There it was again. Someone trying to tell Buzzworm that an overdose was responsible for death. People who conceivably ought to drug the day-lights out of their poor miserable lives but never did, who withstood beating both physical and spiritual, who anyway, they said, had succumbed. Buzzworm couldn’t buy it.
He went back to Margarita’s corner and stared at the grease spots on the pavement where her cooking once dripped, the scatter of peanut shells and orange peel in the gutter. He searched the waves for Aretha but couldn’t find her. Someone was on a talk show talking about some music in her head, humming it on the radio. Could they play it please? Could anyone identify it? It was driving her crazy. This wasn’t a music program lady but maybe someone would hear her humming and call in and identify the tune. Sure enough, a caller came through humming the same stuff, but no identification as yet. Only thing they knew was it sounded classical. What the hell. Buzzworm zipped into Mexican territory. Maybe he would luck out with some cumbia at least. It was the best he could do for poor Margarita. La equis la equis noventa y siete punto nueve!
CHAPTER 17:
The InterviewManzanar
Like Buzzworm promised, I got my interview with the homeless conductor. We met around Pershing Square and tried to get comfortable on one of those curved bus benches that won’t support a sleeping homeless person. I passed out the McMuffins and the coffee and tried to be inconspicuous while Buzzworm did the interview. This was my understated pretense until the end when this homeless character looked me in the eyes and said, “Since you haven’t taken any notes, I’m assuming you’re taping this.”
“Why no. I’m not.”
Buzzworm smiled. “Don’t worry. He’s good,” he assured the man. “Has an almost audiographic memory.” And before I could protest, Buzzworm made further assurances: “Besides, guaranteed you see the copy before it goes to press. Right Balboa?”
Audiographic memory. I could have strangled Buzzworm on the spot. Pretty soon, he’d want every homeless person in L.A. to verify my quotes and critique the copy.
“It’s about trust, Balboa,” Buzzworm tried to justify. “And respect.”
“The president of the United States doesn’t get this privilege, goddammit!”
“You weren’t interviewing the president. You were interviewing Manzanar Murakami, the first sansei born in captivity. Did you hear that?”
“He’s crazy.”
“That’s what you gonna write?”
“No.” Buzzworm was right. There was something important about this man, so wise, so completely honest. He deserved my respect. He probably did deserve to see my copy as well. It wasn’t going to be easy. For the moment I couldn’t see any way to do justice to the story. He might just look like one more crackpot homeless figure who got stepped on by the system. But this was a case where the man had side-stepped the system. And there I was without a pen or an audio recorder, without words.
I hurried back to my desk, tried to reconstruct the interview, reorganize Buzzworm’s circuitous style. It drove me nuts. I was always the hunter, calculating my moves, getting ready for the kill. Of course, finesse was involved; I was subtly brutal. I’d be out of there before anyone remembered what happened.
But Buzzworm played the interview like a social soccer game, moving in, dancing with the ball, a foil there, sparring, dribbling the thing around to no obvious purpose. Or he was editorializing for my benefit with upstart questions like: “When you’re conducting and look up at these downtown skyscrapers, maybe one-third of them empty, as somebody homeless, what do you think?” or “You ever come to make the connection between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in homelessness in L.A.? Some think if we gotta blame someone, it still oughta be the Russians.” or “Most everyone on the street’s got a conspiracy theory. What’s yours?”
Still I had to admit that when Buzzworm finally nailed the goal, it caught me by surprise.
“So you been out on the streets how many years?”
“You composing your own stuff or what?”
“How come you never use my services?”
“What did you do before you moved to the streets?”
“How about jazz? Coltrane? Miles Davis?”
“Where were you born?”
“You come from a musical family?”
“You ever been seen for psychiatric care?”
“What about Bach? Mozart? Dvorak?”
“What did you eat today?”
“How old are you?”
“When did you graduate UCLA?”
“How’s your eyesight? Sure you don’t require some eyeglasses?”
“Where do you camp out?”
“What hospital did you work in?”
“How about your folks?”
“If you could get a job, then what?”
“Maybe you should get yourself a partner.”
“What about medication or drugs?”
“You play an instrument?”
“What kind of surgery did you do? Anybody ever die?”
“How’s your general health? How about the bowels?”
“Now, I know you’re conducting, but how’s it work? I mean, what’s going on when you’re out there?”
“How you making out? You picking up welfare?”
“Is that your real name?”
“You’re an educated man; you don’t consider that you might be crazy?”
Manzanar Murakami did not consider himself to be crazy. I had read about cases of schizophrenia where people could be completely convincing in various roles. It was not his real name, so perhaps he had never been a surgeon, never graduated UCLA. Perhaps it had been one of his former roles. I couldn’t be sure. He had created his name out of his birthplace, Manzanar Concentration Camp in the Owens Valley. He claimed he was born there during the war. That would have been over fifty years ago, and he looked to be well over fifty.
