Criminal Karma

by Steven M. Thomas

  “Meat truck,” he said, nodding toward an alley that disappeared behind the boardwalk restaurants. “Stick around and I’ll grill you up the best T-bone you ever tasted.” In St. Louis, Reggie was famous for his barbequing skills.

  “Deal,” I said, and walked over to say hello to Chavi.

  Draped in a flowing, multicolored robe, with a red scarf covering her thick black hair, she was holding the hand of a young Mexican woman who sat opposite her beneath the canvas roof of her booth, tracing the lines on the girl’s palm with the tip of her index finger.

  “For you,” she said softly, “the path to spiritual fulfillment and happiness is through helping others.”

  The girl’s eyes got wide. “How did you know that?”

  “What?” Chavi said, looking up.

  “I’m studying to be a social worker at City College. All I’ve ever wanted to do since I was a little girl is help children. My priest even told me that I have a calling. But I was thinking of quitting because the classes are so hard.”

  “Get a tutor to help you with math,” Chavi said.

  “How did you …”

  “They have free tutors at the math lab at City College. You must never give up on your dream, darling. There are hurt children waiting for you to help them, some not yet born. You are on a beautiful path. Don’t worry about anything. You will be fine.”

  “Thank you so much,” the girl said, fumbling a ten-dollar bill out of her purse. Her eyes were full of tears.

  “God bless you, and the little children through you,” Chavi said. “Come back and see me soon.”

  “That was pretty good,” I said as the girl walked away with a look of wonder on her face.

  “Hello, Robert,” Chavi said, slightly dazed.

  “How did you know she is meant to help people?”

  “Everyone is meant to help people,” Chavi said. “Sometimes I see pictures when I look at their hands. Sometimes it is just a feeling. In her hand, I saw an image of the Virgin reaching out to save an abandoned soul. She really does have a calling, I think.”

  “How did you know she was having problems with math?”

  Chavi spread her arms wide and tilted her head back, striking a pose. “I yam of the Roma peepole. I yam geepsee,” she said in her best mock-Romanian accent. “I see all!”

  When I didn’t say anything, she lowered her arms and smiled.

  “Most kids at community college have problems with algebra,” she said. “You don’t need ESP to know that.”

  Chavi claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Bela Lugosi and a raccoon-eyed B-movie actress who appeared in some of his later films. With her bright clothes, gold hoop earrings, and dramatic manner, she fit perfectly on a boardwalk crowded with theatrical characters.

  On one side of her, there was a tall, skinny white guy dressed in classic hippie style with an embroidered Indian cotton shirt and granny glasses whose handicraft was mandalas he burned in scrap wood using sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. On the other was a diminutive Jamaican with a mouthful of crooked teeth who entertained the passing crowd by jumping off a stepladder into piles of broken glass in his bare feet while telling jokes or firing insults at people who stopped to watch his show and then walked on without putting a dollar in his cigar box. Beyond him was a heavyset, middle-aged white man who wheeled a battered piano out from someplace each morning and spent the day playing melodic jazz in return for money that people stuffed into a pickle jar. Beyond him was a chalk-portrait guy, then a woman selling wiki gear, then an Okie with an acoustic guitar and a Woody Guthrie twang in his voice.

  The artists, hucksters, and entertainers stretched for more than a mile, from Venice Boulevard halfway to Santa Monica, creating a counterculture atmosphere and energy that attracted tourists from around the L.A. basin and the planet Earth. On that sunny Saturday afternoon, the boardwalk crowd was as colorful as the professional performers. Leather-clad bikers ogled elegant Latinas in spike heels and capris while bangers in thick plaid shirts and work pants held shop doors open for elderly ladies in flowered dresses; sophisticated international travelers looked down their aquiline noses at Iowa couples in JCPenney clothing who weaved like drunkards to avoid the beggars lurching out from behind palm trees rattling Starbucks cups. There were dreadlocks and flowing blond tresses, heartbreakingly beautiful bodies and ruined faces. Roller blades, skateboards, and bicycles; tight shorts, baggy jeans, and sweatpants; bodybuilders, businessmen, and mermaids. All mixed together in a murmur of mostly good-humored humanity flowing in two directions beside the shining sea.

