by Chip Jacobs
He rushed off for it, passing the first set of bolted, red vinyl chairs and the blackboard-size menu above the soda-syrup pumps. Halfway to the open seat, realizing who was next to it, his amperage rose. A woman he had a crush on was sitting alone, nose deep into a chunky book. Man does not live by the Di Crapper alone.
Naturally, his right foot tried making a chump of him. Mid-step, it caught the bendy strap of a purse that a customer didn’t know was on the floor. Nick, perennial klutz, stumbled over it, fated, it seemed, to smash his face into the ground racing up to meet it. But deliverance spared him, the deliverance of a lightning-fast hand grabbing him by the belt from behind. There’d be no public humiliation, no Bronx clap.
Hoisted up by the Good Samaritan, Nick spun around expecting to eyeball Orel Hershiser, star of the ’88 World Series. It wasn’t Orel. It was a tan, middle-aged Chinese-American in his signature rawhide vest and cowboy hat. Nick recognized him from a recent story in an alternative weekly. Lei “Giddy Up” Wong, it said, was “Pasadena’s Marlboro Man,” though he didn’t smoke and only rode his palomino to the lucrative Kinko’s franchise he owned on Lake Avenue bi-annually.
“Whoa, pardner. You okay?” Wong said, playing to idiom.
“Yeah. Think so,” Nick said. “Thanks to you.”
“Shucks. Was nothing,” said Wong, who smelled of Wrigley’s Spearmint, which Nick himself adored, going back to the days when his buddies tore through Bazooka. “Never much liked seeing falling objects.”
Nick soon folded into the vinyl seat next to the woman he thought of as “the Vroman’s girl,” having spotted her numerous times recommending non-fiction titles to customers in Vroman’s, Pasadena’s oldest and most esteemed bookstore. Hattie was cute. The Vroman’s girl was mesmeric. Everything about her—her intelligent hazel eyes; candy-dish cheekbones; pointy chin; shoulder-length, dirty-blonde hair—made Nick oscillate.
He stole glances at her in the pie mirror, but the curt smile she flashed at him sitting down broadcast she had all she needed: her tuna plate and Adolphus Busch biography.
“Hey, Nick,” said the waitress, an effervescent, brunette burger-slinger, to whom old-men regulars told off-color jokes in hopeless flirtations. “We’ve missed you. Your buddy Fleet came in last week; said you’ve been going through some stuff.”
“Not anymore,” Nick said with a dismissive chuckle. “I’ll have my usual. Fries extra crispy.”
He was halfway through eating when he caught the Vroman’s girl giving him a side-eyed checkout, which nearly made him drop a fry. Then no. Two minutes later, she was fishing cash out of her wallet to pay her tab. Nick’s mind scrounged for an icebreaker—a PETA joke, something about the high prices—when he looked again in the pie-cabinet mirror and found his second deliverance. “Excuse me, miss,” he said. “I think you’ve got ketchup in your hair, the right side.”
“Really?” The Vroman’s girl felt around until her fingers brushed the slushy condiment. “Oh, geez. Thank you. It would’ve been embarrassing to walk around with that.” She uncrumpled her napkin and blotted it.
Steady, boy. “You work at Vroman’s, don’t you?”
“Part time. Hey, weren’t you in last week?”
“That’s me. Blowing my paycheck, one inventor at a time. So, you an alcohol enthusiast?” Nick said, nodding at her book.
“Only weekend chardonnay. But I’m sort of fixated on Busch Gardens. On hectic days, I dream of transporting myself there. You ever heard about it?”
“I grew up here, so yeah. I’m a recovering homer.”
“Besides all the trails, and ponds, and animals, I guess there were fairy-tale huts and figurines from the Brothers Grimm. So quixotic.”
“That rings a bell from school. Closest I ever came to the Busches was gulping too many free samples with the aforementioned Fleet at their Van Nuys brewery.” Smart, she thinks you’re a lush.
“Well, who doesn’t enjoy complimentary Budweiser? Anyway, I find Adolphus engrossing. Complicated person.”
“Didn’t he rock a goatee?”
