The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  I was, in short, in shit.

  Still, not inextricably. After all, once I agreed to work the gaff, they had to give me some kind of room to move. They couldn’t crowd me too close, or what I was working on wouldn’t work. And with only the vaunted (which is to say nonexistent) guardian skills of a Mirplo standing between me and freedom, there was no reason to believe I couldn’t shade and fade whenever I wanted. No doubt they knew this, and it distressed me that they didn’t work visibly hard to prevent it. Were there invisible strings attached? Perhaps all my aliases were compromised, even the virgin ones. This meant that someone would have worked over my apartment, my storage unit, and my safe deposit boxes, and certainly that was within the realm of possibility. Still, it didn’t seem like enough to glue me to the grift. If I really wanted to get gone, I could get gone. So why did they think I’d stay?

  It’s what Hines said: “I know how much you like puzzles.”

  In this, alas, he was right. Unknown people for unknown reasons had decided to fuck up my life. I was determined not to quit until I had not only unupfucked it, but gotten to the bottom of why. What can I tell you? Sometimes your pride will take you places your common sense wouldn’t go.

  Like, for example, to the Blue Magoon.

  15.

  the blue magoon

  I met a Swede once on a flight from London to Los Angeles, a two-pack-a-day man, jonesing hard for a cigarette almost before we went wheels up. At one point, he asked me, “When we land in Los Angeles, where is the soonest I can smoke? Do they have special areas, or will I have to wait till I get outside?”

  “Oh, you can’t smoke in California,” I said.

  “In the terminal in general, yes, I understand.”

  “No, no, anywhere; from border to border, it’s been banned. They passed a law.” You should have seen the color drain from his face. “I’m just messing with you, man. You can smoke outside.”

  But as the saying goes, “Your jokes will become your reality.” Over the years, California’s smoke-free airspace expanded to encompass beaches, parks, playgrounds, stadiums, even sidewalks in certain cities. It reached the point that about the only place you could smoke was in the privacy of your own home. Or at the Blue Magoon.

  The Blue Magoon was a dive bar on Santa Monica Boulevard in the borderland between Hollywood and West Hollywood, with an oliated clientele of gay, straight, biker, junkie, and pure Monday morning drunk. The place reeked perpetually of vomit and stale beer. Also of cigarette smoke, for the Blue Magoon, its own little outlaw corner of the world, was one spot in L.A. where you could still spark up with impunity. The owner of the Magoon had been fined 267 times for violating state smoking bans. He’d been threatened with loss of license, even sued. He didn’t give a rat’s ass. With the ferocity of a mama lion defending her cubs, he fought every fine, every suit, every attempt to shut him down. The funny thing is, the guy didn’t even smoke. He just had this libertarian streak in him—his daddy had run the bar before him and had died from secondhand smoke, and by damn, he was gonna do the same.

  With its off-the-reservation reputation, the Magoon attracted just a raft of slackers, spivs, angle shooters, hucksters, mooks, art fraudists, pill pushers, franchise capitalists, and sundry other denizens of the demimonde. People would meet there to arrange alliances, pimp their sisters, sell contraband, buy counterfeits and chemicals, trade illegal aliens, and make record deals. I myself had only been there once. Walked in, turned up my nose and walked back out. Decided if that’s what it took to hook up with L.A. hustlers, I’d just as soon fly solo. I’m not a snob, but honestly, to call the place a shithole makes shitholes shine.

  Mirplo, of course, loved it, and when Allie told us that Billy Yuan had become a habitué, Vic nearly wet his pants. I think he thought it was some kind of Disneyland for people like us: “The crookedest place on Earth.” Still, it was an iffy proposition. Here was a known grifter in a known grifters’ lair. Anyone walking in the door was assumed to be on the razzle, and who extends the hand of trust to someone on the razzle? No intelligent grifter, that’s for sure, and you had to believe that Yuan was molto intelligente, else he wouldn’t have made it this far nor strewn such heat in his wake. So how do I penetrate the Magoon without looking like a guy in the game? Like I said, iffy proposition. Oddly, it was Hines who pointed me toward the angle to shoot, for it occurred to me that just as he had sold himself to me as a citizen, I might could vend myself to Yuan the same way. Of course, for a citizen to wander unsuspectingly into a place like the Magoon would be a bad mistake.

