The Gold Coast

  “Well,” Humphrey says, “it looks like the financing package is coming together for the office tower we want to build there. Ambank is showing serious interest, and that will seal things if they go for it.”

  “But Humphrey!” Jim protests. “The occupancy rate out in Santiago office buildings is only about thirty percent! You tried to get people to commit to this complex and you couldn’t find anybody!”

  “True, but I got a lot of written assurances that people would consider moving in if the building were there, especially when we promised them free rent for five years. The notes have convinced most of the finance packagers that it’s viable.”

  “But it isn’t! You know that it isn’t! You’ll build another forty-story tower out there, and it’ll stand there empty!”

  “Nah.” Humphrey shakes his head. “Once it’s there it’ll fill up. It’ll just take a while. The thing is, Jim, if you get the land and the money together at the same time, it’s time to build! Occupancy will take care of itself. The thing is, we need the final go-ahead from Ambank, and they’re so damn slow that we might lose the commitment of the other financiers before they get around to approving it.”

  “If you build and no one occupies the space then Ambank is going to end up holding the bills! I can see why they might hesitate!”

  But Humphrey doesn’t want to think about that, and he’s got a meeting with the company president in a half hour, so he shoos Jim out of his office.

  Jim goes back to his console, picks up the phone, and calls Arthur. “Listen, I’m really interested in what we talked about the other night. I want—”

  “Let’s not talk about it now,” Arthur says quickly. “Next time I see you. Best to talk in person, you know. But that’s good. That’s real good.”

  Back to work, fuming at Humphrey, at his job, at the greedy and stupid government, from the local board of supervisors up to Congress and this foul administration. Shift over, three more hours sacrificed to the great money god. He’s on the wheel of economic birth and death, and running like a rat in it. He shuts down and prepares to leave. Scheduled for dinner at the folks’ tonight—

  Oh shit! He’s forgotten to visit Uncle Tom! That won’t go over at all with Mom. God. What a day this is turning out to be. What time is it, four? And they have afternoon visiting hours. Mom’s sure to ask. There’s no good way out of it. The best course is to track down there real quick and drop in on Tom real briefly before going up for dinner. Oh, man.

  12

  On the track down 405 to Seizure World he clicks on the radio, they’re playing The Pudknockers’ latest and he blasts himself with a full hundred and twenty decibels of volume, singing along as loud as he can:

  I’m swimming in the amniotic fluid of love

  Swimming like a finger to the end of the glove

  When I reach the top I’m going to dive right in

  I’m the sperm in the egg—did I lose? did I win?

  Seizure World spreads over the Laguna Hills, from El Toro to Mission Viejo: “Rossmoor Leisure World,” a condomundo for the elderly that used to be only for the richest of the old. Now it’s got its ritzy sections and its slums and its mental hospitals just like any other “town” in OC, and overpopulation sure, there’s more old folks now than ever before, an immense percentage of the population is over seventy, and two or three percent are over a hundred, and they have to go somewhere, right? So there are half a million of them densepacked here.

  Jim parks, gets out. Now this place: this is depression. He hates Seizure World with a passion. Uncle Tom does too, he’s pretty sure. But with emphysema, and relying completely on Social Security, the old guy doesn’t have much choice. These subsidized aps are as cheap as you can get, and only the old can get them. So here Tom is, in a condomundo that looks like all the rest, except everything is smaller and dingier, closer to dissolution. No pretending here, no Mediterranean fake front on the tenement reality. This is an old folks’ home.

  And Tom lives in the mental ward of it—though usually he is lucid enough. Most days he lies fairly calmly, working to breathe. Then every once in a while he loses it, and has to be watched or he’ll attack people—nurses, anyone. This has been the pattern for the last decade or so, anyway. He’s over a hundred.

  Jim can’t really bear to think about it for too long, so he doesn’t. When he’s out in OC it never occurs to him to think of Uncle Tom and how he lives. But during these infrequent visits it’s shoved in his face.

