Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  Actually, Jake’ death was a culmination, the last in a string of deaths going back to my mother dying when I was a tot, and somehow I saw myself responsible for them all. I was the Grim Reaper’s henchman.

  That is crazy, I know. I did not willfully kill any of these persons. But I was there, in the background, a veritable Joe Btfsplk, my own little black cloud following wherever I went. The rain that fell on my head said, “Gattling, you are a worthless prick, you can sweat and strain, you will never make up for the bad things you’ve done.”

  *****

  This is how I got to be The Janitor of Bobwhite Court. Before I came over the hill, some entrepreneur with more vision than capital had started to develop the cul-de-sac but went belly up just about the time I stopped being an Assistant Vice-President at UC Berkeley. The project got as far as framing the first floor of what the fading sign in front advertized as condominiums. Then activity just stopped. The two-by-fours bleached in the sun and rain, the weeds returned around the foundation. I noticed the decay as I took my daily constitutional along the abandoned Southern Pacific tracks that ran behind Bobwhite Court. One day I said to myself, “Robert, those bleached bones could be something else: offices, apartments. Why don’t you use your retirement money and buy them?”

  Before I could overcome the amateur’s fear of the risk involved, V.M. Meany, who already owned about half of central Contra Costa County, saw the same potential as I and didn’t hesitate one bit. He bought the derelict.

  By the way, being an Assistant Vice-President, working for Stu Katz, the Vice-President for Medical Education for the statewide University system, became a not-such-exalted niche on the corporate ladder. From my bureaucratic desk I was tasked to ride herd on the funding of biomedical research—until the day Mario Savio got himself arrested for climbing atop a police car and speaking out against the University’s paternalistic treatment of its students. This became the revolution named The Free Speech Movement. Stu Katz, who had inherited me and didn’t much like me, nominated me as the guy to carry the University’s latest offer to the protesting students. The University’s President agreed they needed a spokesperson who wouldn’t flinch when an enraged long-hair screamed in his face. (“You were an amateur boxer, Robert? Olympic Auditorium? Golden Gloves? You wouldn’t actually strike a protester, if things got heated, would you?” “Only in self-defense, sir.”) Out on the steps of the Admin Building with the latest offer from the President, I shouted back when necessary and I didn’t flinch, though I quickly learned the therapeutic benefits of double martinis in evenings of jarred nerves.

  During the “institutionalization phase” of the revolution, as poli-sci profs are wont to call it, I needed to get the hell out of the middle. I asked for a leave of absence. “I’ll resign if you’d rather” I told Stu Katz, leading with my chin because I was frazzled and tuckered out from all the tension. He would have loved to fire me but his reactionary instincts had him consult the Big Boss, and away I went. You can’t believe how thankful I was to be quit of the superheated rhetoric (or, as my piled higher-and-deeper colleagues would say, the Sturm-und-Drang-Zeit).

  I sublet my digs and pursued a zaftig young woman named Lana up to Reno, where she had learned to deal twenty-one and was learning to be her own person. It was there, or rather, outside of Reno, up an arroyo I’m not sure I could find on the map today, where I did something that was frowned upon by academicians, was not good for a man’s soul nor for his relationship with the zaftig Lana. We married under a cloud, and the cloud rained on us throughout a trip camping out through Mexico and led to an ultimate falling out.

  It had to do with a sawed-off shotgun and a man who would now be called ‘homeless’ but back in those days was simply called a drifter.

  three

  Jake asked me, on his deathbed, to finish the novel he’d been working on since that night I agreed to work around him. This seemed a preposterous request at the time. I knew as much about writing as I did about driving an automobile, and asking me to finish his novel was like asking me to take his place in the cockpit of a Ferrari at Le Mans It was pure manipulation, but manipulation I unthinkingly submitted to in that solemn moment of watching his life ebb away. “Sure Jake, anything.” I promised.

  If this is the second Robert Gattling effort you’re reading, you know I didn’t finish the novel, which was the story of a man falling in love with a witch. I never gathered enough nerve to try. It’s true, I read the unfinished manuscript of “The Witch’s House” a half-dozen times and poured through cryptic notes Jake made to himself, going back to what he scribbled in a notebook he kept by his bed the night he had the dream upon which he based the novel.