They introduced themselves, and their chemistry drummed off that pie rack.
“Everybody told me this place was a must,” Julie Cumbersmith said. “I’m already berating myself for not ordering the burger. Rookie mistake. I’m still learning the Pasadena ropes.”
Nick pounced on that like Royo once did on an unwatched Bundt cake. “If you’re interested, I’ll be your humble guide to show you around. A goopy burger does not a town make.”
“Hmmm,” she said, putting her finger to her chin, adorably so. “I’m not accustomed to getting hit on over Formica.”
“Better than a noisy bar, especially one playing disco.”
“For the sake of my education, I’ll agree. You’re not married, right?”
“Only to my dog. But it’s not weird.”
—
For their first date, Nick took her to landlocked Pasadena’s marine institution. Cameron’s Seafood—faded, fish-shaped sign, sawdust floors, barn-ish building—would’ve blended in organically along San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Instead, it was struck on Colorado Boulevard’s tragically passé eastern sector. Senior citizens fond of its affordable wines and denture-friendly white fish kept its cash registers sentient.
Second impressions were forged over steaming sourdough. This was oppositional attraction. Julie was a together, former magazine editor from Chicago who relocated west to consider a local master’s program in Progressive Age history. A Northwestern graduate, she was spunky and upbeat, the anti-Hattie. Long term, she aspired to be an author specializing in forgotten personalities.
“You came to the right place,” Nick said. “We have a boatload of them here. From what I foggily remember.”
“And current Hollywood people,” Julie said. “Kevin Costner sometimes comes into the store. Sally Field, too. Voracious readers.”
She continued the dime tour of herself. Wuthering Heights and The Jungle were favorite novels; as a teenager, an Eleanor Roosevelt poster hung above her bed. She liked oversize sweaters, candle-lit baths, and, counter-intuitively, Clint Eastwood westerns. Someday, she wanted a yard full of beagles.
Screw it. Nick told her the unvarnished truth about himself. He was a classic underachiever: high IQ, lackluster GPA. Every Sunday, knowing he should be doing better, gloom set in about his Wham-O Mondays. Once a month, he rendezvoused with Fleet, as they pledged they would at eighteen, to split a Shakey’s pepperoni pizza, party, and gab. His passion: solar power; his guilty pleasure: B-grade sci-fi flicks.
Julie ate her butter-drowned shrimp scampi, staying quiet as Nick segued into why his young marriage to Hattie grew old. “Lying is no way to start off with someone else,” he said, nipping his food. “About a year ago, I lost all my steam. My soon-to-be-ex told me I needed therapy for depression—and electric shock for smart-ass syndrome.”
“That’s rough, Nick,” Julie said with a quick stroke of the hand (and a smidge of butter on her chin). “I say leave her in your past. Where she belongs.”
Nick, after dinner, suggested a landmark visit. She anticipated a cruise past the iconic Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens, which many Pasadenans claimed as their civic treasures despite being in San Marino, or a drive by city hall’s capitol dome. Ehhhh. He whisked her to outer space: a steel-bar rocket ship at Victory Park in east Pasadena, where he hung out as a boy.
“Okay, Ms. Writer-To-Be,” he said after they climbed to the top of the capsule. “You ever play word association?”
“Who doesn’t? Fire away.”
“Hillary Clinton?” he asked.
“Better off divorced,” she answered.
“Snappy. Jack Parsons?”
“Oh, I just read up on Devil’s Gate. Wasn’t he a Satan worshiper and rocketeer? He must’ve driven his high school guidance counselor nuts.
”
Nick laughed, and when he heard her infectious chuckle, it made butterflies dipsy-do over the swordfish kabob and au gratin potatoes in his belly.
“My turn to ask one,” she said. “Jurassic Park?”
Nick paused to be witty. “Um, fat guys always get eaten first.”
On their second date, Nick acquainted her with another slice of OG Pasadena. The corporations could build their featureless multiplexes, drizzle their imitation butter. Nick preferred the dilapidated majesty of the Pacific Theater on upper Rosemead Boulevard, where he once was a pubescent ticket-ripper in a rank company blazer.
