The Masters

Carroll was edgy the night before the Masters. He only had two days of his four day binge planned. He wanted to go to the Mermaid and he wanted to go to Clancy’s Crab Broiler. He wanted to park himself at those bars as though they were blackjack tables, and watch the progress of the tournament. He wanted to get to Clancy’s first, but also Friday for the clam chowder.

The impact of the visit to the sculpture garden, where he met Trace for a private discussion, he was not anxious to trivialize. Trace knew a bit too much for his own comfort, and said so. Carroll thought of calling Liffey but Liffey had become undependable since Carroll’s embarrassing episode with the daughter in Boyle Heights. But Liffey himself in fact was last seen wearing a Billabong shirt the girl in Bakersfield with the head injury had given him last Father’s Day. Liffey would get a free ride on that one because there were too many political mysteries to solve already.

Carroll wanted to enjoy the Masters, but knew that unless he disappeared as Liffey had disappeared that he wouldn’t be enjoying a damn thing over the next four days. The conversation with Trace—why didn’t he tape it?—he could have left his phone on and recorded it on the server at home, it was that short. Trace never found it unusual when Carroll wore a sportcoat, and there the phone was in the left breast pocket.

When Trace got around to Olivares, he stopped short of implicating him fully. It looked to Carroll that Trace thought better of it; a face that involuntarily exclaimed, “You don’t want to know” flashed in the dusk. Carroll pretended he didn’t find it out of the ordinary; he looked at the Nancy Graves sculpture to his immediate left. Trace shook him off as though he were a pitcher dissatisfied with the sign from the catcher. Carroll contemplated the sculpture.

“Olivares?” Carroll finally repeated, obstinately.

“Nothing on Olivares,” Trace said. “Forget it. I don’t know why I included him.”

What did Carroll say after that? It was…something…like…

“You don’t usually make a mistake like that when fingering people.”

As Carroll tried to retrieve the conversation, he decided: Clancy’s.

“I’m not…fingering…anybody,” Trace said.

Then why did he bring him up? That was plainly a mask.

As Carroll recalled, the Nancy Graves piece grew menacing in the dusk. The Flip guards would be shutting the gate soon and sweeping them out.

“What the fuck!” Trace yelled.

That was right when they both saw the rocket launcher on Wilshire, pointed right at them.

“I don’t care. Have at it, Ponce. I’m a fucking zombie these days anyway,” Carroll said.

“That sportcoat does indeed say that,” Trace said.

The light on Wilshire changed, and the movie set prop on the back of the International flatbed truck began its slow crawl west.

The more Carroll reviewed the conversation, the better he knew the best place to start watching The Masters was indeed Clancy’s, a Thursdays kind of bar.

The Shortstop and the Victim

The shortstop and the victim / already gone berserk

—Tom Waits, The One that Got Away

But he didn’t go to The Mermaid. The Negras and the Atavan squandered his afternoon for buzz driving any appreciable distance. He went down the hill, to The Shortstop.

Outside, he saw Luckman’s Harley.

He wanted to see a familiar face, but he wanted it to be Rebecca’s. 

He heard the quintet of broken cops moaning through a story.  Luckman served as the lead string. This time, it was about a particular screen test. Carroll already knew all about the screen test: cuff a gay Latino with his hands behind his back, speed up along Benton, suddenly slam on the brakes, watch the kid fly into the screen between front and back. It was a Rampart signature piece in the days before the Christopher report.

“Hey, Carroll! Back in from City Hall? What you got?”

Carroll took a seat at the other end of the bar.

“Nothing, Luckman. Good to see you,” he lied.

No Rebecca.

Hollinger came over. “I’ll have a sazerac,” Carroll told him.

Luckman overheard. “A sazerac! Bring it down here, Clark!”

Carroll winced. The cops lowered their voices to a murmur. Carroll thought, I do have that effect: killjoy.

When Luckman saw that the conversation was now excluding Carroll, he got up and brought his drink over to the seat next to him.

