Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Aaron talked about his graduation from Santa Monica High School—Samo, he called it. He had liked the school very much for the diversity of the student body, but it had bothered him that the kids were so invested in cliques. They were divided along the divided lines of the city, grouped by race or by gang affiliation or by their identification with a subcult such as surfers or punkers.

  It had surprised Aaron how few of his black classmates had actually graduated. It wasn’t as though they had flunked out or anything. They just didn’t show up for the graduation ceremony. Guys he’d known for four years, guys who’d visited him at his house—they simply weren’t there. The same thing was true of the Hispanic students, he said, although to a lesser degree. Some of them did attend the ceremony to accept their diplomas.

  With a keen eye for social logistics, Aaron described how the various cliques deployed themselves around the school grounds, with the jocks holding forth at the center, the blacks clinging to the margins, and the Hispanics hanging around by a Dumpster. The Dumpster business upset him. It seemed so obvious and so unfair.

  “It’s like they know they’re treated like garbage,” he said angrily. Aaron was still young enough to expect some justice from the world.

  He brought out his yearbook to show me. It differed profoundly from the yearbook I had looked at in Wasco, at the Crettols’ place. The Samo yearbook had a strange quality of aspiration about it. Sometimes the photos of the students and the teachers resembled the eight-by-ten glossies that agents sent to casting directors. It was as if the students weren’t really students, and the teachers weren’t really teachers. The dean had posed in a baseball cap worn backward, forever hip. There were no Hispanics on the faculty and only one black.

  Aaron thumbed through the pages and remembered things. He would smile at a picture and relate an anecdote about the person or the situation. Then he came to some pictures of the faculty and said quietly that two teachers had died that year of AIDS.

  How much more troubling his adolescence was than mine, I thought, and what sad facts he had to master. It would make anybody wonder about the value of growing up in California. Better to stay on your skateboard, as Aaron often did, rocketing past the palm trees directly to the beach.

  FRED SANDS HAD HIS HEADQUARTERS in a ten-story building in Brentwood shielded by opaque windows of blackish smoked glass that kept out the storied light of Los Angeles. The windows made you think that something dark and insidious must be going on inside, but Fred Sands was clearly doing something right. He owned forty real estate offices around the city, dealt in commercial properties as far north as Sacramento, and held the highest honor that the Boy Scouts had to give, the God and Country Exemplar Award.

  One reason for Sands’s success was his ability to look toward the future. He was in the vanguard of southern California realtors in his efforts to sell blue-ribbon houses and land in the state to the Japanese. He had recently entered into an affiliation agreement with Sumitomo Real Estate to market his residential listings in Japan, and his “Preview of Homes” videos would soon be shown on Japanese TV.

  The Pacific Rim Division of Fred Sands was currently recording transactions at a monthly rate of $12 million. Its director, Christine Lee Watt, supervised several teams of realtors, each devoted to a specific market overseas, be it Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Australia. The teams were staffed with native speakers as necessary and had the expertise to negotiate a deal in a way that was culturally acceptable and gave no offense.

  Christine Lee Watt met with me while I was waiting out the minutes to my appointed hour with Fred Sands. She was a petite, fine-boned woman in her early thirties about to become a mother, eight months down and counting. She had been born in Tokyo to Chinese parents and had come to California to go to UC Berkeley, where she had majored in business. She had enjoyed her time at Berkeley very much, but after graduating she had gone back to Japan to take a job in investment banking.

  Life was much simpler for her there, she said. She earned a better salary, had better health care, never fretted about her safety, and got better perks, such as reimbursement for her expenses as a commuter. She might never have returned to America if she hadn’t married a Californian, in fact.

  Her career with Fred Sands had started two years earlier. The bulk of her trade in the Pacific Rim Division was done with the Japanese. Everyone knew that they were ardent players in commercial real estate, but they were also quite active in the residential market, Christine told me, because the prices here were so low compared to what they paid at home.

