by Chip Jacobs
“Ridiculously, yes. Would you permit me to come sit next to you so I may be discreet?”
“Sure, why not?”
Nick nudged his parts bucket over with his ankles while the stranger settled in.
Holy Mackerel. It’s him. Him: as in America’s premier muckraker; him, as in the blue-eyed, thin-lipped literary star so distinguished he could go by his first name. And now he needed a sandwich recommendation.
Upton Sinclair introduced himself. “To finish my comment,” he said, “a quack New York physician convinced me that dill-pickle juice was a detoxifying agent. The only thing it removed was my appetite.”
“Your timing’s impeccable, Mr. Sinclair. I’m disembarking in two stops for a late lunch at Buford’s Meat Shack.”
“Sounds morbidly unhealthy, and delicious. Tell me about this Buford’s.”
Nick couldn’t help but wonder what those tycoons and scions from Lilly’s cow-disrupted hoedown would opine about his seatmate? In Sinclair’s blockbuster novel The Jungle, he exposed, within a morality play, the queasy realities of America’s industrialization of food. Its publication hastened health and safety laws that saved people’s lives and tested several presidents. His typewriter keys, in that bestseller and others, soon vaulted him into an everyman crusader.
Not that he was currently dressed like a public champion. Under his black coat he wore a white, V-neck vest and matching tennis pants stained at the knees. His smile was also inconsistent with his reputation for unflinching seriousness.
“If you’re hankering for a belly buster, search no further,” Nick said. “You’re welcome to accompany me.”
“Call me Upton and you’re on.” He tipped the beanie he depended on to stay incognito.
In the twenty minutes until they sat down with their plates, Upton, unsolicited, explained to Nick why he yearned for such a decadent meal. In sum, the socialist idealist had meandered too far down the rabbit hole of experimental dieting.
In response to deteriorating health—bad teeth, bronchitis, dyspepsia, insomnia, you name it—he penned a book about the virtues of caloric restraint. It wasn’t the hot-selling novel his publisher desired, but that was its problem. He had a cautionary tale for his audience: the chocolate cake, buttery potatoes, and bread of his privileged youth led to dangerous eating habits as an adult. Worse, he believed, America’s increasingly artificial food system—formaldehyde-preserved beef, anyone—was the fast track to an early grave.
It was sheer irony hearing about his gastronomic near-suicide being as they were within arm’s reach of two unapologetically fatty sandwhiches. But it was a story Upton was determined to tell. He claimed he tried everything to regain his health. He traveled to the wellness lands of Battle Creek, Michigan, to wean himself from modern food laced with sinister bacteria; he visited digestive resorts in the Adirondacks and Bermuda.
“Nothing was succeeding,” Upton said. “I exercised vigorously and drank water by the bucket. I consumed only milk and raw foods. It was slow death.”
“Something obviously worked,” said Nick, half his Buford’s Special already gone.
“Yes, it did. Moderation. Now, I hew nine days out of ten to an ascetic diet of puny meals. Broth, fruit.”
“And the tenth?”
“I treat myself, and mitigate the internal havoc afterward with water and pomegranates.”
“Smell the roses, so to speak?” Nick said, lamenting how schmaltzy that sounded in this town.
“Advocating for change against the powerful should warrant the occasional indulgence, no? Critics accusing me of spreading fads know little of which they speak.”
Nick could’ve pinched himself, well aware of how his new acquaintance sparred with American giants named Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Schwab, and Carnegie. Copies of The Jungle and The Moneychangers rested high on his own bookshelf, where Royo couldn’t mangle them. But, as Upton’s readership knew, personal turmoil had mangled him. Health issues, divorce, rumors of “free love” at the East Coast utopian compound he founded before it mysteriously burned down. Life slapped him around not in spite of his fame, but because of it.
Upton, a methodical eater savoring each bite of Buford’s magic, said he was in Pasadena to further recuperate while marinating ideas for his next book. “Swinging my racket under your eternal sun, though, is spoiling me. And I’m monopolizing the conversation, too. Tell me about you.”