  Up the wheelchair ramp to the check-in desk. The nurse has a permanent sour expression, a bitchy voice. “Visiting hours end in forty-five minutes.”

  Don’t worry.

  Down the dark hallway, which smells of antiseptic. Wheelchair cases bang into the walls like bumper cars, the old wrecks in them drooling, staring at nothing, drugged out. A young nurse pushes one chair case down the hall, blinking rapidly, just about to cry. Yes, we’re in the nursing home again. (“Did I lose? did I win?”)

  Tom’s got a room just bigger than his bed, with a south-facing window that he treasures. Jim knocks, enters. Tom’s lying there staring out at the sky, in a trance.

  Wrinkled plaid flannel pajamas.

  Three-day stubble of white beard.

  Do you live here?

  Clear plastic tube, from nostrils to tank under bed. Oxygen.

  Bald, freckled pate. Ten thousand wrinkles. A turtle’s head.

  Slowly it turns, and the dull brown eyes regard him, focus, blink rapidly, as the mind behind them pulls back into the room from wherever it was voyaging. Jim swallows, uncomfortable as always. “Hi, Uncle Tom.”

  Tom’s laugh is a sound like plastic crackling. “Don’t call me that. Makes me feel like Simon Legree is about to come in. And whip me.” Again the laugh; he’s waking up. The bitter, sardonic gleam returns to his glance, and he shifts up in the bed. “Maybe that’s appropriate. You call me Uncle Tom, I call you Nigger Jim. Two slaves talking.”

  Jim smiles effortfully. “I guess that’s right.”

  “Is it? So what brings you here? Lucy not coming this week?”

  “Well, ah…”

  “That’s all right. I wouldn’t come here myself if I could help it.” The plastic cracks. “Tell me what you’ve been up to. How are your classes?”

  “Fine. Well—teaching people to write is hard. They don’t read much, so of course they don’t have much idea how to write.”

  “It’s always been like that.”

  “I bet it’s worse now.”

  “No takers there.”

  Tom watches him. Suddenly Jim remembers his archaeological expedition. “Hey! I went and dug up a piece of El Modena Elementary School. Shoot, I forgot to bring it.” He tells Tom the story, and Tom chuckles with his alarming laugh.

  “You probably got some construction material from the donut place. But it was a nice idea. El Modena Elementary School. What a thought. It was old when I went there. They closed it as soon as La Veta was finished. Two long wooden buildings, two stories high with a cellar under each. Big bell in one. The high school got the bell later and the principal, who had been principal of the elementary school years before. Went crazy at the dedication. Had a nervous breakdown right in front of us. Big dirt lot between the two buildings. They were firetraps, we had fire drills almost every day. I played a lot of ball on that lot. Once I singled and stretched it to two, they overthrew and I took third, overthrew again and I went home. They made a play on me there, and I was safe but Mr. Beauchamp called me out. Because he didn’t like me hot-dogging like that. He was a bastard. We used to bail out of swings at the top of the swing. Go flying. I can’t believe we didn’t break limbs regularly, but we didn’t.”

  Tom sighs, looking out the window as if it gives a prospect onto the previous century. He recounts his past with a wandering, feverish bitterness, as if angry that it’s all so far gone. Jim finds it both interesting and depressing at once.

  “There were a couple of girls that hung together, everyone hounde
d them without mercy. Called them Popeye and Mabusa, meaning Medusa I suppose. Although it amazes me that any kid there knew that much. They were retarded, see, and looked bad. Popeye all shriveled, Mabusa big and ugly, Mongoloid. Boys used to hunt for them at recess, to make fun of them.” Tom shakes his head, staring out the window again. “I had a game of my own that I played on the teacher who was recess monitor, a kind of hide-and-seek. Psychological warfare, really. I used the cellars to get from one side of the yard to the other to pop out and surprise her. The monitor would see me here, then there—it drove her nuts. One time I was doing that, and I found Popeye and Mabusa down there in the cellar hiding, huddled together.…” He blinks.