  She gave me an example. A nice apartment in the Ginza district in Tokyo could cost a buyer $6 million, while for $2 million that same buyer could buy an okay house, a whole house, in Beverly Hills, a neighborhood that the Japanese loved. The amount of desirable Beverly Hills property was limited, so its market value was insured. Then, too, “Beverly Hills” stood for something special in Japan, something of inalterable quality, like Fresno cotton or John Wayne.

  The Japanese always shopped for location, Christine went on, and avoided any neighborhood where there was a hint of danger. They loved the weather and the golf in southern California. At home, they would never dream of having so much space and so much privacy. A man might have a luxury car and belong to an exclusive club, but he would never own any land in a city, not ever.

  They also found it cheaper to live in Los Angeles. The fruit and the vegetables available in Beverly Hills cost a pittance, they thought. In Tokyo, a ripe cantaloupe had the status of a rare gift and could run them a hundred dollars. They were becoming more comfortable, as well, because more and more Asians were settling around the city, making it less and less foreign to them.

  At the most basic level, the Japanese who dealt with Christine saw residential property in L.A. as a superior investment. It helped them to bury money that they might otherwise lose in taxes. The inheritance tax in Japan was farcical. There was a saying that a family could be stripped of its fortune in three generations.

  A Japanese buyer did not have to occupy a house purchased in California, Christine pointed out. It could be rented or used to put up visiting corporate executives. Often the houses were turned into residences for children who were getting an education in the United States.

  I asked Christine if she had any particular problems when she worked with investors from Japan, but she said she didn’t. Americans doing business on the Pacific Rim were more difficult, she thought, because they had so many misconceptions about the Japanese and their country. It was true that Japan was a democracy, at least in theory, but Christine believed that it was much more rigidly structured and controlled than the United States. People didn’t feel as free.

  “The system works better in some ways and less well in others,” she said. “There are always trade-offs. Californians need to be more aware of the differences and more tolerant of them.”

  FROM THE PACIFIC RIM DIVISION, I walked to the lobby and boarded an elevator whose doors opened again on a plain outer office on the ninth floor, where a single, harried receptionist in a headset was both fielding telephone calls and signing in visitors. Had I made a wrong turn somewhere? The outer office didn’t look anything like the imperial gateway that I had expected of Fred Sands. It seemed ill-suited to a man who had shaken hands with presidents and had been a frequent guest on TV and radio talk shows.

  At any rate, I was right on time. After giving my name to the receptionist, I sat alone and in silence on a half-moon sliver of gray suede couch and read through the materials that the Fred Sands people had sent me, copies of profiles in such magazines as Beverly Hills 213 that had photos of Fred and his wife, Cindy, and interesting quotes about how they had “hectic schedules” and tried to “prioritize and ration” their time.

  Fred and Cindy had three kids and were building a house in Bel-Air to go along with their beach house in Malibu. They felt fortunate to have a great lifestyle and didn’t take it for granted, the magazine article said.
/>   After I’d been sitting on the sliver of gray suede for about ten minutes, a woman who identified herself as a publicity assistant darted out from the inner sanctum and sat next to me. She wanted to know what sort of questions I planned to ask Fred Sands. This was news to me, this preinterview. I ran through my mental list, midget with a motorcycle, nature of the dynamo, and answered as simply as I could.

  “Questions about real estate,” I said.

  She nodded approvingly. “It will just be a minute.”

  Another thirty minutes went by before I rose from the couch to inform the receptionist that I would not be able to wait any longer for Fred Sands because I had to leave for my next appointment. Obviously, Sands had failed to prioritize me into his hectic schedule.

  The brinksmanship sparked her into a flurry of activity. She spoke some hushed words through her headset to the inner sanctum and then the publicity assistant and a new player, Sands’s secretary, intercepted me at the elevator, to tell me that Fred could see me now.

  “It’s too late,” I said, pausing for effect. “I have to get to my next appointment.”

  Riding down in the elevator, I cursed Fred Sands and carried on about his bad manners and abominated him for being a venal and successful realtor, but I had to quit the ranting when the voice of Los Angeles broke into my tirade.