  But hey, people make mistakes every day.

  For what I had in mind, it wouldn’t do for me to be there waiting, so I sent Vic in to loiter and let me know when Yuan showed up. He whined a little about his assignment. “What I’m gonna do all day just sitting there?”

  “Do a crossword,” I said. “It’s good for you. It’ll stretch your brain.” I gave him a copy of People magazine (home of the world’s most cretinous crossword), opened to the puzzle page. “Here,” I said, “I’ll get you started. One across: five-letter word for Academy Award.”

  He thought long and hard before barfing out, “Statue?”

  “How many letters in statue?”

  He counted them on his fingers and concluded, “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Try again.”

  “Ah … award?”

  “Oscar, you nimrod. Look, just go in there, stay cool, lay low, and text me when Yuan rolls in.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “Then we’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “That could get old real fast.”

  “You should’ve thought about that before you sold me out to the fibbies.”

  Oddly, this got Mirplo’s back up. “Man, Radar,” he said, “you’re just gonna hafta get over that, you know? I didn’t sell you out, I hooked you up, at least that’s how it looked to me at the time. And if you want to kick my ass, I wish you’d just kick it and get the kicking over with, but this passive-aggressive resentment bullshit is pissing me off, so just take it, and your crappy crossword puzzle”—he slapped the magazine against my chest—“and shove ’em up your ass. Okay?” He spun on his heel and, with the hauteur of a dowager aunt, sailed off toward the Magoon.

  “You sure you don’t want the magazine?” I called after him.

  Vic bellowed back in the third person as Uncle Joe. “He’ll watch Judge Judy!”

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to watch Judge Judy. I killed my idle hours at a nearby bookstore, one of those giant ones with seventeen different histories of the Peloponnesian Wars and whole shelves devoted to the art of cooking with cheese. The bookstore is the library of the modern age, which you can tell just by looking around at the earnest students sitting cross-legged on the floor of the test prep section or the stinky homeless leafing through magazines and trying desperately not to fall asleep and, therefore, down.

  I looked around for something to read up on, but I really couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about how Allie and my alter ego Ryan Reed had supposedly met in a bookstore. I imagined it was one of those cute meets, where you stalk each other flirtily through the stacks, eventually simultaneously confronting each other with, “Why are you following me?” and “I wasn’t following you, you were following me,” prelude to an exchange of random banter, then coffee, a leisurely stroll, and a good-night kiss.

  I’m not that old. Actuarially speaking, I’ve got like three quarters of a century to go. But as I wandered around that bookstore, waxing nostalgic for a love affair that never existed except as a fleeting figment of Allie’s and my coagent imagination, I felt prohibitively removed from the snowiness you need to just plunge yourself into another person’s life. Had I ever been that unguarded, that free? I didn’t think so, and in that moment I felt the loss, like if you had a major league fastball but never yanked yourself away from your studies long enough to try out for a team. That was me: so caught in the grift net that I let the best of my youth pass by
. You could argue that I wasn’t all that innocent to begin with, but I would argue back that even if you’ve never had innocence, you can lose it just the same. Let’s call it the potential for innocence—in my case squandered on commerce. What was I doing when I should have been picking up girls in bookstores? Selling artificial gold. Lots of it, yay me. I typically had all the money I needed to take a nice lady out to lunch but, alas, no lady, no lunch.

  I buried myself in a copy of Guns and Ammo magazine, read up on Finland’s new Sako rifles, and tried to forget all about it, the Allie and the innocence and all.

  Some indeterminate time later, my cell phone alerted me to an incoming text message:

  the pigeon poop is on the windshield

  What passed for Mirplovian wit informing me that Yuan had arrived. It was time for me to get into character. I quick-scanned the shelves for the right props and found what I was looking for in A Guide to American Graduate Schools and a laminated map of Los Angeles. I paid for these things, broke the spine of the book and riffled its pages to give it a thumbed feel, and headed out.