Nick recapped his background and eventful last year, skipping the Cawston’s gift-shop fight and rail-barn explosion just up Fair Oaks Avenue. Trying to impress the writer, he mentioned how the Edison Company was, if not spying, monitoring his wireless, solar lamps.
“You got them steamed up,” Upton said, blotting grease from his slender fingers. “Don’t stop.”
“You did once say you could judge a man’s contributions from his enemies.”
“That I did.”
“What are you chasing in the long run?” he asked, digging into his vinegary coleslaw.
“Another sandwich?”
For the first time, Upton laughed unrestrained, which gave Nick an unappetizing view of the future Pulitzer Prize winner’s (and future California gubernatorial candidate) set of crooked teeth. “Then you’ll never see forty,” he said. “Which might not be such an awful thing.”
Nick napkined his face and tried curbing his tendency for glibness. “What I want is to marshal the fire in my belly, to learn if the ancients were prophetic: that the sun we take for granted could be the antidote to propel modern civilization. This job in the Arroyo is my chance to, I guess, outlive my obituary.”
Upton, thirty-five, rocked his head. He glugged water next from a canteen he kept in the cracked-leather satchel with his tennis racket and notepad. After he was done eating, he removed his cap and turned his face to the winter sky. In doing so, Nick noticed another dichotomy about him. Though tanned and alert, he presented the silhouette of a malnourished tripper, a kind of intellectual hobo.
Try as he might to remain unrecognized, it wasn’t working. Every literate restaurateur knew the author of The Jungle; he was one of the country’s most photographed men. Buford, the quiet Cajun, realized it was him in a heartbeat, and tried acting unruffled when he and Nick ordered their specials. Inside, however, he was a wreck, praying his celebrity customer didn’t get a gander at his kitchen—the flies, the smudged aprons, the char on the grill. If he wrote about it, ever, Constance Prunell would have his stand bulldozed in a week.
In the patio area, fellow eaters slyly pointed at him. Buford himself waddled out after ten minutes, sitting down with a frequent customer to chinwag. This was just pretext, for his obvious intent was spying on guess-who. Nick giggled when he saw the pudgy-bellied chef sneaking glances at whether Upton was jotting notes.
“Mmmm,” Upton said. “That was wickedly good.” With his blood sugar revved up, he gabbed even more rat-tat-tat. He talked about his European journeys and his “incredible son.” He spoke of his irritation with the blinkered New York publishing industry and, then, his habitual incapacity to relax. “When you’re interested in everything, it’s challenging to enjoy anything. It’s my curse—that, women, and diet. So what happens? I travel to Southern California and discover myself in the proximity of elitists. Isn’t one of your boulevards nicknamed ‘Millionaire’s Row’?”
“Yes. Just to the west,” Nick said, visualizing the apricot liqueur/ ladyfingers set that dominated there. “On the other hand, money does not a snob make. I’ve spent time around Lillian Busch, and she’s inordinately generous. If you stroll through Busch Gardens, you’ll appreciate the joy it brings the many, too.”
“I have visited the gardens and found them therapeutic. But I am not an authority on her husband. From my cursory knowledge, Mr. Busch seems to be one of the more decent moguls. I have heard he’s a political tiger, and tigers do maul their adversaries when provoked. I’d wage
r he wouldn’t mind digesting some prohibitionists right now.”
They chuckled at that imagery before Nick circled back to his point. “True as that may be, the Busches have welcomed deprived children onto their grounds. They support earthquake relief and orphanages. Be careful about lumping them in with your usual saber-toothed scoundrels.”
Nick last’s line contained a whiff of dudgeon. Upton recoiled, fretting he’d gone too far. “Apologies, Nick. When it comes to industrialists, I’m an incurable skeptic. Can I blame the saturated liver of a carpet-bagging visitor?”
“Yes, you may.”
“Phew. At the risk of further offending someone who’s been so solicitous, would you think me arrogant for saying that no matter how attached one becomes to a place, an institution, a cause, whatever, one must always be willing to peek behind its veils?”
Nick listened without comment, for this wasn’t moralizing by sardonic Fleet. It was musing on class politics by a man deemed brilliant on that front.
