“If you want to stay free you’ll take my advice. Pursue a modest and contemplative existence. Be honest with yourself. Above all, avoid stressful and potentially dangerous situations, especially anything to do with women.”
“That’s a tall order.”
He sipped from his juice. “You don’t need to be Carl Jung to figure out the cause of your trouble. Your mother left you when you were seven.”
“And I never saw her again.”
“And your wife Fang-Hua left you when you were in your midtwenties.”
“I didn’t think a Chinese girl would dump me. Quite the blow to my ego when she did.”
“That was when your descent began.”
“The ‘psychotic trigger,’ as Fasstink calls it.”
“You’re aware of the pattern?” he asked.
“Women problems.”
He nodded vigorously. “You’re unable to trust and therefore to love. Been divorced twice myself, so I can relate. Point is, if you realize that all your sorrow stems from women, just stay away from them. And until you’re back on your feet, avoid all sensory overload situations — fights, bars, football games, walking through graveyards at night. You know San Diego. There are plenty of low-stress arrangements. Get a job as a gardener and a little room downtown. I wish I could do more for you, but freedom is something you have to earn on your own. That’s what makes it precious.”
Jangler had to get running. An oil change at Jiffy Lube and then a fishing trip at Lake Miramar with his eldest son. He asked if I needed a ride anywhere. I replied that I might just stretch my legs and get some air. My father’s house in Solana Beach, I told him, was not far away.
Outside, we shook hands. I tried to thank him but he waved me off. “You’d’ve done the same for me. Godspeed, Eddie. And if you need anything, don’t hesitate to call or write. Again, just use the name Willie.”
He stared at me for a few seconds, then bowed his head, turned on his heel, and strode away. I listened to his black BMW purr as it left the lot, moved through the green light, and curved gently away up into the pillared dusty benzene thunder of the interstate.
6.The Key’s in the Ashtray
SANTA ANITA WAS RUNNING THIS TIME OF YEAR, SO MY FATHER would not be in his Solana Beach house but in his condo in L. A. I would’ve called him but I didn’t remember his number. Hands in pockets, I strolled over to the track. There was a guard at the main stable gate I didn’t feel like talking to, so I walked down Jimmy Durante Boulevard and then across the long parking lot. There was some kind of antique car show going on. A good-sized satellite facility had opened on the fairgrounds since I’d been here last.
The track was much larger than I remembered with lots of new towers and decks. I waved at the tile mosaic of Don Diego and got a drink of water at the fountain, then I found my way backside, walked past the training track, through maintenance, down the empty shedrows. I said good morning to two dark, short muckers wearing white cowboy hats and white rubber boots up to their knees, the only souls to be found. Most everyone else was on the circuit and would not return to Del Mar until July. At the racing office I asked for my father’s phone number.
“Who are you?” the secretary wanted to know.
“I’m his son, Eddie Plum.”
“I didn’t know Cal had a son.”
I was shaky and pale and my face was slumped. I was tenuous and perspiring and not making a good impression. “We’re not that close.”
She opened a book. “You want the one in Culver City, Arcadia, or Solana Beach?”
“Arcadia.”
She scribbled on the back of an envelope and slid it across. “You do look kind of like him.”
I dialed the number at the payphone outside the stable café, which was closed. I had good memories of this place from my childhood, the long tables, the bare wooden floor, all the hard, short men in riding boots and helmets eating crackers and soup and toast without butter so they could make weight, the smell of manure and frying bacon and damp hay, the columns of dusty sunshine piercing the windows and the rat-a-tat-tat of Spanish in the air.
My father sounded annoyed when he answered. I felt lucky to catch him. I’d never gotten along with him. He was a child of the Depression and the son of a strict Ohio Calvinist minister, a workaholic who was troubled that my generation was not as respectful or strong or hardworking as his. Growing up, I would not see him for weeks at a time. He worked sixteen-hour days, taking only Christmas off. He’d been married five times. His first wife, my mother, had left when I was seven and I barely remembered her. I never liked any of his other wives, and I don’t think any of them liked me. He had taught me a lot about horses, hoping I would join him on the backstretch one day, but I preferred the front side, the gambling element, the frivolous, lazy, parasitic element, as my father regarded it. Journalism was another pursuit he didn’t support. There were the people who did things, he liked to say, and the people who talked about them, the second group having, in his opinion, no value. More and more people every day paid to do nothing but talk, he liked to say. When Fang-Hua left me and my life fell apart, I was only reaping in his view what I had sown. Though he had hired me several lawyers, he had come to visit me on only three occasions the whole time I was at Napa, all three brief side trips from his primary business at Bay Meadows or Golden Gate Fields.
