by Marin Sardy
In my mind I scroll through the secret history of my grandfather: his parties, his affairs, my grandmother’s humiliation—which almost ended their marriage. I have heard stories, half told, guardedly, or received thirdhand via cousins: my youngest aunt, college-aged, finding him skinny-dipping with her friends. Or how, in the late eighties, my grandmother nearly left him after he was sued for child support by another woman—for his eighth child, a daughter. From their personal accounts he would pay many thousands each year to support the girl. So I have a half aunt who is roughly the same age as I am—English, of all things, from London, where my grandfather had an office for a while and a mistress about the age of his youngest girls. I think sometimes of this ghost aunt, would like to meet her, to know what she knew or remembered of him. But I won’t try to find her. To do so I would have to ask questions that others would not want to answer.
I still sometimes tell the story of meeting Qaddafi. Still say to myself, I’ve been ogled by Qaddafi. Maybe I want to track the feelings—the quiet that falls over me, the stillness settling in. And the surges of anger that come sometimes too, toward my grandfather, even toward Will for his glib reaction to the revelation. I want to track the memories of my grandfather’s way with women. His benign dismissals. His flirtations with secretaries. A cousin once glancing sidelong at me and saying, “He even flirts with his granddaughters.” The moments, back before the stroke, when he used to catch my eye across the room and wink as if there was a secret between us. The mischief, the attention—being singled out, noticed. That was why all his daughters could say they felt close to him. And I want to track all of this because it seems to mean something that is maybe the key to this composition. It is in the way powerful men can warp reality, bending it around them so that others see only what they themselves see. It almost seems like a passive process: Reality simply bends for them, and they accept this about it and so does everyone else.
* * *
—
Events would come to be marked, in family shorthand, as occurring before or after my grandfather lost all his money. As if the line of demarcation was clear, its implications known. How it happened was unremarkable, really—as much an ordinary feature of capitalism as his dramatic success had been. ARCO had gone public, had grown unwieldy, wasn’t light and flexible, as my grandfather liked things to be. Markets shifted. Prices fluctuated. There were more mergers. The company diversified, lumbered along, lost stock value. He turned sixty-five, retired as CEO. At sixty-eight, he stepped down from the board. He wanted to return to what had made his blood quicken, so he started a new company with his sons, a smaller one, and got back into wildcatting. And that’s it—that’s the story. He did what he had always done, leveraging his assets heavily to pay for these endeavors. But the gamble didn’t pay off, at least not before the stroke suddenly ended his career. There was no second Prudhoe Bay, or anything that came close, only a natural gas field in Colombia that was just big enough to cover his debts if he sold off everything else, including his stake in ARCO. The fortune was gone. He had lost it the same way he made it: looking for oil.
It seems that the pair of skyscrapers at Fifth and Flower did, for a while, fulfill my grandfather’s hopes for them. But the future he envisioned did not last long. Urban decay and their own monolithic design conspired against it. ARCO sold the buildings to a real estate firm in 1986 and, in 1999, as a cost-cutting measure, moved out of the eleven floors it had occupied. By 2003, the place was nearly half empty, and its underground mall, which had many shuttered storefronts, was notably gloomy. In 2006, the complex ceased to be known under the name ARCO, its moniker changed to reflect that of a new corporate tenant. The new owners did promise to renovate and find ways to revive the complex, but ultimately their changes accomplished little to that end. Among other things, one of the owners considered adding some kind of light-show feature—an idea inspired by his childhood memories of the giant red neon letters on the old Richfield Building.