“One last observation, if you can tolerate it,” Upton said.
“I can.”
“Pasadena contains a split personality. It’s gorgeous and seemingly well administered; suffused with an aspirational ethos. I’ve even grown fond of those obstreperous parrots. However, the mansions along the canyon close to your bridge trouble me. They honestly do. They remind me of feudal castles upwind of serfs.”
Did Buford sprinkle drugstore cocaine in his sandwich? Nick sat up ramrod on his bench. His heart was pounding. “Respectfully, Upton, Pasadena is anything but medieval. None of those big spenders cast much influence over us. Our roots are deeper. Have you ridden to Mount Lowe? Taken in a scientific lecture?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Here’s another for your list: next time you finish playing tennis at Annandale Country Club, strut out onto the bluff. At sunset, when purple light gleams off our mountain, you’ll understand what we cherish.”
Upton’s expression was sincere, if a little sheepish. “You have my word, though I am uncertain about my next match. I so overdid it with my backhand that I visited tennis elbow on myself. A local physician, J. H. Wood, has me applying hot eucalyptus compresses. They stink so hideously I smell them in my sleep.”
“If you drank pickle juice, you can tolerate that.”
When they rose to leave, Nick waved at Buford, who allowed himself a relieved smile. Upton, apparently, wasn’t going to expose his hygenically-iffy kitchen.
Out on Fair Oaks, bucket in hand, Nick said he needed to hustle back to base camp. Before he did, Upton had a final request. “Would you mind writing down your address? There’s an invitation-only party I’d be enthralled if you could attend. It’s not until summer, and I hope to still be here.”
Nick, fresh from the lunch of a lifetime, couldn’t believe he was gripping Upton Sinclair’s Mount Blanc pen.
White City in the Sky
He unbuttoned his coat outside the rear flap of the mess tent, exhaling a puff of steam in weather that made absolutely no sense. The first months of 1913 were extreme—subzero nights, drenching rain, coastal fog. Now it was snowing outside, and it was almost Easter. How shivery was it? Buying pliers in town yesterday, Nick overheard an old-timer moaning that the springtime goose bumps were a flashback to his Indiana youth of “cold coffee and frozen pickles.”
The inclement conditions would’ve been politically treacherous for the Mercereau Company, whose project was already behind schedule and under pressure to open, had it not crafted a plan to accelerate production by adding manpower with a third shift. The mandatory workers’ meeting, which Nick ducked into late, was covering this topic and more. Judging from the sound wave of applause he heard, the message
was resonating.
“To repeat, you’re ours for the next three months; that means three more months of paydays,” Marcus said through a bullhorn atop a table at the front. “As our gal is taking a mite longer to complete than expected, you should all be here past the Fourth of July. We hope that provides some bankable assurances for you and your missises.”
Another peal of applause swept the tent, a few beanies tossed into the air, as well. Seventy men crammed into a space designed for half that made it feel clubby. The scent inside—soggy wool, mass perspiration, and a hint of pork and beans from lunch—was less chummy.
“All effort, no backsliding, fellas,” Marcus said in his gruff bellow. “Don’t forget to help out the new men, either. We’re reaching that finish line together.”
“You keep employing like this, we’d help the devil and his Okie cousins,” a blue collar shouted from the rear.
Marcus gave him a winking nod, trying to encourage camaraderie, knowing the assignment ahead would require maximum effort. “You better start scouring for a pair of horns, then,” he added, “because all of you are getting the rest of the day off, with half pay.”
“Stone breaker! Stone breaker!” workers chanted.
“Settle down. Shhhh. Settle down. We’re not sending anybody out in a blizzard, not even the ugliest of you cusses. They’re predicting the storm should be gone by tonight, so be ready to move double-time tomorrow. Any questions?”
People turned to one another to confer within their cliques, weighing the cost of publicly asking anything against this news of additional paychecks. A rebar-furnace operator tentatively stuck his hand up, and then retracted it.
