The Gold Coast

53

Sandy’s return from Europe is a bit hectic. His answering machine goes on for two and a half hours, at a minute maximum per message. It seems that half the messages are from Bob Tompkins, too. So he calls Bob. “Hi, Bob, Sandy here.”

“Ah, Sandy! You’re back!”

“Yeah, I decided to, to—”

“To let things cool down a little, eh Sandy? Well, it worked.”

Bob laughs, and Sandy nods to himself. It did indeed work. Talking to Bob on the day he got the news would have been blistering.

“You shouldn’t worry so much about things, Sandy. I mean when I first got your message I was upset, sure, but it didn’t take me a week to get over it, for Christ’s sake! I mean when you’ve got the Coast Guard breathing down your neck, what else can you do? You could have dumped those barrels over the side, right? So just the fact that we might be able to recover them is a big plus. Listen, if you can liberate that stuff, there’ll be a bonus in it for you, for duty above and beyond the call.”

“That’s great, Bob, I’m glad you feel that way about it. But there’s a certain problem with where we stashed the stuff. We just picked the nearest isolated spot on the coast, you know, and dumped them in a bunch of boulders. But then we noticed that the buildings for Laguna Space Research were on the top of the bluff above us. And they’ve just announced an increase in security around their facility, because of the recent sabotages. Including a watch against boats landing.”

“Ah ha. That is a problem. So… this company is a defense contractor, then?”

“Yeah.”

“I see.” Long pause. “Okay, well listen Sandy, we’ll have to figure something out to help you, then. I’ll get back to you on this, okay? Meanwhile just let it ride.”

Fine with Sandy. He’s free to concentrate on some heavy-duty dealing. He’s got quite a bit of ground to make up, and so for the next few days he goes into overdrive, working sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours each day, to the point where he has to put some serious effort into supply as well as sales. Angela, who sees the need, is doing overtime herself taking care of him and the ap and their meals and the nightly party, which has regained its momentum in the days since their return. The constant running around in traffic, keeping track of handshake deals, doing the bookkeeping in the head, all over a ground base of massive drug intake, is exhausting in the extreme. In fact he’s finding it hard to come home at night and really enjoy the party.

“Wow, burnout,” he says to Angela.

“Why don’t you take tomorrow night off. In the long run it’ll help you keep this pace.”

“Good idea.”

So the next night he comes home early, around eleven, and corrals Abe, Tashi, and Jim. “Hey you guys, let’s cruise.”

The others like the idea. They get in Sandy’s big car and track onto Newport Freeway north. Sandy programs a loop into the car: Newport Freeway north, Riverside west, Orange south, Garden Grove east, and then north on the Newport again: it’s upper level all the way in each of these directions, so that it’s like going for a little plane ride on autopia, with the great lightshow and all the other cars and their passengers for entertainment.

They started doing this together on the wrestling team, when they first got driver’s licenses. Starving and thirsty high school kids, trying to make weight, or celebrating the end of the weekly necessity to make weight by pigging out.… Tonight there’s a strongly nostalgic feeling about it; they’re cruising the freeways, a basic OC activity. How could they have lost the habit?

Sandy is driving, Abe’s in the front passenger seat, Jim is behind Abe, Tash behind Sandy. The first order of business is to deploy a few eyedroppers, in fact there’s a sort of synergistic capacity upgrade when these four get together like this, and they really drown their eyes, according to long-standing tradition.

“Nothing like coming down to the old club and settling in,” Jim says blissfully. “The lightshow is good tonight, isn’t it? Look there, you can see in the pattern of the streetlights, the original plattings for the first towns in the area. See the really tight squares of streetlights are the oldest towns, when the platting was into really small blocks. There’s Fullerton… there’s Anaheim, the oldest… pretty soon we’ll see Orange… and in between the pattern stretches way out, see? Longer blocks and twisty housing tracts.”

“Yeah, I see it!” Sandy says, surprised. “I never noticed that before, but it’s there.”

“Yep,” Jim says, proudly. He goes rattling on about real estate history, which his employer First American Title Insurance and Real Estate has all the records for; then about First American and Humphrey’s attempt to build his office building on the land of the dismembered Cleveland National Forest; then about a new computer system that the company has installed in the offices, very advanced, “I mean you really can talk to it, not just simple commands but really complicated stuff, it’s like the real beginning of the man-computer interface, and it’s really going to mean a lot for,” and then suddenly all three of his friends have turned to stare Jim in the face.