“What’s that you got?” Carroll asked.

“Bourbon and rocks. You have to when you get off.”

“I’d agree.”

“So whatcha workin’ on? Rampart? Hollenbeck?”

“I’m working on all of it,” Carroll said.

Atavan affected him in two ways, and privately he recognized the bipolarity. It occasionally made him more mellow; mellow enough, for instance, to go on radio with confidence. But sometimes it made him overly angry. There was a dinner with Diana where he suddenly swept a plate of cappellini off the table and sent it crashing into the fireplace. When she didn’t shut up, he threw his drink into the fireplace too. That was the other side of Atavan, and Luckman could bring it out.

“Hollinger, this drink is mine,” Luckman said, pointing to Carroll’s sazerac.

“Thanks,” Carroll said.

“Really. What do you got?” Luckman prodded.

Carroll drew a long breath.

“OK, the other week I did an interview with Ponce. Sondra Rodriguez, who’s fairly a blimp, told me to meet her at some building on Main, I don’t even know where the hell it is. Some new loft. Sondra? That’s his chief of staff.  It’s 8:30 in the fucking morning. I meet her and she keeps calling Ponce. ‘Ready?’ ‘Ready?’ This isn’t where Ponce lives, but I figure he’s crashing after a night down at that scuzzy nightclub they all hang at, you know, 740. Finally he calls down: he’s ready.

“We go up to the penthouse on the tenth floor and Ponce comes out with a shirt-tail out. Oh yeah, he spent the night there. And I’m going, like John McEnroe, ‘You cannot be serious.’ So I am looking around the penthouse for clues as to who’s it is.

“And it’s G. Daniel Pipps. You know that guy? A rich dude, of course, but also a lobbyist.”

“I think I heard the name,” Luckman said.

“Maybe. He’s gay, a Latino guy with an Anglo name. Maybe he even has had a screen test in his time.  So that all strikes me as funny, because, I’m thinking…they all went to Berkeley: Ponce, Rodriguez, Pipps, even the guy Ponce beat in the last election. That’s funny to me, they were all there, now they’re all here. Stay with me: there’s a guy at Eastside, he also went to Eastside with them. Eastside, you know, where the gangs recruit the kids who go out and shoot somebody a day later.”

“I don’t get that,” Luckman said.

“What? Why it happens? The Berkeley part? What?”

“Well, I get why it happens. Turns the kid’s whole life into one long suicide-by-cop afternoon. From Eastside or County to Pelican Bay, a few big headlines, star treatment in jail, the only place the kid knows, maybe even a death penalty. Superstardom for those assholes. But I don’t get Berkeley part. What are you getting at?”

Carroll’s sazerac was going down fast. You had to get out of The Shortstop before the kids started to arrive.

“Look, I talked to this nun on Holy Hill who knew them all in Berkeley. It was a sentimental moment, I thought I’d snoop around.

“And she said it’s where they’re from. They love to live with fear. They loved it after a certain point, it became sexy to them.  They still must love it even today.  ‘Desire does not lie,’ she said.  Making the Man fearful is still sexy for them. Even the Chief. So they’re turning the other cheek on the recruiting. And I think it’s because of that gang bond that’s coming.”

“Oh…” Luckman said.

“Oh yeah.  That’s what I’m working with.  They’re going to let the streets go to hell this summer so that they can come back in the fall and get that half-billion gang bond passed. That money will go to all their cronies and cement this town as theirs. It’s just whackamole, you guys with the territories know that, because they gangs will move right outside of City limits the second it passes.”

“Mmmm,” Luckman said.  A nun on Holy Hill—that got Luckman’s buy-in.

The two men sat sipping while Hollinger twirled a glass around a towel.

“Shit, what are you going to do?”

Carroll finished his sazerac. Not bad. Now everyone on shabby Sunset has one. Fernando’s is the best, but Hollinger’s is pretty good, he thought. He stood up.

“I don’t know. Write your own damn happy ending,” he said to Luckman. He was sad that Rebecca wasn’t there.

