were keeping under strict surveillance. Ned was asking the peace delegates if any of them had any questions. Amid much laughter several delegates wanted minor clarifications about time, place, responsibilities, other peace groups, routes, etc.

Then Ned, looking to the law-enforcement section, shouted: “Any questions?” For an answer he got complete, hostile or (I thought) embarrassed silence.

Later, on our drive in the Princess back to Studio City to pick up VIV, I asked Billie why none of the law-enforcers asked a question. “Already know everything about us,” she said, grimacing a worried smile at me.


51.

But first what had happened on that fateful Thursday, two months before Billie’s worried smile, and seven months before she’d moved in with me, when I met Kenneth the King Conrad at his office in Brentwood and talked to him about doing an appraisal on the property he owned and was contemplating developing in Peiwinkle, California? Remember?

Well, on Wednesday, the night before my momentous meeting with the King, I’d gotten into bed early, expecting I’d have my usual trouble settling down and sleeping, because I had such a huge day ahead of me.

Instead I dropped off to sleep within minutes of getting into bed and didn’t wake up till seven forty-five the next morning, with barely enough time to get to Brentwood by 9:30. Shiller had warned me against coming late.

So when I arrived Thursday morning exactly on time, he thanked me effusively. He was waiting for me in his small glassed-in office in the outer lobby of the company’s Brentwood Headquarters Building. “Do you tap?’ he said, tap-dancing clumsily in front of his desk.

“Tap?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s the big thing here now, “he said, continuing his clumsy tap-dancing, while he explained to me that the King had decided to produce a musical extravaganza, with a cast of tap-dancing employees (working friends), as the perfect expression of the kind of individualism and togetherness the company needed to do its best and most creative work.

“Tap-dancing?” I said, as Miss Peg Peevy came tapping toward her desk in the reception area near outer lobby’s main entrance.

A stout, oblong-shaped woman in her mid-fifties, Peevy was King’s executive secretary and first ex-wife. Her tapping was even clumsier than Shiller’s.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m learning fast.”

“Didn’t you take tap as a kid?” Shiller asked. “I did.”

“I didn’t,” Miss Peevy said, accidentally stepping on one of her own feet and flopping by some miracle, onto her desk chair, “but that won’t stop me.”

“Did you?” Shiller said, eyeing me skeptically, as if sizing me up as a tap-dancer trainee.

“Did I what?” I said.

“Take tap when you were a kid?”

“A few times,” I said.

“What means a few times?” he said, staring critically, I thought, at my flat feet.

“Is it important?” I said.

“Vitally,” Miss Peevy said.

“We’re collecting statistics,” Shiller said, “to assess what kind of training we need.”

“In tap-dancing?”

“In bringing cohesiveness to our long-term purpose,” Miss Peevy said.

“Which is what?” I said, sounding hostile, I suppose, instead of innocently curious, which was my true feeling.

“To become a stronger, healthier, and more versatile organization of working friends from all levels of the corporation, Miss Peevy said, who are committed not only to company growth but also to maximizing inner joy and satisfaction among ourselves and in one another.”

“Doesn’t affect me, does it?” I said, my heart pounding, anticipating an answer I didn’t want to hear.

“If you come to work for us,” Miss Peevy said, “why not?”

Shiller was grinning. “Talk to the King about it,” he said. He’d arranged for a tap-dancing clerk to escort me to the King’s private meeting room in the rear section of the building.

“Is it okay if I keep practicing?” the clerk asked. Poised and much more advanced than Shiller and Miss Peevy, she tap danced smoothly more complicated steps. As I hurried after her, I was tempted to try a couple of unsteady shuffle-offs, taught to me in the distant past by Hootie’s father, Norbert Gallagher, a water inspector by profession, who gave tap-dancing lessons on the side.

Who, you ask, is Hootie Gallagher? How exactly does she fit into the company’s tap-dancing extravaganza?

Well, hmmm.