  “Kids are cruel,” Jim says.

  “And they stay that way! They stay that way.” Coppery bitterness burrs Tom’s voice. “The nurses here call us O’s and Q’s. O’s have their mouths hanging open. Q’s have their mouths hanging open with their tongues stuck out. Funny, eh?” He shakes his head. “People are cruel.”

  Jim grits his teeth. “Maybe that’s why you became a public defender, eh?” Seeing two retarded kids, huddled together in a cellar: can that shape a life?

  “Maybe it was.” The little room is taking on a coppery light, the air has a coppery taste. “Maybe it was.”

  “So what was it like, being a public defender?”

  “What do you mean? It was the kind of work that tears your heart out. Poor people get arrested for crimes. Most crimes are committed by really poor people, they’re desperate. It’s just like you’d expect. And they’re entitled to representation even though they can’t afford it. So a judge would appoint one of us. Endless case loads, every kind of thing you can imagine, but a lot of repetition. Good training, right. But … I don’t know. Someone’s got to do that work. This isn’t a just society and that was one way to resist it, do you understand me boy?”

  Jim nods, startled by this intersection with his own recent thoughts. So the old man had tried to resist!

  “But in the end it doesn’t matter. Most of your clients hate you because you’re just part of the system that’s snared them. And a good percentage are guilty as charged. And the case loads…” The plastic cracking, it really seems like something in him must be breaking. “In the end it doesn’t make any difference. Someone else would have done it, yes they would! Just as well. I should have been a tax lawyer, investment counselor. Then I’d have enough money now to be in some villa somewhere. Private nurse and secretary.…”

  Jim shivers. Tom knows just exactly what he’s living in, he’s perfectly aware of it. Who better? It’s despair making all those Q’s and O’s, in this old folks’ mental ward.…

  “But you did some good! I’m sure you did.” Doubtfully: “You saved some people from jail who were grateful for it.…”

  “Maybe.” Crack crack crack. “I remember … I got this one Russian immigrant who could barely speak English. He’d only been in the country a month or two. He was lonely and went into one of the porno theaters in Santa Ana. The police were trying to close those places down at the time. They made a sweep and arrested everyone they could catch. So they got this Russian and he was charged with public indecency. Because they said he was masturbating in there. If you can believe that. When I first saw him he was really scared. I mean he was used to the Soviet system where if you’re arrested then you’re a goner. Guilty as charged. And he didn’t understand the charges and I mean he was scared. So I took it to trial and just massacred the assistant D.A.’s case, which was bullshit to begin with. I mean how can you prove something like that? So the judge dismissed it. And the look on that Russian’s face when they let him out…” Crack! Crack! “Oh, that might have been worth a few days in this hole, I guess. A few days.”

  “So…” Jim is thinking of his own problems, his own choices. “So what would you do today, Tom? I mean, if you wanted to resist the injustices, the people who run it all … what would you do?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing seems to work. I guess I would teach. Except that’s useless too. Write, maybe. Or practice law at a higher level. Affect the laws themselves somehow. That’s where it all rests, boy. This whole edifice of privilege and exploitation. It’s all firmly grounded in the law of the land. That’s what’s got to change.”

  “But how? Would you resist actively? Like … go out at night and sabotage a space weapons factory, or something like that?”

  Tom stares out the window bright-eyed. As often happens, his bitterness has galvanized him, made him seem younger. “Sure. If I could do it without hurting anybody. Or getting hurt myself.” Crack! “A liberal to the end. I guess that’s always been my problem. But yeah, why not? It would take a lot of that kind of thing. But they should be stopped somehow. They’re sucking the world dry to fuel their games.”

  Jim nods, thinking it over.