At June Flowers’

“Hey, June!” Carroll called to inside the house. “What was that you had on the bathroom mirror when you were living with the idiot? What was that P.J. O’Rourke?”

She popped out of her bungalow, rolled her eyes and turned, and went back inside just as quickly. A cuckoo clock, Carroll thought. A lavender mob of wisteria hung from the wires over the deck in full bloom, letting loose of their pollen over the entirety of the patio.

“Oh!” she said from inside the bungalow. “When I was with the idiot? Shit, you remember that! Something like, ‘People who try to commit suicide by drugs need to know they may take too few and simply have a good time.’”

“Right!” he said. The wisteria made him wheeze. “Can you suicide on Actifed? Between here and Hollenbeck, I’m toast.”

She laughed.

“I’m really sorry about today,” June Flowers said. She came outside again, and handed Carroll a Negra. “I had no idea she’d even be so self-centered with you too.” It was breezy out on June’s patio and he had already had three Negras and two Atavan before he got there. The Negras steadied his breathing and the Atavan wrecked his nerves.

“Thanks. Oh, she’s just a crazy social worker,” Carroll said. “Who wouldn’t be? I didn’t care. But wasn’t it funny it was in Ponce’s district? I mean, right in the heart of the district!”

“Yeah, funny,” June agreed. “Allergies got you?”

“Mmm,” Carroll said. “I went fairly nuts last night.”

He spotted the fold-up chaise. It was wrapped up behind the date palm around which the deck had been built. The deck was cluttered enough that he wasn’t able to see the chaise right away. The other two chairs were caked with dirt.

“Mind if I unfold this?” he asked.

“Oh, no, go right ahead,” June said. “I’ll bring a chair from inside.”

He set down his Negra and unfolded the lightweight chaise. It took him a few minutes to figure out the way the chaise folded all the way back and then wratcheted into place. He set it up so that he could recline enough to sleep if he wanted. June went into the bungalow to get a chair, but she changed her blouse and forgot about sitting outside.

Then he fell asleep for about an hour. When he came back to consciousness, Carroll Clark reached for his cell and poked in the number of Jimmy Jameson at the CRA.

“Hey! Jimmy!”

“I don’t got any!”

“Shut up. It’s me. What about Eastside? Any word on recruiting?”

“Oh, hell, yes, way too much. I’m not touching that. It has everyone running away. The Mayor is just letting it happen. The Chief is afraid for the City this summer…well, I shouldn’t say that—we heard he’s trying to do something privately. It’s crazy time, all this shooting just to prove how crazy they are, and nobody stopping them. I hear it’s all because two goddamn pols are so desperate for workerbees these days. Your friend Ponce and you-know-who.”

“I think they can seem more desperate than they are,” Carroll said, lying a little. “I think they like it that way. It’s what they know. Ponce tried to recruit Joe Lopez last week. But I don’t know that that’s actually desperate, though. That’s just Boyle Heights business as usual.”

“Yeah, but have you seen the way the Chief is shifting bodies around? That’s all supposed to be so the Mayor doesn’t get suspicious that the Chief is actively trying to break things up.”

Carroll sneezed, and spilled a little of his Negra onto the deck part of the patio.

“OK, maybe….listen, oops, I wish I had more time, something came up.” June handed Carroll another Negra. “Please give my best to Juliana.”

“Will do,” Jim said.

Carroll folded his cell phone. He took two big swigs from his Negra. A flock of canaries landed on the barren fruit stems of the palm high above them; then they flew down towards Sunset.

“Jimmy says the Mayor’s deliberately turning the other cheek on the gang stuff,” Carroll called to June, who was back in the house again.

“I can’t imagine that the Mayor would willfully let that happen,” said when she came outside. “But then again; didn’t Jack guess that too at some point?”

Carroll shook his head. He was embarrassed by Jack’s conspiracy theory. But it was funny that Jimmy had one too. “They pop out of jail, they make a little bang bang, back they go. Like cuckoos.”