  North of us, up the boardwalk toward Santa Monica, something was creating a stir. The sound of the crowd changed, the multilingual buzz gaining density. People walking north began to go faster; those coming south toward Chavi’s booth slowed down and looked back over their shoulders.

  First in glimpses, then more clearly, I saw coming through the menagerie a figure that stood out even in that crazy seaside circus: a tall, rotund white man dressed only in a cotton dhoti, surrounded by a flock of young women in airy white robes who scattered red rose petals in his path. The man, who looked like he was in his fifties, and the girls, who were much younger, paused occasionally when someone stepped out from the line that had formed along the boardwalk and knelt to touch the man’s bare feet or hand him a flower or piece of fruit. He greeted these devotees with loving smiles and graceful bows, hands pressed flat together in front of his barrel chest, fingertips pointing upward like a steeple, then came on majestically toward us, placing the soles of his feet on the silky petals strewn before him.

  “Who’s that?” Reggie said. He had come up beside me in front of Chavi’s booth, attracted by the excitement of the crowd.

  “It’s Baba Raba,” I heard a grade school voice say.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Turning, I saw that Ozone Pacific had come up behind me. He was gazing at the approaching guru with a look of awe and adoration.

  “Why is he wearing a diaper?” Reggie asked.

  “It’s not a diaper,” I said. “It’s a dhoti. It’s what Indian spiritual teachers wear to show their simplicity and detachment from society’s expectations.”

  “Huh?”

  As Baba Raba came to where we were standing, he turned his ponderous head toward Ozone and showed him the loving smile. It made me quiver a little bit even though it was directed a few feet to my right.

  “How are you feeling today, my young friend?” Baba asked in a vibrant bass voice as he stopped in front of us.

  Ozone Pacific nodded his head silently, returning the big man’s smile with one that was equally loving but infinitely more childlike.

  “Are you feeling better since our talk?”

  “Yes, Baba,” the boy said softly.

  The guru was pear-shaped, with a huge ass that made his solid shoulders look narrow. He was six feet tall or a little better and probably weighed three hundred pounds. The hair on his cannonball head was cropped short in a gray crew cut. He had a wide mouth with thick, rubbery lips, a large nose, and big ears. A mat of dark hair grew on his chest and boulder belly. His short, thick legs were hairy, too.

  His robed female attendants looked like children by comparison. Eyes downcast, they murmured among themselves, holding leftover holiday gift bags half full of rose petals. They ranged in looks from plain to pretty and in age from late teens to early thirties. One thing they had in common was nice bodies. There wasn’t a fat chick among them.

  Another girl stood close beside Baba on his right. She was a blond beauty who had undoubtedly been turning heads since junior high school, not that many years before. She wore white sneakers, tight white jeans, and a white T-shirt with a yellow OM symbol on the front. Her thick shoulder-length hair was a tawny golden color and her face had been sculpted by a slum dweller who dreamed of angels. She observed the crowd with an amused smile. The shape of her lips and arch of her eyebrows made my heart race.

  “It looks like a diaper,” Reggie s
aid audibly, in the midst of a hush that had fallen as people waited to see if Baba Raba was going to say anything else.

  Baba shifted his glittering black eyes from Ozone, who was to my right, across my face, to rest on Reggie, who was standing to my left, holding a spatula in one hand and a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in the other. He stared back at Baba.

  “What’s cooking?” Baba asked him after a few seconds.

  “Um grilling T-bones,” Reggie said. “Sorry there’s not enough to go around.”

  Pity flowed into Baba’s big-lipped smile slowly, like urine filling a specimen jar. He held his right hand out in front of him, thick index finger pointing up, and tick-tocked the finger back and forth, more or less in Reggie’s face.