“Dad,” I said. “This is Eddie.”
“Yeah, Eddie,” he said.
“Well, I’m out,” I said.
“That’s what I heard. They called me last night. What do you think you’re doing anyway?”
I felt boyish when I replied, “They had no right to keep me.”
“So, what are you going to do now? They catch you they’ll throw away the key.”
“They’d already thrown away the key. Have you got a place I can stay?”
A long pause followed before he said, “Should be a couple of cabins at the Island. Go talk to Beatriz. Do you remember Beatriz?”
I said that I did.
“They’re all fugitives up there, so you should be safe.”
“Do you have a vehicle I can use?”
“Sure, there’s an old truck in Del Mar backside, parked in a shed. We use it to haul hay. The key’s in the ashtray. Good luck finding someone to let you in.”
“Thanks, hey, I know you’re busy, so I’ll catch you down the way, we’ll have dinner or something.”
“If anyone asks, I never heard from you.”
That was about as close to kind words as I could ever expect from my father.
7.Island of the Butterscotch Beast
A ROUND, BANDY-LEGGED LITTLE FELLOW WEARING A PONCHO and a wide tooled belt with a silver buckle on it as big as my fist rolled up to me as I wandered around the backstretch looking for the shed where the truck might be parked. The entire area, like the main track facility itself, had been reconfigured and I had no idea where my father’s stables might be. I asked him in Spanish if he knew Calvin Plum. He pointed to a row of stalls, one containing a horse, the name plate on the bridle of which read “Bug Eyed Joe.” I explained that I was going to get the truck and asked him which of the sheds he thought it might be in. The key, I told him, as if this were some special password, was in the ashtray. He shrugged as if I’d told him I had decided to breathe now. All the shed doors were unlocked and on the third door lifted I found the truck.
The clutch was longer than I thought it should be, but other than that driving returned naturally to me. The guard at the gate gave me a funny look as I rolled past him probably thinking that I was a member of the antique car show who’d gotten turned around. I went up the boulevard slowly, my eyes sweeping from mirror to mirror and fixing repeatedly on the crack in the windshield. It was early enough in the morning and late enough in the season that there wasn’t much traffic. I drove under the interstate bridge and headed inland up into the bluffs to the Island, as my father called it, or Isla Escondida (Hidden Island), as most of the Latinos who resided there pref
erred.
Back in the 1950s my father had bought this isolated parcel of land for a few thousand dollars (it had to be worth millions now) and put up a few casitas for his hired help, 99 percent of whom were Mexican. My father was a great admirer of Mexicans, principally for the small wages and low maintenance they required. He also had some flower greenhouses built for my mother. Horticulture was all the rage in the sparsely populated north county then. He bought extravagant gifts for all of his wives, trying to make up for never being home. When my mother left him the poinsettia houses went untended. I had many memories of running through their hot feral and earthy halls, lying sedate in the filtered green sunlight when it was cold outside. Very young, I’d been warned that the poinsettia was poisonous, and since then I’d mysteriously associated the scarlet Christmas flower with Babar the Elephant and the death of his mother.
From the road below, you would not have known that this little outpost existed. It had perhaps been Spanish missionaries who’d planted a windbreak of oaks on the west side that through their tangled branches on a clear day you could see the spangled blue-gray prairie of the Pacific Ocean. On the eastern side was high bluff. To the north were the empty hothouses, beyond that the Spanish colonial ceramic-roofed and beige stucco monotony that constituted the new architecturally conformist southern California as far as the eye could see. The southern end was open but occluded by citrus, avocado, and eucalyptus trees. I drove up the narrow, crude road and parked next to a brown Cozy Craft van with four flat tires. As the giant oaks swayed, their leaves made a fizzing sound in the breeze.