They saw “Groundhog Day” holding hands sticky from Starbursts. Nick thought Bill Murray was hilarious but was unable to identify, as a lapsed Presbyterian, with the premise that souls must pass tests before advancing. Their twenty-second goodnight kiss outside Julie’s Marengo Avenue apartment was more tangible, proof positive his dimmer could be rebooted.
On the drive home in his burnt-orange Toyota, Nick popped in Zep’s Houses of the Holy CD. Now that they were opening up, he told Julie the group’s songs spoke to him the way the burning bush must’ve spoken to Moses; that its mysticism-dappled lyrics and thunderous guitar “was what it would’ve sounded like if J. R. R. Tolkien ever flew a stereofled F-16.” She said their hard rock tunes were okay, though Squeeze and Elvis Costello were more her cup of tea.
Exiting the freeway now, Nick floated to the resonant outro of “Over the Hills and Far Away.” Then it bled into the unsyncopated funkiness of the next song, and he hastily changed the track to “The Ocean” for sanity’s sake. Robert Plant’s spoken coda at the end of “The Crunge” used to be the party-cranking slogan for he and his fellow prep-school hooligans. But something scarring happened to Nick one night down at “that confounded bridge,” and from then on he refused to drive or discuss it.
Pasadena’s historic Colorado Street Bridge—or, as it was popularly and pitilessly known, “Suicide Bridge”—was currently barricaded while a twenty-seven-million-dollar seismic upgrade and face-lift wrapped up. When he spaced out inside Banana Republic noticing the banner advertising the bridge’s December rechristening, it only reaffirmed the structure’s dark grip on him. He abhorred any association between his favorite band and most dreaded spot on Earth. Best to keep that lodged away. In Julie Cumbersmith he had a reason to smile, and a hope that his pain bore, as the man once crooned, some “silver linings.”
Don’t Fear the Hojack
Mark Stonebreaker, Nick’s boss, was a Dilbert-esque character if there ever were one: a meek, inept middle manager who’d stumbled up the promotion ladder that no MBA yearned to climb. Built like an upright buffalo, he acted more like a swarthy, sugar-craving Cowardly Lion. Nobody at Wham-O’s backwater annex respected him.
Today, Nick sat in the chair facing his desk, watching him hoover up the last of his Winchell’s apple fritter. You’d need an oracle to predict what Mark was going to say, because he smiled just as awkwardly disciplining someone for insulting a distribution rep as he did when informing them of a dental-plan change.
Nick, whom he’d asked to see this morning, expected to hear retailer feedback about his latest prototype, and it wasn’t the Di-Crapper.
“I’ll be candid,” Mark said, struggling to complete the sentence as he sucked glaze from his fingertips. “And that’s not easy for me. I dislike confrontation.”
And vegetables. “Confrontation? What are you talking about?”
“Nobody is looking for the next Frisbee or gag gift anymore. The next time somebody swaps their Game Boy for one of those will be the day, um—the day the Earth’s axis reverses polarity.”
Mark leaned forward in a desk chair whose hinges squealed for WD-40. He started at Wham-O seven years ago as a product engineer hawking an inflatable isolation tank. Promising as it sounded, it either leaked or trapped stressed-out customers in their homes. The gremlin: “faulty” zippers. What did management do? They promoted him.
Before the Nintendo Corporation cherry-picked him, Nick’s closest workmate, Otis Norwood, once described Mark as “the Peter Principle incarnate in the worst of J. C. Penney’s spring lineup.” Nick missed Otis, a man as talented as he was incisive.
“That’s not exactly news,” Nick said, cringing about where this was leading. “Everybody knows kids don’t play outside like they once did. In fact, if we were smart, we’d partner with a vitamin D company to pitch a Bart Simpson chewable.”
“I should that write that down,” Mark said.
“But funny never goes out of style in the adult demo. Now spill. What did QVC say? It pre-ordering ten-thousand units?”
Mark smiled toothily. “The executives there thought your idea was witty and would do well. Let me check my notes,” he said, flipping pages on a food-stained yellow pad. “Here it is, do well in flyover states hospitable to trailer parks and bowling alleys, places where folks are more plainspoken.”