Not Chester: there was no ambivalence in his flagged-up arm. When Marcus called on him, a tremor rippled through the audience. “Mr. Stonebreaker, I have an honest inquiry. Any truth to the gossip that we’ve been waylaid, partly anyways, because the next arches need to be reinforced in case they decide to run trains over the bridge? Henry Huntington’s people kicked in money for the job. Only natural they want to further their interests.”
The reaction was mixed—some gasps, a little jeering. Mainly there was pin-drop silence as everyone waited to learn if Chester’s provocation was an active bomb or a juicy dud. The rumor about any train was certainly news to Nick. There was camp-wide chatter that a water line might someday be attached under the deck to hydrate the hills of Linda Vista and San Rafael just outside Pasadena’s western limits. The other tidbit, which Nick heard about secondhand through a company engineer, was even more ludicrous: that the “peace-and-quiet loving millionaires” on the Arroyo’s eastern bluff arm twisted the Board of Trade to champion a bridge lower than needed to maintain their unobstructed mountain views. If accurate, that would’ve leaked out. Been denounced. Caused a ruckus.
“No truth to it at all about Mr. Huntington,” Marcus said, sans-bullhorn to conspiracy-monger Chester. “Zilch. This road will be for automobiles only. That’s what voters paid for, and that’s what we’re delivering. Any other bogus scandals anyone wants to broach?” No hands spiraled up. “Now, before any of you leave for home to loaf off, talk to your foremen to see what you can do about battening down the hatches as we’ve done during other tricky weather. That’s it.”
People flooded out the two exits in cheerful moods. When Nick saw he was behind Chester, he swerved away.
Outside, the snow twirled in papery flutters. Flakes blanketed company tents and equipment in the gorge and dusted church spires and merchants’ awnings in town. In the whiteout, the bridge resembled a slate-gray blimp levitating above the canyon. It was spooky not hearing construction racket banging from it.
Nick yawned, having been up since five. Funny, he told Royo, whom he confined in the bungalow today rather than walk him through the storm to Ivy Wall. Dreamers like him rarely get much sleep. Post-meeting, he started packing his tools away into a gunnysack near the requisition tent. Though recent frosts cracked two lamp globes, the overall results were reassuring. His lights still gobbled and stored enough sunlight in these extraordinarily cloudy months to beam through the long nights. He had three more to install before the next dozen were in place, after wh
ich Marcus would either shit-can him or authorize more.
And, speaking of: “Must be colder than a witch’s tit for you California sissies,” Marcus said with a snort. As an Iowa native, these conditions were nothing. As a journeyman construction boss, neither was the choking workload. He slept most nights on a cot in his tent, apart from his four children and asthmatic wife, warmed by a little fire.
Nick steeled himself for abuse or a bridge trivia challenge. “Yes, it is,” he said. “Not that I’ve ever seen a witch naked.” He was champing to get home to frolic in the white stuff with Royo and Fleet. Snow typically requiring a trek into the Sierra Madres to play in was now piling at street level. Kids freed from their classroom prisons were heaving snowballs in enjoyment. On Colorado Street, a resourceful hotdog vendor switched to selling hot chocolate heated by Sterno cans.
“I have a present for you,” Marcus said.
Nick kept a poker face. “Another VIP tour?”
“Better. In appreciation for your efforts, so far, I’m sending you away.”
Away? Like to Anaheim (home to more immigrant Germans than a Busch family reunion party)? “Where’s that, sir?”
Marcus placed into Nick’s shivering hands two tickets to another of Pasadena’s famous enchantments. “Thank you,” he said. “Weather permitting, I’ll be up there Sunday.”
“Enjoy. The company bartered for these. Your hard work merited them.”
“And here I thought you were going to quiz me on weight tolerances.”
“You can’t help yourself, can you?” Marcus said. “One aside: I’ve noticed you at the chow table getting an earful from bridge rats I refer to as the Nellies, as in Nervous Nellies. Obviously, you can fraternize with whomever you wish, including Chester. Just take it from a grizzled pro. There are always gossipmongers on large-scale enterprises. Doesn’t mean they don’t excel at their trade, only that they’re prone to extracting isolated facts and weaving them into fantasy. Understand my thrust?”
