The Gold Coast

9

Abe Bernard guns his GM freeway rescue truck down the fast track, scattering the cars ahead with the power of the truck’s sound and light show. “Get out of the way!” he shouts, his swarthy hatchet face twisted with anger. He and his partner Xavier have just been tapped out a few moments before, and he is still a bit jacked on the initial adrenaline surge. The driver of a passing car flips them off; Xavier says “Fuck you too, buddy,” and Abe laughs shortly. Stupid fools, when they’ve crashed he hopes they lie there in the metal remembering how often they obstructed rescue teams, realizing that other fools are doing it that very moment as the trucks try to get to them.… Another recalcitrant driver ahead, Abe turns up the siren to its full howl, the music of his work: “Get—out—of the way!”

They’re into the permanent traffic snarl where Laguna Canyon Highway meets the Coast Highway, pretty beach park to the right, century-long volleyball games still going, sun glancing off the sea in a million spearpoints. Abe keeps the siren on and they push cautiously through a red light, up the Canyon Highway. Beside him Xavier is on the box trying to get some more information on the accident, but Abe can’t hear much through the siren and the radio crackle.

The oceanbound lanes across from them are bumpertobumper and crawling, and without a doubt it’s worse on the far side of the accident, everyone overriding their carbrains to slow down and stare over into the other lane, bloodlust curiosity surging.… But going upcanyon they can still move; they haven’t reached the accident’s backup yet.

“Indications seem to be that the track has once again been left behind, causing two cars to occupy the same space at the same time,” Xavier says in his rapid on-the-job patter. “We suspect lane changing is perhaps the culprit. My, look at the traffic ahead.”

“I know.” They’ve reached the backup. Ahead of them the brake light symphony is blinking, redred, redred, redred redred redred. Overrides everywhere, nowhere for people to go, impossible for the computers to clear things up when the lanes clog this badly, it’s time to take the old Chevy supertruck offtrack, yes this baby has an internal combustion engine under its big hood. “Independent lo-comotion,” Xavier sings as Abe turns the key and revs the engine, 1056 horsepower, atavistic Formula One adrenaline rush here as he steers them off the magnetic track into the narrow gap between fast-track cars and the center divider, roaring along in vibratory petrol power, let the poor saps breathe a bit of that carbon monoxide ambrosia, nostalgic whiff of last century’s power smog as they zroom by almost taking off door handles, sideview mirrors, sure why not clip a few to give them a story to tell about this ten-millionth traffic jam of their OC condo lives? Abe still gets a bit buzzed putting the antique skills to work, firing by all the cars; he’s just short of his first anniversary on the job. He cools it, drives closer to the center divider, still just manages to squeeze the gap left by some Cadillac monster, fiberglass body a replica of the 1992 cow, “Sure buddy, I’m the one in a car, here, a big fucking truck in fact and I’ll shave your whole plastic side off if you don’t get over.”

They barrel up the curves of the canyon road past traffic stopped dead on the tracks, past the condos covering the hills on both sides, ersatz Mediterranean minivillas in standard OC style—these carefully named Seaview Clifftops because they’re the first homes upcanyon without the slightest chance of a glimpse of the ocean. Vroom, vroom, vroom, past the complex’s too-small-to-be-used park, where as Jim tells it a hippo that escaped from Lion Country Safari settled down to establish a little hippo’s empire in a pond, until they darted him to crane him out and killed him with too much tranquilizer, the idiots. And just past that heraldic fragment of OC natural history they accelerate over chewed asphalt covered with trash and chips of broken headlight plastic, around a corner and into the sota, the scene of the accident. One Chippiemobile there off the tracks, its rooflight doing a strobe over the scene, red eye winking over and over.

Abe puts the truck in neutral and turns on the exterior power system, and they jump out and run to the scene. CHP are out on the tracks doing what they do best, setting out flares. Fast lane is a mess. As they approach Abe feels the sick horror and helplessness that anyone would feel, oh my God no, then he passes through the membrane as always and the professional takes over, the structural analyst trying to comprehend a certain configuration, and the best way to extricate the organic components of it from the inorganic.… And the horrified helpless witness is left up in a back corner of the mind, staring over the shoulder of the other guy, storing up images for dreams.