  “You chump!” said Los Angeles, with a laugh. “Haven’t you been paying any attention at all? Whatever made you think you counted?”

  AARON GIGLIOTTI HAD a part-time minder, Teddy Zambetti, who lived down the block and looked in on him now and again as a favor to his parents. Zambetti’s name was like the lush slide of brushes over the drums that he played as a musician. He had toured with Jackson Browne and had worked as a sideman on many rock albums, and one night he stopped by the house after ten o’clock looking really beat, a guy worn out from a long recording session and still willing to extend himself on behalf of friends.

  Nobody had introduced me to Zambetti or explained to him what I was doing in the house, and he figured that maybe he should try to find out, just in case.

  “I’m a drummer,” he said, in a friendly way. “I’ve been in the studio for hours, you know? So, like, what are you—just bopping around?”

  “No, I’m a writer.”

  “A writer?”

  “Yes. The world is my studio.”

  In the morning, I felt stupid and small-minded. Los Angeles was turning me into the smartass that I’d always had the potential to become. There was a perverse rhythm to the city, a strange kind of accounting. Fred Sands fucked you over, I said to myself, so you had to fuck over Teddy Zambetti. The fucking-over just got passed along in L.A., like a malicious strain of influenza.

  I took to the freeways, another aimless driver out to forget everything that had happened to him in the last few hours. I had learned that the freeways, however crabbed, had the power to induce a mood of calm once you’d taught yourself to look beyond the crashes and the mayhem and the flotsam of crumpled chrome and manikin limbs.

  The comforting message of the freeways was that you would always be behind and so would always have an excuse. You would never accomplish what you’d hoped to accomplish, would never arrive where you had hoped to arrive at the time that you had hoped to arrive there, and would fail to accumulate the money or the fame that was deservedly yours because someone else, probably Aaron Spelling, had got to it first, jumping your claim.

  The message brought a curious relief. Soon the freeway alpha waves began to flow, and I was as weightless as a dolphin in saltwater until I had to leave my car.

  In Beverly Hills, where I parked near Rodeo Drive, I heard a man ask for directions to the Harbor Freeway and say, “Thanks, I’ll be fine once I’m in the system.”

  Rodeo Drive served up a scary panorama of cosmetically enhanced women and extraterrestrial lounge lizards whose ponytails were stuck inside their slouchy sport coats. Like Susanville, Beverly Hills had a sister city—Cannes, France. At Tribeca Restaurant, a Los Angeles gloss on New York, two female shoppers discussed cholesterol while sipping Chardonnay.

  “I give Adam turkey burgers all the time,” one of them confessed to the other, sotto voce. “I put on the tomatoes and the lettuce, and he doesn’t know the difference!”

  An extraterrestrial blew in, a regular. The bartender asked, “Beer?” Came the reply, “Nah, just a Kaliber. I’m doing the wagon thing.”

  I got back on the freeway. The downside of driving and meditating was that you were exposed to four times as many cancer-causing chemicals than usual, even with your windows rolled up. You breathed carbon monoxide, of course, and benzene and toluene. You breathed xylene and ethylene dibromide and dichloride, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, perchloroethylene, a little chromium, a dollop of nickel, and a ration of lead as a garnish.

  At the house in the evening, I grabbed some recent copies of the Times and ransacked them for the latest bloodbaths. In addition to becoming a smartass, I was also developing into a shootings buff. My incredulity was constantly being tested. Each new slaughter seemed an attempt to stretch the limits of the genre and give a new spin to the concept of violent death, investing it with fresh imaginative energy to create a sequel with legs, Shootings II, Shootings III, and Shootings IV.

  A drive-by in Pacoima. Three men killed as they walked from a soccer field after a game. Ordinary.

  Here was something better. An eighty-four-year-old had murdered his estranged wife in the cafeteria at Universal Studios because she refused to take him back.