He comes to a halt and Sandy giggles. Abe, shaking his head, says in a pitying, exasperated voice: “Jim, no one gives a fuck about computers.”

“Ah. Yes. Well. You know.” And Jim starts to giggle himself. Must have been an eyedropper of Funny Bone, that last unmarked one.

Abe is pointing down at the Orange Mall. “Sandy, did you ever tell these guys about the time we were in the parking garage there?”

“No, don’t think I did,” Sandy says, grinning.

Abe turns to the two in the backseat. “We were leaving the mall and driving out of the big parking garage they have, you know, the thirty-story one, and we’re following the arrows down the ramps from floor to floor, and it’s not a simple spiral staircase situation at all, they’ve got it screwed up and you have to go to successive corners of each floor to get down, or something like that. So here we are following the arrows down, and Sandy’s eyes do their bug-out-of-his-head thing, you know?”

Tashi and Jim nod, imitating the look in tandem.

“Exactly.” Abe laughs. “And he says, ‘You know, Abraham, if it weren’t for these arrows…’ and I say uh-huh, yeah, what? And he says, ‘Stop the car! Wait a minute! Stop the car, I forgot something!’ So I sit there while he goes back in the mall, and then he comes running back out with two big cans of paint—one can white, one a gray the color of the garage floors. And two brushes. ‘We’ll start at the bottom,’ he says, ‘and no one will ever escape.’”

“Ahhh, hahaha.”

“The labyrinth without the thread,” Jim says.

“You aren’t kidding! I mean, think about it! So we drive around and at every arrow Sandy jumps out and quick paints over the old one and puts a new one down, pointing in a new direction—not necessarily the opposite direction, just a new one. And finally we reach the top floor. Already we can hear the honking and the cursing and all from the floors below. And then Sandy turns to me with this puzzled expression, and says, ‘Hey, Abe—how are we going to get out of here?’”

Sandy’s manic laugh dominates the rest.

They’re tracking south on the Orange Freeway, coming to the giant interchange with the Santa Ana and the Garden Grove freeways—another immense pretzel of concrete ribbons flying through the air, lightly buttressed on concrete pillars. Their change to the Garden Grove east will take them right through the middle of the knot. Great views over Santa Ana to the south, then Orange to the north; just names in the continuum of the lightshow, but given what Jim has said about the pattern of the streetlights, interesting to observe.

Tashi rises up like he’s achieved enlightenment, and speaks the message from the cosmos: “There are only four streets in OC.”

“What?” cries Abe. “Look around you, man!”

“Platonic forms,” Jim says, understanding. “Ideal types.”

“Only four.” Tash nods. “First there’s the freeways.”

“Okay. I’ll grant you that.”

“Then there’s the commercial streets, big ones with parking lots flanking them and all the businesses behind the parking lots, or on them. Like Tustin Avenue, right down there.” He points north.

“Or Chapman.” “Or Bristol.” “Or Garbage Grove Boulevard.” “Or Beach.” “Or First.” “Or MacArthur.” “Or Westminster.” “Or Katella.” “Or Harbor.” “Or Brookhurst.”

“Yeah yeah yeah!” Tashi interrupts them. “Point proven! There are many commercial streets in OC. But they all are one.”

“I wonder,” Sandy says dreamily, “if you blindfolded someone and spun them around to disorient them, then took off the blindfold somewhere on one of the commercial streets, how long it would take them to identify it?”

“Forever,” Tash opines. “They’re indistinguishable. I think they made a one-mile unit and then just reproduced it five hundred times.”

“It would be a challenge,” Sandy muses. “A sort of game.”

“Not tonight,” Abe says.

“No?”

“No.”

“The third kind of street,” Tashi forges on, “is the residential street, class A. The suburban streets of the housing tracts. Please don’t start naming examples, there are ten zillion.”

“I like the cute curly ones in Mission Viejo,” Sandy says.

“Or the old cul-de-sac exclusive models,” Jim adds.

“And the fourth type?” says Abe.

“Residential street, class B. The urban ap streets, like down there in Santa Ana.”

“A lot of that’s original platting,” Jim says. “Now it’s as close to slums as we’ve got.”

“As close to slums?” Abe repeats. “Man, they’re there.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“There’s a fifth kind of street,” Sandy announces.

“You think so?” Tash asks, interested.