This time one of the lane-changing tracks appears to have malfunctioned. It’s rare, but it happens. Working correctly, the computer controlling the magnetic track takes a request from an approaching car, slows cars in the adjacent lane to make a gap, slots the car onto the lane-change track and into a quick S-curve onto the track of the desired lane, fitting it neatly into the flow of traffic. No room for human error, and really it’s thousands of times safer than letting drivers do it. But the one in ten million has come up once again, and the cause of accident is sits, something in the silicon; a car in the middle lane was tracked directly into the side of another in the fast lane, knocking it off its guidance system and into the center divider, while the first car spun and was plowed into by a follow-up car. All at around sixty-five mph. One more follow-up crunched mildly into the mess. The driver of that one, saved by the power of electromagnetic brakes, is out and babbling to the Chippies with the usual edge of hysteria. Abe and Xavier hop around the three main participants. The car against the center divider has a single occupant, crushed between dash, door, and divider. Chest cavity caved and blood-soaked, neck apparently broken. On to the impacting car, a couple in the front seat, driver unconscious and bleeding from the head, woman trapped underneath him and dash, bleeding heavily from the neck but apparently still conscious, eyes fluttering. Main follow-up with heavily starred windshield, not wearing those seat belts were you, two people already dragged out and on the ground, heads bloody.

“Those two in the middle car,” Xavier pants as they run for the truck. “Yeah,” says Abe. “The one on the divider is dots.” Meaning dead on the spot. Xavier grabs his medic pack and hauls back to the car, Abe brings the truck down the shoulder as close to the middle car as he can get. Then he’s out and pulling the cutters from the truckside, yanking on the power cord, hands shoved down into the sleeves, it’s waldo time here and novice expert cutter Abe Bernard now has all the power of modern robotics in his hands. He starts snipping the flimsy steel of the car’s sidewall as if it were chocolate. There’s no resistance to the sheers at all. Water streams out over the metal under the cutters, spraying over Xavier who is crawling around just beyond the reach of Abe’s work, squeezing into the new hole to do his medic routine. Xavier did two tours on Java with the Army and is very good indeed. At this point they could sure use another man or two, but budgets are tight everywhere, lot of rescue trucks to be kept manned and ready for tap-out, and budgets are tight, budgets are tight!

The horrified witness in the back of Abe’s mind watches him snip steel as if he is cutting origami, with Xavier and the woman passenger just beyond the end of the blades, and wonders if he really knows how to do this. But the thought never reaches the part of Abe’s mind that’s at work. A Chippie comes over to help, pulls the wet steel back with his gloved hands, Abe keeps cutting, they make a good new door approximately where the old one used to be, and Xavier’s got some compress kits plastered on the woman and is busy injecting her with various antishock superdrugs and a lot of new plasma/blood. Then it’s time to get her into the inflatable conformable braces, neck and spine held firm and they reach in and everyone takes a hold, carefully here, breath held, warm flesh squeezed between the fingers, blood trickling over the back of the hand, they lift her out, oops her hand is caught, Abe snips the folded section of dash and she’s free. Onto a stretcher, off to the ambulance room in the back of the truck. They run back and extricate the man, who may or may not be living, his head looks bad indeed but they stretcher him and run him into the gutbucket, lay him next to the woman. “Shit I’ve got to confirm the guy in the lead car,” Abe remembers, grabs Xavier’s steth and runs back. He has to break a window and lean in to get the steth on the driver’s neck. Readout shows flat and he’s back to the truck. A private gutbucket has showed to pick up the two from the follow-up car, Abe gives them a quick thumbs-up and guides the cutters as they’re reeled back on board and jumps in the driver’s seat, seat belt on yes, off they go. These old gasoline hogs can really accelerate.

Xavier sticks his head out the window that connects the cab to their rolling ER. “Going to the Lagunatic Asylum?”

“No, the canyon is so fucked up, I figure UCI is faster.”

Xavier nods.

“How are they?”

“The guy’s dead. He was dots, I imagine. The woman’s still going, but she’s lost a lot of blood and her heart’s hurting. I got her patched and plugged in and she’s drinking plasma, but her pulse be weak still. She could use a proper heart machine.” Xavier’s black face is shiny with sweat, he’s looking uptrack anxiously, he wants them to go faster. Abe guns it, they rocket around the last curve onto the Laguna Freeway link between 405 and 5, left on 405 onramp and up the San Diego Freeway, not ontrack but on the shoulder beside it, flying past the tracked cars on their left, pushing 100, 105, quickly to the University Drive offramp and onto the meandering boulevard, here’s where the driving gets tricky, don’t want to pull a Fred Spaulding here, Fred who put a rescue truck into an overpass pylon and killed everyone aboard except the crash victim in back, who died two days later in the hospital.