He had smiled wryly under a bush of white unkempt hair that he must shear off himself from time to time by simply grabbing it on top and hacking. His clothing was worn but not tattered. Even in the heat of June, he wore a black trenchcoat—good quality with a lot of pockets and zippers just like Buzzworm said; like other homeless, he carried all his belongings on his person. Said he had a “modest place” in an encampment hidden in freeway overgrowth; Buzzworm knew the place. The man had a blackened appearance like a chimney sweep. Like the underbelly of the overpass itself, it seemed rather permanent. Beneath this sooty exterior, however, I noticed a powerful body, broad chest and strong arms, as if the man worked out. What a lousy baton could do for the body! There was something of the stevedore about him. The elements of the urban outdoors had not worn him down, yet. I imagined he could simply take a shower, don a white jacket, and be transformed very suddenly into Dr. Murakami.
What struck me was that Manzanar was probably not crazy. There was a subtle quality about him and an honest reticence that seemed to reflect a true kind of modesty. He had a clarity of mind and speech; no glitches that I could notice. But then, who am I to say? After all, he lived on the street; he conducted an orchestra no one could see and music no one could hear. But his attitude was monkish, like a character in a Kurosawa film who shaves his head and forsakes all worldliness—a kind of head start toward nirvana. And yet he was funny. His words and manner were laced with irony and intelligent humor. I figured if he were crazy, a lack of humor would be a dead giveaway.
Buzzworm had no opinion about this. It didn’t matter if he were out of his mind. Look at Buzzworm. He was crazy. So what? Still, it wasn’t your typical homeless story, if there were such a thing. It could be said that Manzanar had chosen homelessness as a way of life. This probably wasn’t the message Buzzworm was trying to convey. Buzzworm was trying to get jobs, housing, health care, rehab, and mental services for the folks. Manzanar wasn’t exactly a case for any of these things, but Buzzworm said, “Balboa, forget the social agenda. Just tell the story. Point is there’s people out here. Life out here.”
I didn’t make the Asian connection until I got Emi’s habitual afternoon call; but then why should I connect Emi to Asianness? Maybe Emi never let me forget I was Chicano, but it was easy to lose track of Emi. She defied definition. “Ever heard of a Manzanar Murakami?” I asked. “He’s sansei,” I added as if it would help.
“Oh-kay,” she said, like she was dealing with a hypothesis of some sort.
“He’s homeless.”
“Do I know anybody homeless?”
“Do you know anything about your community at all?”
“Gosh, what do you figure, Gabe? Twenty thousand of us? Fifty? A hundred? I’m supposed to know one homeless Asian?”
“Your people take care of each other. This guy is very noticeable. I bet someone’s noticed him. I bet your mom’s heard of him.”
“True. My mom reads the Rafu cover to cover. Too bad you don’t write for the Rafu. That would really impress her.”
“She likes me anyway.”
“But she doesn’t read your stuff much. Rafu’s got the J.A. obits. She never misses a funeral. Do you know what koden is?”
“No.”
“Well, she’s spent a fortune in it.”
“Ask her about Manzanar Murakami, will you?”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Sansei hybrid.”
Emi changed the subject. “Now I know all of you over there only get your news from printed matter, but did you at least hear the second semi blow? They can’t contain the fire. Don’t you get out? It’s got to be smoking your way. Even imprisoned behind four inches of glass, you must have heard the blast.”
“I thought they cleared it up. That was yesterday.”
“How did you get to work?”
“I had an interview six a.m. I took side streets to pick up coffee. Wait. You said second semi. There’s more than one?”
“Where have you been? Turns out a second semi—no apparent relation to the first—knifed a few minutes later about a mile back of the first. This time, it was just ten thousand gallons of sloshing gasoline. One more giant Molotov cocktail on wheels. Besides which, a truck crashed into the second semi spilling thirty-three thousand pounds of meat. That’s when the whole thing blew up. It’s dead cows all over the freeway. Can you imagine the barbecue? An entire mile of cars trapped between two dead semis, not to mention two craters, fires, and the debris from the blasts. Find a TV for godssake! There’s a very weird view from the NewsNow copter. Cars on fire, all the ivy, palm trees, brush, signs. Worse yet, the Santa Anas are blowing through like the one-ten was a canyon in Malibu.”
“There’s a homeless encampment in the overgrowth around there.”
“It’s not Malibu. It’s gonna burn.”
“I gotta go.” I hung up and paged Buzzworm.
“Cardboard ramshackles’ve gone up in smoke,” he reported. “You believe there’s maybe two-three-hundred of ’em live up in here?”
“Where’re they now?”
“They’re headed down onto the freeway.”
“What?”
“Traffic’s at a standstill. Folks abandoned their cars. Explosions, fires. You’d run for it too. Some didn’t make it. Homeless’re in the cars now.”
“Buzz, whadya hear on your radio?”
“Sports.”