  I got so worked up, unable to keep my promise, I went to see a shrink about it. Dr. Deary was Jake’s contemporary, a woman whose face bore the chiseled marks of great (I suspect physical) pain. She was recommended by a friend, wasn’t licensed by the state because she didn’t like the state’s rules, but had a full practice of persons , like me, only mildly regretted their insurance wouldn’t pay any part of her robust fee. She listened to me rant, she listened to me cry tears of frustration and regret, she listened to me try to rationalize why I couldn’t keep my promise, and this took four sessions. During the fifth session she became prescriptive, for which I’m very grateful. It saved me lots of time and money.

  “Look, Mr. Gattling,” (she never got around to calling me anything less formal) “I don’t need to tell you, dreams are highly personal. Your Jake didn’t try to parse his witch dream because it would have ruined what he perceived as its high drama. The only problem is, if I hear you correctly, the drama never came out in the writing. He left all the emotion inside, never got it down on paper. This doesn’t surprise me. He was like a man shadow-boxing, that is not coming to terms with whatever or whomever is the real foe. If you were really going to write a novel based on the outline of his dream, you’d have to make the witch your witch, and the psychic battle with her your battle. Then it wouldn’t be finishing Jake’s novel, it would be writing your own. And if the idea of writing your own novel about falling in love with a witch leaves you cold (your expression is telling me that’s so) then doing so is betraying yourself.”

  “But what about my promise?”

  She said, “Unless you believe Jake’s up there” (she pointed towards the ceiling without looking up) “looking down and shaking a cautionary finger at you like your fifth grade teacher, you haven’t betrayed anyone. If he’d said, ‘Look after my wife and kids’ it would have been one thing. I believe, from what you’ve told me of the man, he had a fairly complex and perhaps pixyish reason for tasking you this way.

  “So, by the power vested in me by my overweening self-confidence as a therapist, I absolve you of all worldly guilt. Now you need to go home and absolve yourself. Knock off the mea culpas. Write a novel with a Jake Pritchett in it.”

  *****

  Driving home, I thought about a novel with a Jake Pritchett in it. That evening I wound down with a couple of glasses of Louis Martini’s Dry Chenin Blanc in lieu of dry martinis. I told Mary Clare about my final session with Dr. Deary and what I got from her was a broad grin.

  “What?” I asked, puzzled by the grin.

  She said, “That Jake. He told me you wouldn’t be able to keep your promise.”

  “Shit. Then why’d he ask me to do it?”

  She smiled. “He wanted you to spend so much energy getting pissed at him for sending you on a snipe hunt that you wouldn’t have time to beat yourself up about his dying.”

  “He said that?” I was actually starting to get pissed.

  “Would I lie to you?”

  “Not about something like that. Why didn’t you tell me this sooner, goddamnit?”

  “Because he made me promise.”

  I said, “Oh, so you got to keep your promise to him while I break mine.”

  She said, “But he knew you weren’t going to be able to do it.”

  “Why waste my time, t
hen?”

  “Ah, Grasshopper, if you must ask, you would not understand the answer.” We were sitting hip to haunch on the couch. She reached up and ruffled my hair. Somehow my pique was endearing.

  “Try me,” I said.

  “Does the Buddhist monk, daily raking the gravel in the monastery’s rock garden, waste time when he makes it look exactly like the day before?”

  “Smarty pants. What else did Jake and you discuss that I should know about?”

  She said, “I told him you were the best lover a woman ever had.”

  I laughed.

  “I did.”

  “I bet that merited a big ‘so what.’”

  “Why?” Now she was playing with my hair.

  “Jake wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about my love-making ability. Isn’t that something you might better have shared with a female friend?”

  She said, “Heck no. I’m not about to stimulate some woman’s curiosity about Robert-in-the-sack.”

  I put my forehead against hers. “I’d like to stimulate your curiosity.”