Headlights, taillights, don’t you dare make that left turn in front of me there isn’t time screech, he puts the siren on full volume and the howl fills everything, throat sinuses cranium, they reach the campus and go down to California Avenue, hang a mean left and fire up the hill to the ER driveway and up to the ambulance doors. By the time he’s out and to the back of the truck Xavier and an ER nurse are rolling the woman through swinging doors and inside.

Abe sits on the loading dock, quivering a bit. A couple more ER nurses come out and he gets up, helps them get the dead driver onto a gurney. Inside. Back onto the rubber edge of the loading dock.

Xavier comes back out, sits heavily beside him. “They’re working on it.” All those years of medic work, the two tours in Indonesia and all, and still Xavier gets into it, every run. He lights a cigarette, hands trembling, takes a deep drag. Abe watches, feeling that he is just as bad as Xavier, though he tries not to care at all. Don’t get into a savior complex! as the unit counselor would say. He looks at his watch: 7:30. Two hours since they got the call. Hard to believe; it feels longer, shorter—like six hours have banged by in fifteen minutes. That’s rescue work for you. “Hey, we were off half an hour ago,” he remembers. “Our shift is over.”

“Good.”

Time passes.

A doctor bumps out the swinging doors. “Bad luck this time, boys,” he says cheerily. “Both dead on arrival, I’m afraid.” Briefly he puts his hands on their shoulders, goes back inside.

For a while they just sit there.

“Shit,” says Xavier, flicking his cigarette into the darkness. In the dim light Abe can just see the look on his face.

“Hey, X, we did what we could.”

“The woman was not DOA! They let her go inside!”

“Next time, X. Next time.”

Xavier shakes his head, stands up. “We’re off, hey?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get out of here then.”

Silently they roll. Abe puts them back on track, enters the program that will take the truck to MacArthur and the Del Mar Freeway, then up the Newport to Dyer. Everything seems empty, quiet. They track into the Fire and Rescue station, park the truck among a few dozen others, go inside, file reports, clock out, walk to their own cars in the employee lot. Abe approaches his car feeling the familiar drained emptiness. Every time he reaches for his own keys in this lot it’s the same. “Catch you later, X,” he calls at the dark figure across the lot.

“Doubtless. When we on again?”

“Saturday.”

“See you then.”

Xavier backs out, off to the depths of lower Santa Ana, and some life Abe can barely imagine: X has a wife, four kids, ten thousand in-laws and dependents… a life out of his grandfather’s generation, as full of melodrama as any video soap. And X, supporting the whole show, is right on the edge. He’s going to crack soon, Abe thinks. After all these years.

He gets back onto the Newport Freeway, great aorta of all the OC lives. River of red fireflies, bearing him on. He punches the program for South Coast Plaza south, sits back. Clicks in a CD, need something loud, fast, aggressive… Three Spoons and a Stupid Fork, yeah, powering out their classic album Get the Fuck Off My Beach.

Abe sings along at the top of his lungs, tracks into SCP, finds parking almost directly below Sandy’s place, takes the elevator up, pops on in. Blast of light, loud music, it’s the Tustin Tragedy on the CD here, singing “Happy Days” in Indonesian gamelan style, punctuated by machine-gun fire. The rhythms perk Abe up immediately, and Erica gives him a peck on the cheek. “Tashi was looking for you.” Good. Sandy barges around a corner, “Abraham, you look wilted, you just got off work, right?” The Sandy grin, an eyedropper appears in his fingers and it’s head back, lids pulled open, drip drip drip. Abe offers it back to Sandy; “Polish it, there’s more.” Drip, drip, drip, his spinal cord is suddenly snapping off big bursts of excess electricity and he wanders into the next room, they’re dancing there and he feels great shocks of energy coursing up his spine and out his fingertips, he dances hard, leaping for the ceiling, shaking it all out, now that feels good. He tilts his head back, “Yow! Yow! Yoweeee!” Coyote time at Sandy’s place, traditional high point of the parties, everyone just hauls back and lets loose, they must be audible all the way to Huntington Beach. Great.

Feeling much better, he goes out onto the balcony. Still no sight of Tash, though the balcony’s his spot; Tash never goes indoors when he can help it. Even lives on a roof, in a tent. Abe loves it; Tash, his closest friend, is like a cold salt splash of the Pacific.