  “It is not food that I would deign to eat,” Baba said in his professional guru voice. “If you are wise, you will not eat it either. It is tamasic. Consuming dead animals feeds your animal nature and poisons your etheric body. It is unhealthy for your physical body, too.”

  “The hell you talking about?” Reggie said, offended. “Them are some prime T-bones.”

  The tick-tocking continued, and the pity in the smile overflowed.

  “You are digging your grave with your teeth, my bearded friend.”

  “Um what?”

  “You are digging. Your grave. With your teeth,” Baba said slowly and distinctly, then bared his own horse teeth and tapped the top ones with his finger. He looked savage and a little crazy with his lips pulled back and his incisors showing.

  “That’s grade-A beef,” Reggie said, his voice getting a little high. It had never crossed his mind that there might be someone who didn’t relish a good steak.

  Baba shook his head with heavy authority. “Innocent animals should be loved, not slaughtered. That bovine was full of hormones and antibiotics. It was terrified at the time of its death. Its adrenal terror flooded into its muscles and congealed there when it was killed. When you eat the steak, you eat the chemicals and the fear along with the rotting meat. You do not know when or where or how it was killed. It may have been dead and decaying for weeks. No, no. It is not good food. You are excited to have a nice juicy steak to chew and swallow, anticipating the taste of blood and flesh, but to me what you are cooking is as disgusting as a nice juicy piece of rat.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s you, Bubba Rubba, not me,” Reggie practically shouted. “What do you eat, seaweed and daisies?”

  Baba shook his head again. “I am sorry I have offended you, my bearded friend.” He gave the bow and the steeple. “I must speak the truth.”

  “Baba speaks the truth,” the robed girls echoed. The crowd murmured assent.

  Baba turned his luminous black eyes on me.

  I forgot about Reggie and the steaks. And the blond girl. And the diamonds.

  Looking into his eyes, I had the feeling that we had known each other in a previous lifetime. That we had been close companions for many years. That he remembered our time together clearly and was glad to have found me again. The feeling was one of overwhelming relief and gratitude. I recalled a first-person description I had read of the sensation a spiritual seeker felt when he met his guru for the first time, and I was pierced by the conviction that the same thing was happening to me late on a Saturday afternoon on the Venice boardwalk after forty years of wandering in the wilderness of the world. Behind me, I heard the surf rushing on the sand and flashed on the eternity of the sea and the mystery of life.

  “How are you?” he asked me, and his words echoed inside my skull.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I felt warm and happy and safe to be there with him.

  “Yes,” he said. “You are fine. I can see that you are a strong, courageous man. Highly intelligent. But something troubles you.”

  The thought of my daughter rushed to the front of my mind like a prisoner rushing to the door of a cell when his lawyer arrives with word of his case. Her name was on my lips. I was on the verge of telling him about my loss and grief. But I caught myself.

  Pulling my eyes loose from his, which was like pulling strong magnets from a block of iron, I took a step back and looked him up and down, from his well-tended size-twelve feet to the iron-gray bristles on top of his head. He looked ridiculous with his massive ass swaddled in a strip of Indian cotton and his big hairy belly sticking out, but he had tremendous physical and emotional presence, like a chief in a primitive land who contained in his well-fed person the collective wisdom of the tribe and wielded the power of life and death. His big hands, hanging at his sides, looked strong enough to tear a telephone directory in half. He would be a dangerous man to steal from.

  The guru regarded me beneficently as I looked him over, getting mileage out of the loving smile.

  The blonde was looking at me, too, her pretty smile tinged with contempt.

  “He’s good,” I said to her. “He’s really got something.”

  “Yeah,” she said, mockingly, her blue eyes meeting mine. “I thought you were going to go.”

  I shook my head and smiled back at her, not mocking, friendly.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You almost did.”

  I shrugged, kept smiling. “He’s got something.”

  “He’s got lots of things,” she said, moving her slim body closer to Baba and linking her arm through his gorilla appendage.

  “Does he have them, too?” I said, nodding at the robed girls.