  I was making much of this up as I went along, for I have found that my own gift for the grift is largely improvisational. When I grab a good idea and run with it, things usually work out, but when I try to over-solve the problem … well, we’ve already seen how well that’s gone. Anyway, in Yuan’s case, I really didn’t want to know too much, for when you “meet” a well-researched mark, there’s always the chance that some of your research will accidentally dribble out.

  Twenty minutes later, I stood in the doorway of the Blue Magoon letting my eyes adjust to the gloom and my lungs to oxygen debt. The bartender squinted at me and gave the barest grunt of greeting. Mirplo had cleared out. Of the half-dozen people drinking their day away, the only Asian in the bar was not hard to spot. He occupied the last booth before the bathrooms, where he sat hunched over a newspaper. His lank black hair fell down over his eyes and he pushed it away at intervals, only to have it fall back down and occlude his vision once again.

  I walked to the bar, spread out my laminated map, and asked the bartender, “If I were UCLA, where would I be?”

  “Nowhere near here,” he said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said. “Did I make a wrong turn off Cahuenga?” I pronounced it ka-HUN-guh.

  “Man, that’s the least of your wrong turns,” said the bartender. He took my map and traced a route with his finger. “Go down to Holloway, shoot up to Sunset, and take that out to Westwood. UCLA’s on your left.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Mind if I use your can?”

  “Knock yourself out.” I walked toward the bathroom. As I drew abreast of Yuan’s booth, my cell phone rang. I broke stride to answer it.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “It’s me calling you,” said Mirplo. “How’s my timing?”

  “Hi, Dad,” I said with an edge of irritation in my voice.

  “Blee blee blah blah bloo bloo,” said Mirplo, carrying on his part of the conversation as he saw fit.

  Now I really sounded irked. “Dad, I told you, nothing’s been decided yet. I’m just having a look around.”

  “Ape ledger legions toothy flak offer hew knighted snakes over marigolds.”

  “Yeah, well it’s my money, isn’t it?”

  “Money schmoney, honey bunny.”

  “Dad,” I said severely, “I’m not having this conversation. That’s why it’s called a trust, remember? Because people trust you with it.”

  “There once was a girl from Cadiz, whose hooters hung down to her knees. She spread her vagina from here to Regina …”

  “Nothing’s been decided! I’ll call you later.”

  “… and buttered her butt crack with cheese.”

  I closed the phone with an angry snap.

  “Trouble?” asked Yuan, not looking up from the paper. I heard the flattened vowels of his Australian accent.

  “Family,” I said with a shrug, and went into the can.

  When I came back out, Yuan had changed position. He now leaned casually against the wall of the booth, his pipe-stem legs stretched out across the red vinyl bench. “So,” he asked as I passed, “what do you want to study?”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems you’re scouting schools.”

  “I am.” I let my voice betray my surprise. “How did you know?”

  He cocked a slender finger at my book. “Between that and … ‘Dad, it’s my money,’ I’d say … gonna take a lark here …” He furrowed his brow in ponder. “Something impractical. Art?”

  “Worse. Philosophy.”

  “And father doesn’t like it?”

  “He’s an idiot. He thinks I should study business.”

  “Because you have all this money to manage.”

  “Wow, you don’t miss much, do you.”

  “I have a practiced ear.” He leaned forward and extended a hand. “Rick Chen.”

  I shook his hand. “Chad Thurston,” I said, then added self-consciously, “the third.”

  “So, family money. Have a seat.”

  I slid into the booth opposite, dropping my book and my map on the table between us. Yuan noted the map and asked, “Where are you from?”

  “Kensington, Maryland.”

  “Nice place?”

  “Not bad if you own it. You’re from England, right?” This was a gentle ping, to see if Yuan carried the Aussie pride gene and its concordant annoyance at American provincialism.