I found Beatriz in her garden behind casita number 1. She did not recognize me until I spoke. Beatriz had a round face and slanted eyes like an Eskimo. I remembered her as young, but now like me she was not so young. She smiled at me and touched my waist with her wrist. In her company was a big dog, half St. Bernard, half pit bull, a giant barrel-chested, stumpy-legged orange and white lummox who looked like something out of Tolkien or Where the Wild Things Are. His name was Carlito and it was plain that he did not like me. He growled and lowered his head and showed his teeth. Beatriz smacked him on the head and said, “Ya ni la haces, pulgiento.” He continued to growl at me, so she pointed and said, “Vete, cabron, desgraciado” until he slunk away, cowing but still looking back to glower at me, his muzzle flickering with hatred. I knew that he’d kill me given the chance and I formulated a plan to brain him with a fireplace poker the next time I saw him.
Beatriz only shook her head as I explained my situation. I blurred but did not directly lie about my reasons for being here, explaining that my psychiatrist had released me against the will of the administrators and that my father had given his blessings on a cabin for a few months. All of this seemed a painful subject for her, and I knew that due to lack of food and attention I did not look well, so I asked her about her six children. They were all gone, she said sadly, scattered across the country. The closest was her daughter in Temple City. There was a son in the siding business in Mendocino, another a policeman in San Antonio, a daughter in Gilroy who was a real estate agent. She didn’t see them as much as she liked. I asked her why she stayed here and she said she did not know, but I thought out of loyalty to my father and as a maternal influence over the migrantes who flowed through here in their various labor circuits.
“Apareces muy cansado,” she said, and I said that, yes, I was quite tired. She smiled thinly and touched me again at the waist with her wrist, then went inside to get me the key to number 7.
While I waited for her return I strolled the grounds. This miniature barrio was composed of seven casitas arranged in a circle around a central orange tree that had doubled its size since I’d seen it last. The tree was loaded with sparrows and fruit and the sharp citrus aroma sent me back. Each small bungalow was identical, with a small deck and the long troughlike metal barbeque pit they called a parilla in front of it. All the residential units were stained brown, the color of cabins in the woods, but each was decorated differently: one had a hammock, another a basketball hoop, several had hanging pots or porch swings or saints in the windows or flower boxes or glittering broad ceramic planters with geraniums. Two of the casitas had Familia Catolica plaques above the door. Another had a Chivas El Mejor Equipo Del Mundo sticker in the window. They were all uninhabited except for Beatriz’s and mine.
My cabin was furnished in the style of the 1970s, cracked vinyl sofa with matching wing chair, swanky tasseled ottoman, round-shouldered refrigerator with a handle like a slot machine, braided hippie rugs, and an ancient plaid dinette set. The wallpaper was yellow with rainbows. An old JCPenney stereo record player stood in the corner with a row of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz albums in the cabinet below. In the kitchen was an old black rotary telephone that weighed four pounds and still worked. There were a few paintings on the walls, a tarnished oceanscape, a woodland scene with deer looking up startled from a stream, an amateur’s crude blue velvet portrait of a high-collared Elvis. In the kitchen cupboards I found a bottle of malt vinegar, a cellophane bag of japones chiles, a half-wrapped chunk of Abuelita chocolate, a bottle of crystallized fish sauce, a jar of cajeta, some stale sesame crackers, a blue box of Don Pedrito herbal remedy, and an unopened can of cashews. In the fridge was a crusty bottle of Valentina, a package of old tortillas, a pair of wrinkled limes, half a bottle of white wine, and a cheesecloth-enveloped ball of queso fresco. I recognized it as the kind that Beatriz made, too salty and tasting slightly of unwashed feet, but good with beans or sprinkled like parmesan on noodles. I was happy to find not only a coffeemaker but a big blue can of Maxwell House coffee beside it.