He wheezed again. He needed to leave. She always had something—a cat, a plant, a sweater—always something to make him wheeze.

“I’ve got to get to the Mermaid,” he said, standing up from the chaise. “Some gangs, nobody leaves them alive,” he added, brushing the afternoon pollen off of his Fila jacket. “Do you want the chaise folded back up?”

“I don’t care. No. So what else on the streets?” June asked.

“The streets are on cuckoo clock time,” Carroll said. “Buh-bye. Best to Joe.”

Ladybug

The aphids on the roses peaked over the weekend; by midweek they were mostly done. A ladybug nestled into the vortex of a purple leaf and green stem of Golden Celebration.

He took his cape codder and Saturday crossword puzzle and a hardcopy of Balthazar to the backyard and sat on a patio chair. Very proud of the drink; less proud of the progress on the puzzle; not proud at all to be thinking about a nude woman. He counted the spaces of a particular answer to a particular clue. Then he felt the sunshine and went to sleep.

When he woke up, he took a sip of his drink without looking at it and quickly noted his drink was empty. Then the cellphone went off.

“This is Carroll.”

“Carroll, I was at the Boyle Heights office and I just saw Joe Lopez get into a big black Mercedes with smoked winshields. They drove him around the block a few times and then Joe got out and went back to work.”

“What theater,” Carroll said. He folded the phone closed.

He stood up and walked into the house and poured the rest of the drink left over in the shaker into his cocktail glass. Then he went back to the backyard and made a phone call.

“Tigerman, this is Carroll. Can you tell me who’s driving a big black Mercedes with tinted windows in the Mayor’s office?”

“That’s Ravenne,” Tigerman said.

“Ravenne. What’s funny about Ravenne? Didn’t he come from the Valley?”

“No. He came from South LA. He’s a dago. Thinks he’s a bad ass but he would wet himself if he were ever in any real trouble.”

Carroll sipped his cape codder.

“I don’t like the idea that he thinks he can call up Joe Lopez and Lopez will just go running down to greet him. What’s the big deal? Has he had a tough time pulling a permit for a donor somewhere? I don’t get the involvement at all.”

“Carroll, you won’t believe it, but they’re going to Manila together next week,” Tigerman said. “Joe Lopez is going to Manila on City business, like for something involving urban planning, and Ravenne is funding it. You know what happens in Manila. Word is also that someone in the Mayor’s office is finally teaching Joe Lopez how to treat a mistress so his mistress doesn’t get chatty. Can you believe this crap happens?”

“I’m watching a ladybug eat an aphid right now. Of course it fucking happens,” Carroll said.

Modelo

Then she told me about the head injury.  I feigned indifference; I looked away and nodded ever so slightly.  But the words “head injury” were all I heard from that point out. She told me she lived in Bakersfield; she told me she hated her mother’s boyfriend; she told me she thought she should be writing but her brothers discouraged her.  And I heard these things.  But I heard the words “head injury” over and over.

 It was nearing midnight.  The sleepy slopes of Silver Lake below us fell off into a canyon of black ink dotted by phosphorescent halos.  Her heels clicked on the asphalt on the way to my car.

 ”What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

I didn’t hear the question perfectly.

“Wait a minute.  Who directed Hollywood Squares—your father?”

“Yeah.”

 I looked at the brick retaining wall of another shingled modern house with papyrus and rosemary in the short front yard.

“Then you should write,” I said.  “It’s like the House of Atreus.  He’s dead, mom’s in Hell, you should write.”

There was a pool of tear in her right eye.  She fumbled for a cigarette.  I heard a fountain trickling, somewhere.

 ”Bakersfield, all the guys drink beer and hang out in pool halls and there’s just pizza,” she said.

 ”What about those Basque places?”

“The meat is awful,” she said.  “I don’t trust it.”

“That’s why you have to write,” I said.

“Do you have a cellphone?” she said.

I handed it to her.  She punched her number into it.  Then she handed it to me.

 ”Well, that’s me,” she said.  “Leave a message.”