“What happened to the news?”
“Balboa, ain’t we got enough news yet?”
“Give me fifteen. I’ll be there.” I paused and decided to ask while I remembered, “Buzz, at the interview this morning, what were you tuned to?”
“You mean what was I on?”
“Yeah.”
“Just talk.”
“Howard Stern?”
“What I be listening to New York for?”
I thought about this. “Rush Limbaugh?”
“Listen, Balboa. I take it all in. KFI, KLSX. Might as well be KLAN as in Ku Klux. People out there starved to talk, try their excuses for brains out on the airwaves.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, but I was gonna miss the homeless taking over the one-ten. I hurried on like the reporter I am. “We’ll talk more. See you in fifteen.”
“Balboa,” he stopped me. “The C. Juárez thing? I got some addresses for you, but they all lead South, meaning maybe México. And I think you’re right. It’s not just about illegal medication. Cartel’s into diversification.”
“Damn,” I said.
“There’s always a price attached to these addresses. Can you pay up?”
“Depends.”
“Looks like it’s not a monetary price. More like a political one. They figure a journalist like you has connections, see.”
“I’m listening.”
“They insist on a meeting. Mexico City. Need to size you up to make an offer, I guess.”
“You guess! I can’t be everywhere,” I complained.
“It’s your call. I myself don’t go nowhere. Hell, L.A. don’t go nowhere, and look at this. Shit just comes to us.”
I didn’t say anything. I was being lectured to again.
“About Manzanar. You wanted to know?”
“Right.”
“SigAlerts and weather. Commuter Classics. Was I wrong?”
“I guess not.” I hung up and grabbed a Power Bar from the top desk drawer, washed the chewy consistency down with a gulp from my mug of always-cold coffee. I paused over the mug’s significance. Emi had given it to me. An eyeball floated by means of a ceramic post in the middle of the black liquid—a mercurial gray under these artificial lights. With the smoke rising from the freeway fires out there, the eyeball was looking like the sun in my L.A. pewter skies. The mug read sardonically, “Here’s looking at you . . .”
CHAPTER 18:
DaylightThe Cornfield
Rafaela rubbed the salt between her fingers, pelting the corn lightly, and gave it to Sol whose small hands encircled the thick ear eagerly. He sunk his baby teeth into the soft sweet kernels at one end and wandered after his mother. She slung a canvas bag with Sol’s bottle in it over her shoulder and called after the boy, “This way, Sol. We’re going to see Doña Maria.”
Together they skirted Rodriguez’s unfinished wall following its pregnant bulge. Strangely the curve in its features seemed even more accentuated than this morning when she and Rodriguez had stood solemnly before it, speechless. Both watched a long thin snake wend its way along the wall, its fine head curiously rising and dipping, searching for a passage. Rodriguez did not move to kill the snake as he might have because, she thought, the snake’s path skirting the wall seemed oddly straight. If only the snake could define the nature of a straight line . . . She did not have the heart to ask Rodriguez to tear the wall down, and she hoped that Gabriel would not expect such perfection either. But she would call and ask. Sol tugged at her fingers, and they continued down the path toward Doña Maria’s.
She had been thinking about calling Bobby, practicing her conversation. She had needed to go home to find out what that felt like; it had been too many years . . . that would be her excuse. He should see Sol, so tan and healthy these days. Maybe they could find a way to go to Singapore. At least he could go home to see his family. It might help. She was going to suggest it.
A highly polished black Jaguar was parked conspicuously in the shade in front of Doña Maria’s porch. Rafaela eyed the car warily and paused, absently reading the gold numbers across its back, XJS 12, wondering whether it might be best to leave, but Sol was already running up the step
s, and Doña Maria seemed to be waiting for them at the door. Rafaela sighed. She had better look in on the woman. Perhaps the Jaguar belonged to a stranger.
“You have come at a good time.” Doña Maria clapped her chubby hands together. “You can meet my son Hernando. I suppose you thought he didn’t exist. I’m always talking about him, but he never visits. But what’s a mother to do? He’s so busy.”
Rafaela could hear a man’s voice yelling.
Doña Maria waved in that direction. “On the phone. He’s been on the phone since he arrived last night. Always business. Such a headache. He hasn’t touched his coffee. Come on. Sit down. Sweet bread for Sol?”
Sol was still clinging to his corn. Pieces of the yellow kernels stuck to his cheeks and nose. Rafaela wiped them away and tried to take the corn from Sol’s hands. Sol pulled away. The corn was precious to him.
“Is it that good?” Doña Maria laughed. “We have an entire field of it. You can have as much corn as you want. Shall we take a look?”
Rafaela nodded but glanced back in the direction of the phone. Doña Maria’s son was still yelling. Something about a shipment of oranges. “I want to know every detail, every stop, every person who had anything to do with it from the time it got to Honduras!” He paused. “Those Brazilians are sons of bitches, but they’re not so stupid!”
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