is everything going?” I asked the bubbly young adult.
“Everything is very good, Dad.”
“Your new place is so close to Santa Monica College; it will be easy to get to school. Have you picked out a major yet?”
“No, Dad. But probably teaching.”
Grateful that Hilary had survived her birth, we had given our only child a lot of freedom. Now a grown woman, she had spent two years circling between her classes in Santa Barbara, friends in L.A., our home, and her aunt’s place in Santa Ynez. I handed her the gift cards.
“Dad, that’s so nice.” She kissed my cheek. We walked past the sprinkle trays at the ice cream niche and then up the promenade to Forever Twenty-One.
Hilary asked the clerk, “Do you have a chair for my Dad to sit in? He always waits when I shop.”
The clerk pulled out a chair from behind her counter. I visualized Friday afternoon. I saw myself approaching my car in the parking lot at the end of my glorious hike and taking a seat on the rear bumper to remove my boots, tossing them into my trunk and slipping on my loafers. I felt the drive down Route 62 to the motel. I would park and go to my room to put on my bathing suit and grab some snacks. After a few steps down to the rust pavers of the pool landing, I’d be lying back, mission accomplished, totally relaxed at a spot under the roof awning with a black shadow covering me. I’d have the New York Times handy and some Medjool dates in a bowl.
“I finished.” My eyes opened, and I went around the counter to meet her. She had a stuffed bagful of clothes in her hand and a smile on her face.
“Everything worked out great. I have one coupon left. I’ll come back with Berna next week. Look at this cute blouse.” She held it against her chest.
“That’s very pretty.” I smiled without examining the pattern or colors of the item. I cared for the ritual. When she was little, on Sundays I’d roll her in her carriage to the local deli. After I lifted her out and set her in a baby seat, the waitress would tie a bagel around her neck.
Hilary and I walked out to Main Street, then turned into the ice cream shop. We sat down with our cones, and she asked, “Are you coming back on Sunday, like always?”
“Yes, for sure,” I said.
A few quick turns and I reached 4th Street to pick up the 10 for the drive to the desert. Once I passed Downtown, it would be a straight shot. With my bag of goodies beside me on the passenger seat, I felt lucky. I had closed a deal on the Landmark Eastern Columbia at the same time as Clifton’s. Two deals in the heart of the financial crisis, right before totally running out of money. I was elated. My career and family life were steady, and I was free to detach myself from everything.
I had come to Los Angeles in 1976, shortly after giving up on a college teaching career in New Hampshire because the technical economics required to complete a PhD put me to sleep. I wanted a more romantic, manly career, and spent six years drifting through furniture finishing, cabinet making, and carpentry. But I finally accepted the advice of a carpenter, Loren Evans, who told me as he handed me my last check, “You ain’t no carpenter, a cabinet maker maybe, but I doubt it, you better ride that horse in the direction it’s going.”
I loved Loren Evans and considered him a real man — he ran an all-male construction crew and was assertive, proud, and physically capable — so I took his advice as gospel. I’ve always been sort of like an empty beach onto which active males would swim up and land. I was always interested in men, not as sexual partners, but as an admirer of their active stances and their proclivities. I wanted to be one. I wanted to know what made them the way they were. And as an empty beach, there were always men landing.
The first whom I loved was Douglas Moore, one of the black kids I met when we moved from the Lower East Side to Rockaway Beach. I had just run a schoolyard race and had lost to Eliot Blum, a frail boy in my fourth grade class. After the race, I stood by Eliot and was grimacing at him when Douglas appeared from nowhere and told me in a casual and friendly tone, “If you want to fight him, you have to fight me.”
In no time, I decided to skip the battle and befriend the aggressive black stranger. I admired his forwardness and friendly manner, so when a few months later, he and his brother Terrell trapped me on the street with my shopping cart full of my mother’s groceries and pretended to steal them, I knew it was a hoax. Terrell had rolled the cart away and yelled, “We got your food.” But I could tell that confident Douglas was sharing a game with his younger brother. Terrell brought the cart back, and Douglas said, “We were just kidding.”
In my teen years, the projects filled up with a pack of new males. Larry Schnitzer stood out. He had come from a tough area of Brooklyn. I met him outside the fence of our junior high school as I was doing my paper route. He stood on the sidewalk in front of me, opened his hands, and motioned in all directions. He regaled me with stories of his fantastic victories against all odds. Dancing in his shiny loafers and carefully pressed slacks, he mimicked a gangster shooting a machine gun. “Crazy Schnitzer” became one of my best friends.
Even though I took the words of the charismatic master carpenter Loren Evans to heart, I had no idea what direction to go. After a few years and a series of dead-end white-collar jobs, I drifted into commercial real estate and got traction in a niche market. Drawn in by the beauty of the abandoned financial district in Downtown Los Angeles, I managed to coexist with a garrulous bunch of ethnic landlords inhabiting the area. At first it was weirder than weird for a former instructor and PhD candidate of a liberal bent to work side-by-side with an avaricious tribe of landlords, but they trusted me and totally distrusted each other — and with difficulty, I made deals with them.
Now, I drove by in a string of cars winding along the rim of the downtown center with the glass-skinned towers of the financial district off to my left. I told myself I’d sell one of those sixty-story buildings one day. The San Gabriel Mountains beyond them hugged the horizon, and the high-rises looked like children’s toys watched over by a graying grandmother. The mountains are the ancestors of the basin.
If mother earth were a broker, she might say, “I opened escrow on the deal twenty-eight million years ago, when I locked the Pacific Oceanic and North Atlantic Plates in a grind against each other.” When the two plates locked, friction between them built up until the earth’s crust broke, creating a visible fault and pushing up mountains. First, the earth’s crust has to move. The heated mantle is thrust upward, building mountains as the molten rock is released. It took the San Andreas Fault the twenty-eight million years to build the rim of ranges in the background of my two-hour voyage across the basin. The Santa Monica, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Mountains. The San Andreas Fault is still active and heads east, like me, cracking the earth along its way.
My first date with Nicole, I took her to a Bukowski play on Traction Avenue where artists were first reclaiming the old lofts. I then dreamt about a woman in a gold lamé blouse and took it as a sign when Nicole wore a gold lamé blouse on our second date. Things moved quickly. Nicole came from a comfortable, down-to-earth family in Beverly Hills. Her mom and dad greeted me warmly.
I was selling a building for a nattily dressed landlord who took me to lunch one day. I told him of my upcoming marriage. “You’re getting engaged?” he asked, wiping his mouth. His sapphire cuff links shone in the dim basement. “Ed, get your wife used to the fact that you go away and she doesn’t know where you are.”
“Okay sure, Frank.” I nodded my head.
He walked me up Olive Street and opened the trunk of his Mercedes where he stored a beautifully pressed outfit and full leather