My family no longer owns any part of ARCO, which is now a fraction of its former size since being broken apart some years ago, the remainder bought up by BP Amoco. Around then the building at LACMA that housed modern and contemporary art was repurposed and renamed, my grandfather’s appellation removed from its wall. The buildings and the company have moved on. I do not think the family expected this. Most of the ranch, too, had to be sold off after his stroke rendered him too fragile to earn back what he had lost. The family did keep, until very recently, two old adobe houses and a field that once were part of Circle Diamond, and when I went there I could still pick apples from the orchard, spot wild turkeys, and watch a few dozen head of cattle graze. But the Big House belonged to a Texas banker who was never there. I used to sometimes walk through the old property, peeking into the windows of the mansion, remembering where my grandfather kept the old convertible Cadillac and where the peacocks roosted in the evenings when darkness fell. The place had defined our family, and so for a long time it still felt like ours.
I eventually understood that what separated my grandfather’s wild success from his subsequent failure was little more than luck—that the first time around, for a good four decades, he had been profoundly, phenomenally lucky. Not just in the specific sense of drilling in the right spot but in a general sense—lucky to be starting out in America in the middle of the twentieth century, lucky to be white and male, lucky to be interested in oil at the moment the world was most deeply in love with it, lucky to ride that wave as long as he did.
I know that at his peak, in the early 1980s, Forbes listed his net worth at $400 million. I know this because my father told me long ago. I have carried this number with me ever since, keeping it tucked in a fold in my mind, awaiting the day when I will make sense of it. Of what it meant to be a man who made $400 million, who lost $400 million. Of what it means that such sums can be won and then forfeited in a single lifetime. Of who I am, as one whose legacy is the memory of an enormous fortune, tangentially experienced and unexpectedly lost. To me this has become a parable, a fairy tale of ephemerality. I think occasionally that nothing could be more appropriate, nothing could be more American.
The Dragon at the Bottom of the Sea
The bus from San Jose takes forever, but I don’t care. I’m not thinking about much and my brother isn’t talking much. Stepping off at the stop in our first Costa Rican beach town, Tom and I walk with our tall backpacks down the dusty yellow road toward the center of Tamarindo. Passing under a sign for a hotel named after the town, he says, “Hey look: Tom-Marin-Do.” He smiles, pleased with his observation. I beam at him, at his odd cleverness and, more than that, because it feels like for a moment he has come near to me.
It is 2002. I’m twenty-seven and still living as I have since college—season by season. I plan to linger with Tom in Costa Rica for several weeks before we work our way down to Panama for Christmas, to join our father and sisters in Bocas del Toro. Because someone needs to spend some time with Tom and I am the one who can. I’m single, with a seasonal job. And he trusts me.
The road is lined with concrete buildings and restaurant patios. It ends in a roundabout with a park bench in the middle, an entrance to the beach at our right, a side street to our left, and an open-fronted, thatch-roofed bar directly in front of us, where a good-looking young Rasta man lounges by the door.
Not far down the side street we find a cheap backpackers’ motel, a crumbling one-story compound recommended in our Lonely Planet guide. We get a dark, airless room with two small mattresses on springs, a couple of low tables, and an electric fan. Old sheets cover the window, which looks out on the street and across the blazing day toward more dingy concrete buildings. “This is perfect,” I tell him. All the other rooms are taken by young surfers and travelers, the kind who spend six months wandering through five countries. Our kind, I tell myself. I take comfort these days in the things I tell myself.
* * *
—
Tom is three years younger than me, a good-looking kid with a square jaw, a wide smile, and almond-shaped hazel eyes—a kind of hazel that shifts in concentric rings from blue to green to yellow to orange to brown. I sometimes say he has rainbow eyes.
Tom is delightful in a sharp-witted way, with a rangy intellect and a habit of passing the time talking about Picasso, Conrad, Bruce Lee. A couple of years ago he made twenty thousand dollars day-trading on the Internet, and I like to joke about how we’ll spend his money when he’s a millionaire. A lean, strong twenty-four-year-old, he climbs mountains too, and the rocks around Boulder, where he has lived since he left home to attend the University of Colorado. He has also done things like bike through Europe and scale the icy Alaskan crag known as the Moose’s Tooth. This last one in particular is a point of pride for me.