  They talk about Jim’s parents, a natural enough association, although neither of them mentions Dennis’s occupation. Jim talks a bit about his work and friends, until Tom’s eyes begin to blur. He’s getting tired: slumping down, speech coming with an ugly hiss of breath. Jim sees again that the mind, that sharp-edged bitter quick mind, is trapped in an old wreck of a body that is just barely kept going by constant infusion of oxygen, of drugs. A body that poisons its mind occasionally, blunts all its edges … One gnarled hand creeps over the bedsheet after the other, like a pair of crabs; spotted, fleshless, the joints so swollen that the fingers will never straighten again.… That has to hurt! It all does. He must live with pain every day, just as a part of living.

  Jim can’t really imagine that, and the thought doesn’t stay with him long. Too hard. It’s getting time to go, it really is.

  “Tell me one last Orange County story, Tom. Then I’ve got to go.”

  Tom stares through him, without recognition: Jim shivers.

  The focus returns, Tom stares out the window at the sky. “Before they built Dana Point harbor, there was a beautiful beach down there under the bluff. Not many people went there. The only way down was a rickety old wood staircase built against the bluff. Every year steps came out and it got chancier to go down it. But we did. The thing was to go after a big storm had hit the coast. The beach was all fresh, sand torn out and flushed and thrown back in. And in the sand were tiny bits of colored stones. Gem sand, we called it. It was really an extraordinary thing. I don’t know if they really were tiny bits of sapphires, rubies, emeralds—but they looked like it, and that’s what we called them. Not driftglass, no, real stones. Walking along the beach real slow, you’d see a blink of colored light, green, red, blue—perfectly intense and clear against the wet sand. You could collect a little handful in a day, and if you kept them in a jar of water … I had one at home. Wonder what happened to that. What happens to all the things you own? The people you know? I’m sure I never would have thrown that out.…”

  And Tom falls off into reverie, then into an uneasy sleep, tossing so that the oxygen tube presses against his neck. Jim, who has heard about the gem sand before, arranges the tube and the sheets as best he can, and leaves. He feels sad. There was a place here, once. And a person, with a whole life. Now hanging on past all sense. This awful condomundo—a jail for the old, a kind of concentration camp! It really is depressing. He’s got to come by more often. Tom needs the company. And he’s a historical resource, he really is.

  But tracking up 5, Jim begins to forget about this. The truth is, the overall experience is just too unpleasant for him. He can’t stand it. And so he forgets his visits there, and avoids the place.

  On to dinner at the folks’. Then his class! It really is turning out to be a hell of a long day.

  13

  After Jim leaves, Old Tom continues the conversation in his head.

  I played in the orange groves as a child, he tells Jim. When you lived on a street plunging into a grove that extended away in every direction, then you could go out any time you liked. Mid-afternoon when everything was hot and lazy was a good time. It was always sun
ny.

  They cleared the ground around the trees, nothing but dirt. Around each tree was a circular irrigation moat maybe thirty feet across, which made the groves look strange. As did the symmetrical planting. Every tree was in a perfect rank, a perfect file, and two perfect diagonals, for as far as you could see. The trees were symmetrical too, something like the shape of an olive, made of small green leaves on small twisted branches.

  There were almost always oranges on the trees, they blossomed and grew twice a year and the growing took up most of the time. Oranges first green and small, then through an odd transition of mixed green and yellow, to orange, darkening always as they ripened—until if not picked they would darken to a browny orange and then go brown and dry and small and hard, and then whitish brown and then earth again. But most of them were picked.

  We used to throw them at each other. Like snowballs already formed and ready to go. Old ones were squishy and smelled bad, whole new ones were hard and hurt a little. We fought wars, boys throwing oranges back and forth and it was kind of like German dodgeball at school. Getting hit was no big deal, except perhaps when you had to explain it to your mother. During the fights itself it was kind of funny. I wonder if any of those young friends ended up in Vietnam? If so, they were poorly trained for it.

  We took bows and arrows out into the groves to shoot the jackrabbits we often saw bounding away from us. They could really run. We never even came close to them, happily, so we shot at oranges on trees instead. Perfect targets, quite difficult to hit and a wonderful triumph if you did, the oranges burst open and flew off or hung there punctured, it was great.