  And something even better. A disturbed man had emptied a shotgun on a sound stage at Lorimar Studios in Culver City, where an episode of a TV series was being filmed, because he felt that one of the stars had fucked him over in a business deal pertaining to a popcorn company. Then he had committed suicide.

  Elsewhere in Los Angeles County, a drifter from Arizona, who had last worked as a janitor at a Jack-in-the-Box, shot Rebecca Schaeffer, a starlet, because he was obsessed with her. The man had mental problems. He was apprehended in Tucson, where, the Times noted with its infinite attention to such details, the chief of police was Linda Ronstadt’s brother.

  A Jack-in-the-Box janitor-drifter with mental problems.

  In the Times, I came upon a headline that read, “Mental Health Care: A System on the Verge of Collapse.” A citizens’ health-research group had rated L.A. County as the worst place in the United States in terms of the outpatient services that it afforded to the mentally ill. Yet more layoffs and budget cuts were looming. Social workers at a clinic in Santa Monica were reported to be demoralized in the aftermath of a recent attack during which a patient had shot a staff member.

  “Poverty Gap Growing in L.A., Report Finds,” read another headline in the Times, but I already knew the story. Miles of money, money dropping from the clouds.

  I turned on the TV. Reba McEntire said to a talk-show person, “K. T. Oslin is so unique, she’s an individual!”

  Flip the channel.

  Somebody was telling a talk-show person this funny story about how Ronald Reagan had once roomed with a Munchkin, Mickey Carrol, during his days as an actor. The Munchkin had testified that Dutch was clean and a good cook.

  I turned off the TV, closed my eyes, and thought about what still lay ahead of me to the south—Orange County, the Colorado Desert, San Diego, and then the border.

  What was it that Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, a mass murderer, had said after being sentenced to die at the close of his trial?

  “Big deal, death always went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland!”

  BARRY YOURGRAU’S HEART had mended some. He was feeling better. His movie would soon be released, and he was performing his stories at Cafe Largo, a fashionable little venue in the Fairfax District. The performing had gone so well that he’d been asked to read something at Cafe Largo’s weekly poetry bash, where stars, starlets, ingenues, models, and celebrities tried their hand at being Ranier Maria Rilke and Sara Teasdale.
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  Poetry was big with the Hollywood crowd. It came in books and had no economic value whatsoever. A poem was a free spirit, like a butterfly. If you wrote a few, you proved that you were also a free spirit and entitled to wear black clothing and hideously disfiguring eyeglasses. Poetry was above the fray.

  A valet parking attendant claimed my car at Cafe Largo—the first valet ever to work a poetry reading in the history of the world. All the tables inside were occupied or marked “Reserved,” so I took a spot at the bar and listened to the murmuring about the poets who might show up to read that night, maybe Sean Penn or Ally Sheedy.

  Yourgrau joined me momentarily in a state of perturbation. In front of Canter’s Deli, in a benign ambience of derma and gefilte fish, a fellow motorist had taken issue with his driving skills and had threatened to crack his skull. Only a fateful blink of a traffic light, the distance from stop to go, had saved him from a thrashing.

  All in all, it had been an unusual day for Yourgrau, another step forward in the evolutionary process by which he was becoming a Californian. That afternoon, he had visited a psychic in San Fernando Valley for a consultation about his future. He had got the man’s name from the casting director on his movie.

  The psychic lived in a simple tract house, but Yourgrau sensed that he wasn’t like other human beings. He had refused a handshake because he’d just washed. Who knew what manner of interference Yourgrau’s grit and germs might have had on the transmission?

  Seating himself, the psychic had accepted fifty dollars and had eyeballed his visitor. He saw fame in Yourgrau’s aura. Only once before had that happened, with one other special person.

  “Who?” Yourgrau inquired.

  “Vanna White,” the psychic responded.

  The psychic made several predictions about Yourgrau’s love life, but they were radically off-base. Still, the trip to San Fernando Valley had been an adventure, and Yourgrau was glad that he’d gone. He wouldn’t be at a loss anymore if a cocktail-party conversation swerved toward the pananormal, he said.