  “Good. Then, after, I can catch a nap while you cook dinner. I have a long night ahead, because I have to finish this paper by morning or I’m in deep doo-doo.”

  “So now I’m going to put you to sleep?”

  “Turn about and all that.”

  I said, “I prefer tit for tat.”

  “Last one upstairs gets to be on the bottom.”

  And by the time I figured that out, she was in bed waiting for me.

  four

  So there was no real beginning to my post-University and post-Lana life until I saw excavators moving earth one morning as I took my constitutional along the Southern Pacific tracks. There was a spanking new sign stating the name of the construction firm and the name of the project, “Quail’s Reach.” At the bottom in named V.M. Meany as the developer. A lot of noise, dump trucks, men talking with their heads close together, hard hats, plans spread out on the hood of a pickup.

  I went home and looked up V.M. Meany in the yellow pages. Based on what I saw, I assumed Meany was a big frog in a small pond. Later I would go to the library and go through microfilm archives of the Diablo Valley Courier and the San Francisco Chronicle to discover that Meany moved freely among small, medium and large ponds while his relative size didn’t change much at all. He was long past the stage in his career that he needed to advertise. Investors, politicians and other movers and shakers came to him.

  The man was used to getting his way. Witness how he added to the footprint of the Bobwhite Court complex in order to build on every square inch of property the zoning ordinance allowed. Then he got a variance allowing a penthouse one floor higher than the zoning ordinance limit. Which was the whole point of Bobwhite Court: that penthouse and its tenant, the woman I would, in short order, dub the Penthouse Lady.

  In other words, although the project was an efficient use of Meany’s money, it had at its core a quixotic gesture.

  Efficiency was definitely in Meany’s lexicon, quixotic was a stretch. Still, the man had always done things first cabin. It was part of his larger-than-life reputation. In keeping with this quality, the grounds around Quail’s Reach were nicely landscaped, with a tasteful Moroccan fountain out front and a couple of mature shade trees moved in on the flanks. He deeded an easement to the county so that the cul-de-sac could be connected to the Southern Pacific right-of-way, which was, in the county master plan, slated to become a bicycle and pedestrian trail through the heart of central county. This, rumor had it, was a horse trade for the height variance.

  I walked home and mulled the sign. Before long I got the idea of playing Meany as a way of staying alive. It put me on a par with the son of a Zulu warrior working in a South African diamond mine, but when you’ve been pissing away your life and decide it’s time to reform, you figure on starting at the bottom. As an undergrad I’d been a student laboratory assistant at the University, but ended up an Assistant Vice-President, so I thought I might start out a janitor and end up—what? I had no idea. I had no idea what baronies there might be in Meany’s empire.

  So I cashed in my classic BMW for a cherry 1941 Chevy panel truck, plus enough cash to paint it (café au lait body, chocolate fenders) and have Janet Lippert, a sign painter by trade, decorate its panels with a fanciful Gatling gun and the motto, “We Fight Dirt.” She also added pin stripes, her own personal touch.

  See, the truck’s first use was as an advertising ploy. Before he moved to Bobwhite Court, Meany had offices in Martinez, the county seat. For two weeks I parked the truck in various places near his digs, intending it to stir his curiosity. When I felt he must have registered this odd vehicle, and wondered at its provenance, I made an appointment to see him. I never learned whether he even noticed the truck, let alone connected it to me.

  *****

  Meany looked like a retired NFL offensive tackle. As he rose from the chair behind his massive mahogany desk, I had the same reaction as when I once came upon Teddy Roosevelt’s grizzly bear exhibited in the rotunda of the Smithsonian.

  My hackle rose.

  I hesitated before sticking my average sized hand into his enormous mitt. His eyes hid behind rimless optical gray specs. His extra large galluses suspended pleated trousers in a subdued gray wool worsted with stripes so fine I couldn’t make out the color. A banker’s suit. His white shirt was starched, his silk rep tie as conservative as his suiting.

  “I didn’t put out any invitations to bid,” he said. “What makes you think I need someone to clean Quail’s Reach?”

  I said, “I take my exercise walking the train tracks mornings. I’ve watched the progress, and it looks like move-in isn’t far off.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m moving my own offices there the first of the month. I’ll want it to be a showcase. You have a résumé?”