The mattress on the bed was queen-sized, wide as a battleship, and the sheets though dusty were fresh with the scent of marshmallows and wound all around me like kelp around the ankles of a man washed up exhausted on a deserted shore. I slept for three days, maybe it was four. Beatriz brought meals, that lentil dish with the dried corn that I liked and stacks of warm tortillas that I ate with the queso fresco. I could hear the ocean far off and the occasional pounding of hooves. Carlito, that colossal butterscotch splotch of a malevolent beast, stood under the orange tree and scowled at me through the window.
8.Dr. Seuss in the Sky
WHEN MY LAST HALDOL INJECTION WORE OFF I DECIDED NOT TO take anymore. What is the purpose of liberty if you are chained to a chemistry set and jerking around spastically like a marionette on the strings of an evil puppeteer? Just say no to drugs: echale ganas. If I started spitting and raving or thinking I was Napoleon I could always fill one of Jangler’s scrips. There were dozens of pharmacies in the north county, one on every corner and one in every grocery store.
Nervous was I like Dr. Seuss in the sky, and then I’d drink coffee and really fly, but my mind had not been allowed to work freely in ages, and I saw once again the infinite transcendental landscape of the mind and how everything, even death, was aperiodically interactive in quasicrystalline symmetry and I lay on the hardwood floor or on that cracked black couch and watched the electric storms behind my eyelids and wondered maniacally about time and why if the eardrum is simply a single vibrating membrane like a tiny trampoline how it can discern every detail of every instrument in a symphony orchestra along with the old man coughing next to you.
As the drugs began to evaporate from my system the simple beauty of my surroundings unfolded: I savored the fresh air and the clouds and the sand under my bare feet, the cool-aired supermarkets with their acres of delicacies, the crackle of a freshly opened Racing Form, and no one looking over my shoulder or following me down a corridor with a syringe in their left hand. Never again would I take for granted a private bathroom, the choice to drive east or west without permission, or a long walk down to the beach at night to watch the caps and veins of foam in the curling faces of the moon-painted waves. Like a child, I was once again in awe of flowing water, disheveled movie theaters, sitting around the house naked with a freshly opened tub of Cool Whip, and never once answering the phone.
After two weeks off my meds I also began to get my telepathic powers back. Beatriz was often away, leaving no one to watch Carlito, so he hung around scowling and growling at my door, waiting for his opportunity to maul me, and I would’ve gotten him first if I’d had a fireplace poker, but as the heavy haze of boundless years of pernicious and addictive medicines lifted I realized that he was not the threat I had originally perceived.
To make amends, I invited him in. He wagged his tail and said to me in so many words, if you give me even as much as an old tortilla I will stay here and help to heal your mind.
How did you know I had tortillas? I asked him.
It is written all over you, he replied.
Your name is not really Carlito, is it?
No, I am not a Mexican dog.
You look like a big butterscotch sundae.
Flattery will get you nowhere.
From now on I will call you Sweets.
You are about the most pathetic human being I have ever seen.
That made me laugh for what Sweets said was true.
All I had were curly old dried-up tortillas, which Sweets preferred for their chewy staleness, but I didn’t have enough for his liking so I gave him some of the queso fresco, which he snuffled at because he said it gave him the runs. I fell asleep at noon in a patch of sun on the floor and woke up with the front door wide open and that big snoring orange-and-white brute piled into my ribs and I knew that he had begun to heal me. Later that afternoon, I took him swimming in the ocean, and on the way back I picked up a thirty-pack of Mission tortillas from Vons and set them out on the kitchen table to dry.
Freedom presented problems that I hadn’t had to worry much about in Mudville, chief among them money and sex. Without rent and not much interest in eating, I’d be all right financially for a while. Eventually I’d have to get a job or develop a gambling system or write a bestseller or something to that effect, but off the noxious psychotropics my libido was sharp to the point of an overload if not addressed. I knew no eligible women and did not want to compromise my situation or troll lucklessly in a bar, so I drove down to Tijuana, which had been transformed into a modern city since I’d seen it last. All my old haunts were gone. The Jai Alai Palace had closed. Agua Caliente, the preeminently fast and crooked llamadrome (cheap-purse track) that only ran on the weekends, had burned down twice before they’d finally closed it for good (horse tracks burn down at disproportionate rates, almost always by a vengeful hand). Most of the clubs and restaurants I’d frequented had assumed new names and facades.
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