  Her lip curled. “They don’t even know where they are.”

  “So he’s got them good.”

  Baba didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. His thick-lipped smile slowly morphed into a frown, like an iron bar being bent by a strongman. In what looked like a warning, he clamped his hand over the girl’s where she held his hairy forearm. His large fingernails were professionally manicured and coated with clear polish. Hers were bitten to the quick.

  “Come and see me, my intelligent friend,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I can help you.”

  “With what?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “Like I said before, I’m fine.”

  “Come anyway,” he said, unwavering. “We have most pleasant times.” He rolled his eyes up and to the right as he said that, as if looking over his shoulder. I couldn’t tell if he was feigning an ecstatic state or indicating the girls behind him.

  “Maybe I will.”

  He gave me a final nod, heavy as a pail of quarters, and led the blond girl away, south along the boardwalk.

  “Ya look like Baby Huey!” Reggie yelled after him.

  A guy I hadn’t noticed before who was walking behind the robed girls shot a hard look our way that Reggie didn’t notice. He was dressed in designer jeans and athletic shoes. A short-sleeved black knit shirt was stretched tight across his muscular chest and shoulders. There were India-ink tattoos on his forearms. He reminded me of the inimitable Jimmy Z.

  Chavi watched Baba and his entourage as they walked away, with Ozone drifting along in their wake.

  “What’s your take on that guy?” I asked Chavi.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. His aura changes, so it’s hard to see. He is either a saint or a devil.”

  She went back into her booth and began to spread out her tarot cards on a table draped in red cloth.

  Reggie and I walked over to the fire ring, where he flipped the sizzling steaks and poured on Worcestershire sauce.

  “I’ll kick his fat rat ass if he’s not careful,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Two hours later, Reggie and I descended the wobbly wooden steps in front of the flophouse and walked north along Pacific Avenue. It had been dark for an hour and the neon-lit street was pleasantly lurid as the coast geared up for a Saturday night that would last till dawn on Sunday. Traffic was heavy, with some light horn honking and occasional catcalls and whistles. I just hoped they weren’t whistling at us. Like all picturesque seaside cities, Venice and Santa Monica had a thriving gay community
, evidence that homosexual men have good taste in real estate.

  We crossed Pacific at Westminster and strolled inland along that quiet residential avenue.

  “Whudaya think Baby Huey charges for a wrestling match with one of them chicks in the nightgowns?” Reggie said.

  “You think he is pimping them out?”

  Reggie gave me the half-exasperated, half-disgusted look. “Get real,” he said. “You know good and well he is.”

  “They could be legitimate devotees.”

  “Yeah, and I could be the Lone Ranger’s horse, but I’m not.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Just remember, we aren’t going over there to get laid. We are going to try and find out where those diamonds are so we can steal them, fence them, and stuff our pockets full of money.”

  At Sixth Street, we went two blocks north to Broadway, also residential, despite its glamorous name. The ashram, a converted Queen Anne mansion, was a block farther inland, at the corner of Broadway and Seventh Street. A fiftyish couple who looked like former hippies who had settled down to some lucrative artistic occupation came around the corner from Seventh and preceded us up the walk to the front door. It was standing open, pouring yellow light into the night.

  It was forty-five degrees, cold for Los Angeles, and the foyer was cluttered with jackets and scarves hanging on pegs and piled on wooden benches along the side walls. Dozens of pairs of shoes were lined up beneath the benches. I sat down and pulled off my Reeboks. Reggie grumbled about the custom but took his boots off, too. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he hid them in a corner beneath a red scarf.

  “I don’t want anyone heisting them,” he explained.

  Beyond the foyer, a wide hallway led to a staircase that went up to the second floor. A narrow hallway beside the staircase continued to the back of the house. To our left as we entered was a small bookstore and gift shop, where half a dozen people, including the prosperous hippies, were milling around, talking and laughing. Next to the shop was a library with closed French doors. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held hundreds of old books. A brown leather couch and two armchairs faced a cold fireplace.