Oh, no. Here it comes.
“But they were anxious your product could backfire on the coasts, where consumers are more quickly offended, and in evangelical districts. Holy Rollers aren’t known to be the jokesters that rednecks are.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying headquarters has decided against going into production.”
“So the HoJack is dead?” Nick asked, mouth a rictus. “We’re not even focus-grouping it?”
“No. The bosses are concerned if word got out, we could have the National Organization for Women picketing us.”
Nick wasn’t proud he invented The HoJack, a mash-up of the popular LoJack car alarm and the antediluvian chastity belt. He simply thought it was his Wham-O winner. He envisioned people fighting over it, not against it, at Secret Santa parties or bachelorette nights out. To boost its crass pizzazz, he created a fake “transmitter” that simulated a locking noise. The settings ranged from “Hands Off” to “Horizontal Hootenanny.”
“Then they’re being myopic. I’ve been reading up on this World Wide Web thing coming. We’ll have access to all types of fresh audiences.”
Mark’s three chins jiggled agreement. “I’ll mention that webbing at the next meeting. But you won’t be attending because I’ve been ordered to fire you.”
“Fire me?” Nick said, bolting up out of his chair. “What the fuck, Mark? I know my last performance review concluded I wasn’t living up to my potential, but, to quote a friend, ‘I’ve been going through some stuff.’”
“Then let me quote what my supervisor said. ‘We’re bleeding money. Wham-O needs slam-dunks, not a national shaming on Maury Povich.’”
—
Reverse polarity? He needed a reverse in fortunes as a guy with three thousand dollars in savings, legal bills, a mortgage, never mind a ravenous dog prone to staring at him. At least his mother didn’t charge for her unsolicited psychological evaluation.
“You’ve always been an enigma, darling: fast learner, late bloomer,” she said after he broke the news over the phone. She was speaking from a small house in Indianapolis, where she relocated four years ago from Pasadena. She still missed its mountains and culture, just not its pricey, gentrifying-fueled cost of living. “Can I give you some guidance?”
“Please, no,” he said, puckering at the idea he might have to move into her guest room should his options dry up. “I’m reminding myself it’s not as hard as it seems.”
“Is that from a sermon? It wouldn’t kill you to go to church, incidentally.”
“No, it’s from the gospel of Robert and Jimmy. It’s okay. I have some things cooking. I’m viewing this as a blessing in disguise.”
“Listen to you,” she said. “Thinking like an optimist.”
A week after his firing, Nick decided to walk in a circle: a therapeutic circle around the Rose Bowl. Without Wham-O’s three-month severance, he’d be in deep yogurt, and not the trendy kin
d they sold at Colorado Boulevard’s 21 Choices. So, he leashed Royo and snagged his Walkman. Pulling into a lot near Brookside Golf Club, however, he realized he forgot to load a CD. His distracted head strikes again. He’d have to listen to AM talk-radio; FM reception was spotty in the canyon.
A screechy host was doing a segment about how Pasadena was “finally getting its comeuppance.” Topical subject. If Nick figured he was having a year to forget, a city whose glossy history was its own self-perpetuating PR agent couldn’t wait for the calendar to flip. In October, a brush fire tore through the eastern foothills, devouring homes like a five-hundred-degree Pac-Man. Days later, three teenagers leaving a Halloween party in the city’s violent northwest, a once-proud African American stronghold across the Arroyo from billion-dollar JPL, were gunned down in cold blood. They’d done nothing wrong.
Nineteen ninety-three, the liberal host clucked, was “Pasadena’s year of blood and color.” The WASPy Tournament of Roses Association, headquartered in the colonial-white Wrigley Mansion, was in the crosshairs of activists demanding minority inclusion. They threatened to block the unimaginable: the parade that was the town’s stock-and-trade and never-ending cash cow. At city hall, the usual patrician civility was on sabbatical, too. Mercurial Councilman Isaac Richard, who saw bias and Uncle Tom sellouts everywhere, battled misconduct charges; colleagues were aghast at what his outbursts were doing to Pasadena’s good name.