  He merely smiled indulgently and said, “Australia.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “The accent …”

  “Common duff. No worries.”

  We fell into an affable conversation ranging across topics from how my family made its money (textiles and banking) to why “Rick Chen” was in L.A. (internship), and thus traded lies for a while. And though mine was a willing surrender to the snuke, nevertheless I could feel the textured smoothness with which Yuan eased me in. Watching us over my own shoulder, as it were, I thought, Damn, this guy is good.

  At last I said, “I better get going. I have a meeting with the department head.”

  “In philosophy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “What is what?”

  “Your philosophy. In a nutshell.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You must have some sort of belief orientation, mate. I mean, you don’t just go into the study of philosophy flying blind, right?”

  “Well, kind of the point is to learn.”

  “Still, you must have some platform.”

  “It’s really unformed.”

  He smiled expansively. “In a nutshell.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me see …” I rifled through the files of my brain, looking for “my philosophy in a nutshell.” “How about this?” I said at last. “The universe loves us. All we have to do is love it back.”

  Yuan nodded. “That’s beautiful, mate. Mind if I podge it?”

  “I … don’t know what that means.”

  “Never mind. Give us your handy.”

  “Handy?”

  “The phone, mate.”

  I slid my phone across the table. It wasn’t my phone, of course, but one I’d dummied up for Chad Thurston. He flipped it open and punched in some digits. In a second, his own phone rang. “There,” he said, “now you have my number. Call before you leave town,” he said. “I’ll shout you a beer.”

  “Wow, that’s really nice of you.”

  “Not that nice,” he said. “I kind of daylight as an investment manager. I’d like to pitch your business.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. I picked up my stuff and headed for the door. I couldn’t help smiling. But as I caught a glimpse of Yuan in the back-bar mirror, I noticed that he was smiling, too.

  16.

  open kimonos

  I went for a run. I only ever run occasionally, when I need to clear the cobwebs from my
brain. The health aspect doesn’t interest me at all because, really, what’s the point? You exercise, eat right, take care of your body, you might live an extra ten years, right? But which ten years are we talking about? Ninety to one hundred? If I could have my twenties over again, then maybe, but an extra decade of decrepitude? Nej tak. I swear to God, before senility sweeps over me, I’m going to put together a lethal dose of sleeping pills and keep them by my bed with a note that reads, “When you forget what these are for, take them.”

  It pays to plan ahead.

  I guess you could say that I was running for the sake of forward planning. In all my years on the razzle, I’d never been so deeply enmeshed in a play over which I had so little control. And while I was pleased with the outcome of my meeting with Yuan, at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the meeting went a little too well. I mean, I’m good at the grift and all, but did I really sell my philosopher-prince persona that convincingly? If Yuan was good at the grift, too, and it struck me that he was, then why did he bite so hard? Maybe grifters in Australia just aren’t that cunning.

  Maybe.

  But the more I ran, the more convinced I became that Yuan was acting his role as thoroughly as I was acting mine. We were two sharp cookies grinding against each other and making a bunch of crumbs. So then, what should I tell Hines and the others? That he’s not onto me but he is? Or would that be just another case of dueling fictions, with everyone lying and everyone else trying to unpry the lie? Tired of that shit. And the more I ran, the more tired of it I got.

  I ran the back trail of Elysian Park, the one overlooking the Golden State Freeway, then crossed over and plunged into the acreage south of Stadium Way. Running a tangent past the grounds of the Los Angeles Police Academy, I could hear the echoing rattle of gunfire from the shooting range. That got me thinking about guns. So far, I mused, everyone’s coercive intent had been backed by nothing more than words and threats, plus the usual grifter’s manipulation of desire, fact, and fear. Could things escalate to gun violence? Of course they could. The thought did nothing to calm my jangled nerves. It’s not that I’m afraid of guns, but I don’t trust them. They lull you into a false sense of security. You think that just because you’re on the right end of one you’ve got everything under control. In my experience, by the time the guns come out, control is a thing of the past.