  I said, “I have a résumé and a work proposal. The résumé was going to stretch some definitions of what I’d done in the past to make me sound like, if not a janitor, a man capable of bossing janitors. I was hoping the carefully thought out work plan would get me the gig.

  He went rapidly through the documents. “Are you a man of your word, Mr. Gattling?”

  “Yes, sir.” I reddened slightly, as if a man of the cloth had asked me, out of the blue, if I were keeping the faith.

  “What about the apartments?” he asked.

  I sensed a warming on his part, although his jowly expression, suggestive of chronic depression, changed not at all.

  “I'd clean the common areas, the elevators, vacuum the hallways and wash the front doors once a week, wash the windows every six months. Police the area around the dumpster—I assume you’ll have dumpster service.”

  He said, “Wash the windows the end of the rainy season and the end of summer. Don’t care what the calendar says.” For about a minute he sat and looked out the window behind him, Carquinez Strait stretching west to east, when he swiveled his chair about, rose again, and stuck out that enormous paw.

  I rose, too, not just from native politeness, but because his looming over me was intimidating.

  “Watch for me to move in. —I assume I can I keep these?” He gestured with the documents I’d given him.

  “Of course. How soon do you think you’ll be moving?”

  “Like I said, first of the month.”

  “Anyone else moving in before you?”

  He hesitated a moment and shook his head.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “No, thank you, son. You saved me some bother.”

  As I left I realized that was the first time I’d been called ‘son’ since I went to college.

  *****

  When I started working for him, he handed me a contract to sign, the boilerplate of which looked as if it had come from a stationery store, and before I could more than glance at it, he summarized it for me.

  “The amount’s what we agreed to. Your work proposal is incorporated by reference. Otherwise, I want this place kept
looking as good as the day I move in—simple as that. You have any day-to-day questions, talk to Meryl.” He gestured towards the formidable woman guarding his office door. “She’ll give you the keys.”

  In her three inch heels, Meryl Destrier’s pompadour, a blond version of Linda Darnell’s, topped me by a good two inches. If Meany reminded me of Leo Nomellini or Dan Dierdorf, Meryl reminded me Dick Butkus. She outweighed me, but to say that she was plump would be entirely misleading. Straight of back, broad of shoulders, as age added padding to her body, every part of her stayed in the same relationship to the other parts. If she had an appearance problem it wasn’t size and proportions it was latent pixie-ism—she would wear clothes better suited to a younger, slimmer woman.

  As Meryl and I went over door keys—she had labeled them—I said, “What about the penthouse?”

  “Never mind the penthouse.” (Emphatic, final, as if she’d anticipated the question.)

  I asked what was up there, and the answer—a frown and a repeat of her ‘never mind’—naturally piqued my interest.

  “Not even the elevator?”

  Meryl said, “Nope; not even the elevator.”

  “And if I wanted to rent one of the apartments myself, whom would I see?”

  She said, “That would be me.”

  “Is there a studio? Ground floor rear? Nothing fancy, mind you.”

  “Wait a sec.” She went into Meany’s office and conferred with him while standing on one foot and leaning across his desk, the other foot pointed at me, another pixie-ism.

  “Mr. Meany would prefer that you not,” she said. She added no reason, I assume because, if Meany wanted to fire me, he’d rather not have me hanging about.

  five

  The buildings Meany added to Quail’s Reach—parentheses around the original—were constructed with parking below grade. The excavating added significantly to the, but it allowed him to build more units. The original building with the penthouse had parking to the rear. Passing a second story window the first day I started work, I looked into the parking lot and watched a pale yellow Jaguar roadster—an XKE—pull into a reserved parking space. A woman in butt-hugging Levi’s and tall boots, a bomber jacket and a newsboy cap cocked over one eye, alighted and slung a messenger bag over one shoulder. She strode briskly towards the exterior elevator to the penthouse. I wanted her to look up, but she didn’t. I thought I glimpsed an elegant profile, but maybe I just wanted her to have an elegant profile.