“Yeah. I guess you could call it the street-freeway. It’s a street, but there’s nothing facing it at all—it’s backed by housing-development walls, mostly, and there’s no shops, no pedestrians—”

“Well, none of them have pedestrians.”

“True, but I mean even less than usual. They’re just avenues for tracking fast where there aren’t freeways.”

“Negative numbers of pedestrians?”

“Yeah, we use those a lot,” Abe says. “Like Fairhaven, or Olive, or Edinger.”

“Exactly,” Sandy says.

“Okay,” Tash agrees. “We’ll make it five. There are five streets in OC.”

“Do you think it’s because of zoning laws?” Jim asks. “I mean, why is that?”

“More use habits than zoning, I’d bet,” Tash says. “Stores like to be together, housing developments are built in group lots, that kind of thing.”

“Each street has a history,” Jim says, staring out the window with his mouth hanging open. “My God!”

“Better get writing, Jim.…”

“Speaking of streets and history,” Sandy says, “I was driving east on the Garden Grove on a really clear morning a few weeks ago, first morning of a Santa Ana wind, you know? You could see Baldy and Arrowhead and everything. And the sun was just up, and I looked north to where the old Orange Plaza used to be—a little west of that, I’d guess. And I couldn’t believe my eyes! I mean, down there I suddenly saw this street that I’d never seen before, and it had really tall skinny palm trees on one side of it, and the street surface was like white concrete, wider than usual, and the houses on each side were solo houses with yards, little bungalows with enclosed porches and grass lawns, and sidewalks and everything! I mean it was like one of those old photos from the 1930s or something!”

Jim is bouncing in his seat with excitement, leaning over into the front. “Where, where, where, where!”

“Well, that’s the thing—I don’t know! I was so surprised that I got off at the next exit and tracked on over to take a look for it. I thought you’d be interested, and I even thought I might want to buy a house there if I could, it looked so… So I tracked around for about a half hour looking for it, and I couldn’t find it! Couldn’t even find the palm trees! Since then every time I drive that stretch I look for it, but it just isn’t there.”

“Whoah.”

“Heavy.”

“I know. I figure it had something to do with the light or something. Or maybe a time warp.…”

“Oh, man.” Jim hops up and down on his seat, thinking about it. “I want to find that.”

They track some more. In the cars around them other people live their lives. Occasionally they track by freeway parties, several cars hooked together, people passing things between them, music all the same from every car.

“Let’s fuel up,” Tashi says. “I’m hungry.”

“Let’s swing into one of the drive-thrus,” Sandy says, “so we don’t have to leave the loop. Which shall it be?”

“Jack-in-the-Box,” says Abe.

“McDonald’s,” says Jim.

“Burger King,” says Tashi.

“Which one?” Sandy shouts as they pass one of the drive-thru complex offramps. The others all shout their choices and Tash reaches over Sandy’s shoulder for the steering switch. Abe and Jim grab his arm and try to move it, and the struggle begins. Shouts, curses, wrestling holds, karate chops: finally Sandy cries, “Taste test! Taste test!” The others subside. “We’ll try all of them.”

And so he gets off at the Lincoln exit in Orange and they drive-thru the Burger King and the Jack’s, stopping briefly to order pay and collect from the little windows on the upper level; then around the bend to the Kraemer exit in Placentia, for Jim’s Big Macs.

“See, look. The Burger King Whopper has indisputably got the best meat. Check it out.”

“Isn’t that some kind of bug there, Tash?”

“No! Let’s look at yours if you dare, you know they make those Big Macs out of petroleum byproducts.”

“They do not! In fact they won the slander case in court on that!”

“Lawyers. Look at that meat, it’s sludge!”

“Well, it’s better than the double Jack Abe’s got, anyway.”

“Sure, but that’s saying nothing.”

“Hey,” says Abe. “The Jack’s are adequate, and look here at the malt and fries you get at Jack’s. Both absolutely unmatchable. Burger King malts are made of air, and McDonald’s malts are made of styrofoam. You only get a real ice-cream malt at Jack’s.”

“Malt? Malt? You don’t even know what malt tastes like! There hasn’t been malt in this country since before the millennium! Those are shakes, and the McShake is just fine. Orange-flavored, even.”

“Come on, Jim, we’re trying to eat here. Don’t make me puke.”

“And the McFries are also the best. Those Jackfries, you could inject drugs with those things.”