I like to tell people these things, but I really don’t care what he does as long as he’s Tom. We have an easy, deep bond that has to do with the way he is more like me than either of our two sisters. By that I mean how he thinks—equally analytical and intuitive. A couple of years ago, watching us finishing one another’s sentences while deciphering the instructions for a GPS device, a friend made the comment that we had the same brain.
But we don’t. Unlike me, Tom seems fearless. I’m hypersensitive, easily overwhelmed. When I feel strong emotions, I go numb. And for the past few years, winter’s darkness has been shutting me down. I have a lot of feelings about the brain, most of which I can’t articulate. What I know about the brain is not information I recall in a way that lends itself to sharing. It is remembered in my body, and when it comes to the surface it does not come in words. It takes me back to our mother’s house, where we took care of each other by escaping together into imagined worlds.
In truth, my life doesn’t look so different from his, working and traveling intermittently as I do. I have a good gig going, spending the summer season in Alaska banding birds for Fish & Wildlife, passing my winters skiing in Montana and traveling in Asia or Latin America. But I don’t like my life nearly as much as everyone thinks I ought to. I am plagued by loneliness or something like it. Moving each season keeps me solitary, alone with everything I have not yet learned how to say out loud.
Tom has always seemed immune to the sensitivities that afflict me, so I have a special kind of faith in him, in his smarts and his nerve. Except that Tom has not climbed any mountains in about a year. He has dropped out of college, too, and lost most of the money he made day-trading when the market turned. Since then he has not been doing much at all.
I have invited Tom to come down with me early, traveling one-on-one, so I can watch him closely and see what is happening—if it is happening. If it is happening, I’ll know it when I see it, because it happened to our mother. It is obvious if you know what it looks like. That is the idea anyway. None of us have put much thought into this. Thinking is hard, because the thought of it wraps us in a kind of mental static.
* * *
—
Outside on the porch I sit for a few minutes on a wooden bench and watch the street life beside a dour Israeli surfer. He’s had something stolen. Thieves all over this town. “Wild, wild West,” he says.
I meet Tom down at the beach, where he is sitting with the Rasta and looking stoned. I’m distracted because the Rasta, a Jamaican–Costa Rican who introduces himself as Carlos, is hot. He has a surfer’s ripped torso, black shoulder-length dreads, and a loose, unbuttoned shirt with flames coming up the sides. Sitting on the sand, I look out over low splashing waves and water that is bright with the lowering sun. The beach is straight and long, and full of young men in board shorts and tribal tattoos and women in bikinis and Lycra surf shirts. We sit with Carlos for a while and he flirts with me, charming and playful and direct, but I am hungry, so Tom and I go. Tom has bought some weed already.
* * *
—
The people on the beach are American, Italian, French, Argentine, Chilean, Canadian, Australian, Israeli, Spanish, Costa Rican. The people on the beach are the people at the parties. The DJs are Italian or French and the music is European dance trance mashed up with Manu Chao or Jamaican dancehall. The parties happen Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, in the little bars and the big bars and the other places at the edge of town with dance floors and swimming pools and I don’t even know what they are when they’re not hosting the parties.
A few days in, I am beginning to learn the code language of Tamarindo:
Pura vida means “pure life.” It means that life is good and beautiful and bountiful, and you say it as a greeting, or a goodbye, or an affirmation. If you are visiting for just a week or so, you think this is the coolest thing ever. So when a tico, a Costa Rican, says it with the right note of disguised irony it also means “Fuck you, gringo.”
Pura carne—“pure meat.” This is what the ticos call me when they speak to one another, not knowing that I understand Spanish, having been an exchange student in Ecuador. Once they learn that I can follow their conversations, they are more discreet about it.
Those shirts with red and black flames up the sides, worn by the young drug dealers—status symbols, because only drug dealers can afford them.
Pot. Everywhere.
Cocaine. Everywhere.