I looked at the 805 etc.  I didn’t know what to say.  I began anyway, the way a golfer starts a swing, with just a tick…

“Catherine, this is Carroll.  I’m very curious about everything you’ve said.  Tell me about the Hollywood Squares, about your private House of Atreus, about the head injury.  I’m just letting all the craziness in—maybe you are too.  Now you have my number.”

 She looked at me.  I pushed the red button and folded up the phone.

“The Hollywood Squares was all bullshit,” she said.  “But it paid for everything.  It paid for our houses, it paid for our lives.  It paid for my surgery.  They stitched my head up and it took me six months to learn to walk.  Funny, I could write before I could walk again.  I fell off the back of a motorcycle.  And guess what.  All I see in Bakersfield are guys with motorcycles who hang out at bars with pool tables and eat pizza and drink beer.  It’s like No Exit,” she said.

I reached for the keys to the Mercedes.  “No Exit is more bullshit than Hollywood Squares is,” I said.

A Summer Away

I came through the wood and the pond spread out before me in both directions—it was a lot larger than I thought it would be, and its immensity gave me a better appreciation of the scale of the map of Baxter State Park the Ranger had given us. In the shadow of the mountain, the pond was silver. Across from me, on the far shore, were two moose, one with antlers and one without. There was a little pier nearby, no more than ten feet long, a clunky thing made of untreated wood, which I doubted was used very much. I heard the sound of the water after a trout’s leap for an insect—it was getting to be that time of the evening, and I imagined that very soon the sound would be continuous.

It occurred to me to look for Jack’s soccer shoe footprints, as I couldn’t see either Jack or Skip. In about ten paces to my right, I saw an unmistakable imprint from Jack’s shoe—it was, I think, an indoor soccer shoe, with rubber cleats that were more suggestions of cleats than true cleats—and so I turned around and went the other way. It would take a few hours to hike around the pond, and I hoped that Jack hadn’t convinced Skip to try, for it would be dark in a couple of hours and there would be no way to find the trail. They would be obliged to spend all night outside, a quarter of a mile from the bunkhouse. Determining that Jack was too much of an outdoorsman to take such a risk, I continued a little ways in the direction away from them.

It was very damp on the pond. It was curious, how a life on a pond would be damper, and to my mind, unhealthier, than life at sea—though neither seemed optimal. I was wandering quite contently, neither daring, nor insolent, nor in need of better vision or adventure, nor too involved with anything to be unaware of the things that should indeed be troubling me. All things are vanity under the sun, for instance. I felt that Skip was pursuing a career he never once stopped to think about, and that given his intellectual background, it was a tremendous waste. But what was I doing that was any better? I would work to live, then quit, then read at the beach, go up to San Francisco or the redwoods, go to Santa Barbara, sometimes even New York, and now, Maine. Then I would need some money and I would go back to work again. Money in literature is Monopoly money; the author bestows it at whim, in recognition of some kind of moralizing position; it is bestowed as reward, or with irony, or after many years and few words have passed, or through painless and remorseless inheritance in which the character experiences no suffering, only a fond remembrance. Money in life is nothing like that. It is bestowed as an unemotional, relentlessly unfair and mostly illiterate marketplace deems fit. It is both deserved and undeserved; therefore, it is undeserved. It’s not just the crazy ones; we are all dependent on the kindness of strangers, and damn few of us receive it to satisfaction. In America it is a common myth that at minimum you are either a wage earner or have enough in trust or in investments or in the Cayman Islands to maintain your life. I hated that element of America. But I was not nearly shabby enough nor counterculture enough to join a commune. I was, in short, a luftmensch without a devotee. What makes one a luftmensch unto oneself? I mean, other than youth? Good upbringing—or bad? The simple, sensible desire never to work? The desire to be above the fray? What was there to submit oneself to, if one knew all was vanity? I did not feel as though I would ever become a professional, and yet there seemed nothing else worth being, if one were obliged to work. The only thing in me that survived from my experience in the Ivy League was a charitable understanding of the word amateur, a word with love at its root. Some young people from Cal State Nowhere, by no means all, were laboring to become something high-salaried; some people in the Ivies and other liberal arts schools, by no means all, thought the pre-professionals to be missing a key. That made them elitist more than any other quality, and it wasn’t even their fault.

excerpt, A Summer Away, 1999

Egypte va vous conduire

A short short story from 2002.