“Ho, Mr. Get Tough! Your fries are actually shot puts in disguise! Get serious!”

“I am serious! Here, Sandy, you be judge. Eat this, here.”

“No, Sandy, mine first! Eat this!”

“Mmff mmff mmff.”

“See, he likes mine better!”

“No, he just said Burger Whop, didn’t you hear him?”

Sandy swallows. “They taste the same.”

“What kind of a judge are you?”

Abe says, “Best malt—”

“Shake! Shake! No such thing as malt! Mythical substance!”

“Best malt, best fries, perfectly standard burger.”

“In other words the burger is disgusting,” Tashi says. “There’s no fighting it, the basis of the American body is the hamburger, the rest is just frills. And Burger King has the best burger by miles. And so there you have it.”

“All right,” Sandy says. “Tashi, give me the patty out of yours.”

“What? No way!”

“Yeah, come on. There’s only half left anyway, right? Give it to me. Now Abe, give me the bun with the secret sauce. Not the other one, that’s blank! Ahhh, hahahahahahaha, what a burger, Jesus, give me the secret sauce. Jim, hand over that smidgin of lettuce, right, okay, and the ketchup in its convenient poison-proofed pill-sized container. Fine, fine. Abe, hand over the malt. Yeah, you win! Hand it over. The fries, hmm, well, let’s just mess them all together here, on the seat here, that’s okay. Where’d that ketchup go? Slip down the straw, did it? Squirt it on there, Abe, and watch out you don’t get it all on one fry. Right. There we have it, bros. Le Grand Compromis, the greatest American meal of all time! Fantastic! Dig in!”

“Whoah.”

“Think I’ve lost my appetite, here.…”

When they’re done eating, Sandy takes over the controls and turns them back toward home. It’s late, he’s got another full day tomorrow.

They track down the Newport Freeway, on the underlevel, the adscreens hanging from the underside of the upper level, flashing over them is a colorful subliminal parade of words, images, images, words. BUY! NEW! LOOK! NOW! SPECTAC! They slump back in their seats, watch the lights streak in the car windows.

No one speaks. It’s late, they’re tired. There’s a feeling in the car that is somehow… elegiac. They’ve just performed one of their rituals, an old, central ritual that seems to have been a part of their lives always. How many nights have they cruised autopia and talked, and eaten a meal, and looked at the world? A thousand? Two thousand? This is how they were friends together. And yet this night it feels, somehow, as if this may have been the last time they will perform this particular ritual. Nothing lasts forever. Centrifugal forces are tugging on all their lives, on their collective life; they feel it, they know that the time is coming when this long childhood of their life will have to end. Nothing lasts forever. And this feeling lies as heavy in the car as the smell of French fries.…

Sandy punches a button and his window slides down. “An eyedropper for the road?”

After they enter SCP’s parking garage and Abe and Tash have walked off to their cars, Sandy gestures Jim back to him. Scratching his head sleepily, he says, “Jim, have you seen much of Arthur lately?”

“Oh, a little. Once since we got back, I guess.”

Sandy considers what line of questioning would be best. “Do you know if he’s involved in anything, you know, anything more serious than those posters he puts up?”

Jim blushes. “Well, you know. I’m not really sure.…”

So Arthur is involved. And Jim knows about it. Meaning that Jim may be involved, too. Possibly. Probably. It’s hard for Sandy to imagine Jim taking part in sabotage actions against local industrial plants, but who can say? He is one to follow an idea.

And now it’s Sandy’s turn to consider how much he can say. Jim is one of his best friends, no doubt about it, but Bob Tompkins is a major business partner, and by extension he has to be careful of Raymond’s interests too. It’s a delicate question, and he’s tired. There doesn’t seem to be any pressing hurry in the matter; and it would be better, actually, if he had more of substance to tell Jim, if he decides to speak to him. He’s certain now that Arthur Bastanchury is working for Raymond, and pretty sure that Jim is working with Arthur. The question is, does Raymond work for anyone? That’s the important thing, and until he learns more about it there’s no use in upsetting Jim, he judges. Truth is, he’s too tired to think about it much right now.

He pats Jim’s arm. “Arthur should be careful,” he says wearily, and turns to go to the elevator. “And you too,” he says over his shoulder, catching a surprised look on Jim’s face. He gets in the elevator. Three A.M. If he gets up at seven, he can reach his dad before lunch in Miami.