I smoke the pot because it’s there, the way I always have, but I find myself avoiding the stoners. I’m gravitating toward the people who do cocaine. It’s something in the drug’s aura, maybe—the sense of a last grab, a breath of air.
* * *
—
Today Tom is distracted. “I’ve been having this problem with my face,” he says. “My jaw! Has come disconnected from the rest of my head. It’s been driving me crazy! I spent, like, two hours trying to reattach it.”
“Your face is out of alignment?” I ask.
“It got so complicated, because first it was over here,” he says, gesturing that his jaw was off to the left. “And I had to concentrate so hard to get it back up here,” he continues, holding his hands up by his right cheekbone. “But when I did that, then this part of my cheek came out like this. So I had to fit that back in, but it’s still not staying. It’s not all sticking together and it’s so annoying.” He’s laughing gently and shaking his head in exasperation.
I sit perfectly still. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Like, the bones are detached from the other bones?”
“Yeah. It’s crazy!”
I don’t reply for a while. He’s holding his jaw lightly between his fingers, working it back and forth, opening and closing his mouth, eyes upward in concentration. And he’s not stoned. “It doesn’t look like they’re detached,” I finally say.
“But they are,” he says. “I just. Can’t. Quite get it to stay.”
“Stay?”
“Earlier I got it all together for, like, one moment, and then it shifted again.”
* * *
—
The first time I meet Melvin he only notices the girl I’m hanging out with, a pretty surfer with dark curls. He’s looking at her and I’m looking at him. He’s a tico and has shiny dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail, and he’s wearing one of those shirts with flames. His eyes are green, like blue-green, and his lips are thick and the bones in his face are rounded and smooth. He’s doing the charming flirty thing with her until her husband walks up and she introduces him. Melvin is suddenly extremely polite, says something about him being a lucky man.
We are at a rodeo and I’m happy because Tom has come too. He seems solitary even here, but he sticks close by. The rodeo is great because there are no safety rules. The bull-riding pen is a ring of high walls made of heavy, roughly stacked logs. We can sit on top of the wall and feel it shake when the bull rams his head into it. We lift our legs as he runs under us, beating the wall with the muscle of his shoulder as he goes, making it violently shake.
Melvin climbs up beside me, starts talking in English. “Jump in!” I tell him. I’m trying not to keep looking at him, but I keep looking at him.
“I could!” he says, his face fierce. Then he’s quiet, and he doesn’t.
Anyone can jump in and run around while the bull and his rider leap and turn and flail. When a rider gets thrown, the rodeo clowns and whoever else is in the pen swoop in to pull him by the shoulders away from the hooves and the horns. But it’s not really the hooves and the horns that get me. It’s the meat, the sides of meat, the muscle power, the force of such a thick animal hurtling through space.
The pounding of the meat of the bull against the logs seems to wake something up in my body. Some knowledge coming through the static, through the pervasive numbness that has enfolded me so thickly in recent months. And for a moment I’m aware of it, just barely—a trickle of electricity, pushing through the numbness, bringing me back into myself somehow, reminding me that these limbs and this mind are of the same being. I feel alive again—just briefly, until I climb back off the logs and the feeling is gone.
* * *
—
Tom and I buy a used surfboard and take turns on it. We’ve both surfed only a few times. Tom, stronger in the upper body, catches on much more quickly than I do. Except that he doesn’t have much focus these days.
I start out okay, but I only seem to get worse. I keep getting pounded. I find myself up on the board with the wave hurling me forward, and I feel the rush and the white foam advancing over the water and for a moment I’m as elated as I’ve ever been. But I can’t hang on to it. I can’t stay with it, really—closely, the way you have to. I can’t feel the water beneath me, listen to it, let it tell me what to do. So I fall, hard, and it bangs me under and under. And when it does I just roll, flop, bounce, scrape, stand up again, and go back for more. At some point I tell myself that I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t try to fix it.