The Plasma of Terror

“So do you speak many languages then, Mr. Jean?”

Yes. Jean had had Republican women before. His tenure in the Foreign Service exposed him to Democrats and Republicans in equal number. He was not afraid of Republican women. Everything they bought, everything they drank, and everyone they screwed over ultimately came down to a matter of economy for them—which were perfectly acceptable qualities in a partner, even in a mistress, if not in themselves. Some chose not to stray from marriage (these were the ones who were completely dependent on their husband for their comforts in life). Some strayed (these were the ones who provided for themselves). Show me, he once said, a Republican woman with a career of her own, and I’ll show you an adulteress. They so often screamed in bed, in fact—loudly, as though pleasured to the point of a sincere fetish arousal, as one may scream when one’s net worth suddenly goes up by a factor of ten—that Jean found them inspiring, even patriotic. He supposed that the call to propriety so common to most Republican women, as the call of religion is often to a zealot, was not truly an absolute moral code, but merely some system of belief against which to measure privately the full extent of the evil within their own lusting little hearts.

“Yes. Only in Chile, though. I think I need to see the living room,” Jean said. “If you’ve been here, maybe you’ll show me where it is.”

“I’ll show you,” Monica said. They wandered off, he following her. As they walked, she said, “Chile? Really? Fancy that! I’m going to Chile in a week. I would love some company.” She turned to smile and then he watched her walk, the walk of a burglar, quiet and fluid, a little on the masculine side, without deliberate steps but with shoulders staying level, prepared to turn every which way. They went through the side entrance, bypassing the kitchen crowd, then through another hallway—this one long and narrow and dimly lit, without any doors on either side—and into a refreshing and original space.

excerpt, The Plasma of Terror, 2005

Standard Time

Not yet spring, but the time changed anyway. We lost an hour of our day. It was not a spring day, but it was very much like a spring day, however. When I hung them on the shower door, my shirts dried faster than they have all winter.

She came home and asked me to put the car in the garage.

I went outside. Petals of white flowers were falling from the blooming apricot tree. Some of the white petals fell on the patio table, where my book was.

When I grew up, we had an apricot tree, but only for a few years, before we moved someplace else. As an adult, I had had one for eleven years. This tree was sixty years old and just beginning to fail; but it was still poetic.

I drank for a while, first tequila, then vodka. A guest came over, and Diana and she took a walk, and then the guest left.

Diana had started a Netflicks film the day before, and she wanted to finish it now. I wasn’t interested.

“I think I’ll paint for a while,” I said.

But I didn’t. An hour passed, then two. I sat reading.

She didn’t watch the movie. She did some laundry, then she made dinner.

We had dinner.

“Someone told me that the Japanese don’t have four seasons, they have some other number.  Maybe thirteen, maybe forty.  If they have forty, I’d like to know what they all are,” I said.

We ate dinner politely.  I finished first and waited while she had a second serving of salad.

“I’m not surprised,” Diana said.

She wanted to do the dishes by herself.  She liked the warm water on her hands.

“I might paint some more,” I lied.

I went to one bedroom.  She went to the other bedroom to watch the movie.

I read for an hour.  Sometimes I looked at the canvas on the easel.

“Baby,” I said, “That movie is bugging me. All I’m hearing is a baby crying and gunshots.”

“Oh, I’ll close the door,” she snapped.

“You don’t need to. I’m just…”

She shut the door. I looked at my easel and the blank canvas on it, blank since the lesbian mounted it and gave it to her as a gift last summer. It wasn’t quite spring, but it felt like it, even at night.