Instead he encounters Jim. Jim’s a good friend too, no doubt about it. But sometimes… Jim’s so earnest, so unworldly; Abe has to be in the right mood to really enjoy Jim’s intense meaningfulness. Or whatever it is. Not now. “Hey there, bro,” Abe says, “Howzit.” Pretty lidded, he is.

“Good. Hey, you worked today, huh? How’d it go?”

Ah, Jimbo. Just what he doesn’t want to talk about. “Fine.” Jim cares, and that’s nice, but Abe wants some distraction, here, preferably Tash, or one of his young women friends… a little chat and he’s off.

Still no Tash on the balcony. To his surprise, he runs into Lillian Keilbacher instead. “Hello, Lillian! I didn’t know you knew Sandy!”

“I didn’t, till tonight.” She looks thrilled to have been introduced, which is funny since Sandy knows everyone.

Lillian is maybe eighteen, a fresh-faced cute kid, blond and suntanned, a lively innocent interest in things.… Her mother and Jim’s mother and Abe’s mother are stalwarts of the tiny church they all attended as kids; the mothers are still into it, Abe and Jim have fallen away like the rest of civilization, Lillian… perhaps in that transition zone, who knows. Shit, Abe thinks guiltily, she shouldn’t be at a party like this! But that almost makes him laugh. Who is he, anyway? He realizes he’s holding the eyedropper sort of hidden, and thinks he’s probably insulting her by being condescending to her youth. Besides, they lid out in second grade these days. He offers it to her. “No thanks,” she says, “it just makes me dizzy.”

He laughs. “Good for you.” He lids a drip, laughs again. “Shit, what are you doing here? Last I saw you you were about thirteen, weren’t you?”

“Probably. But, you know, it doesn’t last.”

He cracks up. “No, I guess not.”

“I probably know more than you think I do.”

Utterly transparent come-on in her eyes as she sidles up to him, so girlish that he wonders if it’s actually a sophisticated come-on in clever disguise. He laughs and sees she’s hurt, instant contraction back into herself as when you touch a sea anemone, ah, clearly she knows just as little as he suspected she did, maybe less. A girl, really. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“Don’t you worry about me.” She sniffs disdainfully. “We’re leaving soon to go to my friend Marsha’s to spend the night anyway.”

Jesus. “Good, good. How are your folks?”

“Fine, really.”

“Say hello to them for me.” Lillian agrees and with a last winsome over-the-shoulder smile she’s off with her buddies. Abe remembers the girlish come-on and cracks up. Maybe she had in mind a first kiss from this handsome dashing old acquaintance, an older man no lie. A nice kid, truly; Sandy’s seems definitely the wrong place for her, and he’s glad to see her and her young friends giggling together out the door, the brave exploration into the den of sin completed.

He’s even gladder half an hour later when Tash is pulled dripping from the Jacuzzi, naked and totally lidded. Giggling young women, friends of Angela’s that Sandy calls the Tustin Trollops, maneuver Tashi onto the surfboard surrogate and urge him to ride some video waves for them, which he does with a perfect stoned grace, unaware of anything but the video wave, a Pipeline beauty twenty feet tall and stretching off into eternity. “Whoah,” says Tash from deep in his own tube. Erica, Tash’s ally, watches him with a look of sharp disapproval; Abe laughs at her.

Jim says “Hey, with his arms out like that he looks just like the statue of Poseidon in the Athens museum, here wait a second.” He goes to the video console and starts typing at the computer, and suddenly the wave is replaced by the motionless image of a statue: tall darkened-bronze bearded man, arms up to throw a javelin, eyes empty holes in the metal. Tash looks up, takes the pose instantly, and it brings down the house. “He does look just like him!” everyone exclaims. Jim, laughing, says, “Even the eyes are the same!” Tash growls in mock anger, without breaking the pose.

Abe laughs loud enough to draw the attention of a couple of the Tustin Trollops. Mary and Inez come over and join him on the couch; they’re part of Abe’s little fan club, and their lithe bodies press against his warmly, their fingers tangle in his black curls. Ah, yes, the blisses of unallied freedom.…

He’s putting his arm around Inez when something—the give of soft flesh?—causes the image of the injured woman to strike him. Pulled from the wreck, bent, patched, braced, bloody—Fuck. Tension twists his stomach and he hugs Inez to him violently, clamping his eyes shut; his face contorts back to a mask of normality. “Where’s that eyedropper I had with me?”