HOPE FOR CHANGE... But Settle for a Bailout (2 page)

Lori and the District Manager went back to
whispering. Moments later, the redhead slid a key from his own ring
and handed it to her, with a plastic card he had pulled from his
wallet. He poured out the tip jar contents onto the counter and
handed her all of the bills, which Lori crumpled into a wad and
stuffed into her jeans pocket. She left out the back door, carrying
her two bags, which she put into the passenger seat of the red
convertible parked next to her bike.

.

Lori lurched to a stop in front of Larry’s
apartment and, attempting to back the convertible into a parking
space, popped the clutch and stalled. She threw on the emergency
flashers, engaged the parking brake, grabbed the keys and ran into
the courtyard, where she found Larry laying in the sun on a wooden
lounge chair, surfing on a tablet, two burritos on a plate on the
table next to him, alongside a glass of ice water.

“Thought you were working….”

“I need your help,” said Lori,
breathlessly.

“Now?” said Larry. “I’m in a chat with Miss
Milkshakes.”

.

The
distance from where Lori dropped off Larry so he could get her bike
was less than a block from Bucksters and barely half-a-mile from
his apartment, but fifteen minutes later, when he rode the Schwinn
up the slight hill to his building, he looked as though he had been
riding for hours.

“You look like shit,” said Lori. “My bike
has gears, you know?”

“So what do you wanna do with it? Leave it
in my apartment?” asked Larry. “I mean, I love ya’, but there’s no
way I am riding this thing to north Long Beach.”

“Here’s fine,” said Lori. “I’m not ready to
go home yet.”

“Let’s go to my grandma’s,” said Larry. “My
dad will be there later, but if we go now, we can blow out before
he gets there.”

.

Standing at an ornately-carved, heavy oaken
door, Larry knocked for almost a minute, sometimes in complex
patterns, while Lori stood, carrying her two cloth bags. The
colorful sock poked its nose over the edge of one bag. A
finely-uniformed, highly-attractive servant answered the door and,
upon seeing Larry, smiled thinly and turned, letting the two walk
in freely, closing the door behind them. Larry and Lori worked
their way through a long hallway, lined with framed photographs and
newspaper clippings, showing the Old Man and Carl van der Bix or
Larry’s father, Calvin. They passed through a main foyer, with a
dark-wood stairwell rising to the second and third floors and lit
by a sparkling glass chandelier. They continued through a formal
dining room, with its long banquet table piled with toys,
children’s books and art supplies. Three children suddenly sped
into the room, past Lori and Larry, one of them bumping into Lori,
falling, appearing stunned momentarily, and then springing up to
resume the run, towards a turn at the opposite end of the hallway.
The sound of an object smashing onto a distant floor produced
flinching from Larry and Lori, as they reached a heavy, plain door
with three bolts and a locked doorknob.

Larry drew a set of keys from his pocket and
unlocked each bolt and swung the door open, to reveal the grand
stairway of white marble that climbed four stories to the
Scandinavian’s suite, the marble cloudy for not having been
polished in years, but still aglow with a dull elegance in the
light and colors streaming in from tall, wide crystal panes and a
ceiling skylight of stained glass.

“In all the time I’ve know you, Larry, has
that thing ever worked?” said Lori, pointing to the electric chair
lift that hugged the banister of the stairwell.

“In middle school,” said Larry, taking the
steps slowly, puffing. “Just before we met.”

As the two walked up the stairs, the middle
portion of the stone railing bore the improvised erection of
mounted Plexiglas panels parallel to the chair lift’s track,
entrapping the unit in a wall of plastic that rose upwards to the
second level. On the inner wall of the plastic were lines of a
dried, flaking substance that appeared to be, and had the earthy
smell of, long-dried human excrement. The stairs opened into a wide
landing at the second level, where a single plain door was set into
the unadorned foyer that offered the only direct access onto the
stairwell from the mansion.

Larry and Lori made their way past photos of
the long-ago Long Beach elite. Reaching the fourth floor, the
stairwell opened onto a wide foyer, at the center of which was a
sculpture of pink stone, of a naked woman glancing downward.
Sunlight streamed in from windows and skylights, bathing the work
by Bertel Thorvaldsen so intensely in light as to make the figure
of a dancer glow with a pink aura, like a flesh-toned ghost. Above
the door in a wide mounted wooden display case was the American
flag presented to Carl van der Bix by General Pershing when the
head of the Expeditionary Force gave flags to each of the aviators
in Carl’s unit and the red-and-white Dannebrog that Astrid Ullagård
waved on board her ship when she arrived in Long Beach.

Larry stood next to Thorvaldsen’s pink
dancer and panted.

“Larry, you really ought’a see a doctor,”
said Lori.

“Don’t have health insurance,” said
Larry.

“Your family’s rich and you can’t go to the
doctor?”

“W’ull… tell it to my dad,” said Larry,
pulling out his keyring and unlocking the double doors to the suite
built to convince his great-grandmother, the Danish ballerina,
Astrid Ullagård, to leave her European dance troupe and come to
Long Beach, California, a city then just 30 years old. Long ago
stacked away were the 90 matching chairs that Astrid and Carl would
set up in the mirrored recital hall, so guests could watch the
ballerina perform to discs played on a Victrola. During the spring
of 1931, the dancer, choreographer and artistic director Harald
Lander displayed in the studio works that Astrid would later go on
to perform, after she rejoined the Royal Ballet as Principal Dancer
under Lander, splitting time between Copenhagen and California.

Inside the recital hall, as Astrid had
insisted, was flooring of Danish oak and cabinetry in white birch,
soft pine and other light woods brought in from the Baltic. Next to
the main doors, standing upright like a schoolchild, was the
Victrola phonographic disc player given by the Old Man as a wedding
gift to Carl and Astrid. Its handle hung down and the great bell
yelled in silence. Larry cranked the handle and lowered the needle
apparatus onto the disc on the turntable, filling the suite with
the voice of Enrico Caruso and jangling of instruments played 90
years earlier.

“Hi hi,” said Larry’s grandmother as she
entered the room with a wide smile for each of them. The three
crossed the wide main room of the suite, to a pair of French doors
on the far wall. Through the doors was another, much larger main
chamber, with high ceilings and tall, panoramic windows overlooking
Alamitos Bay from three sides. The kitchen, dining room and bedroom
were separated by potted plants and folding Japanese screens. The
late evening sun streamed golden and orange through the beaded
glass of the French doors that opened on every wall, each leading
to a wide, tiled wrap-around balcony.

The grandmother kissed both Larry and Lori,
and motioned for them to sit at the breakfast table directly
outside the kitchen, on the balcony, as she went to the
refrigerator. Larry and his grandmother were soon talking loudly
through the open doors in their oddly familiar and yet
completely-foreign language.

“You know,” Lori said to Larry, as the
grandmother set three frosted glasses on the table, “I still have a
hard time figuring out when one word ends and another begins.” The
grandmother set a Perrier in front of Lori, and a Carlsberg next to
her glass and another for Larry, who used the tip of a spoon, with
his index finger as the fulcrum, to open his own and then his
grandmother’s bottle.

“Spanish, no problem,” continued Lori.
“Picked that up around home.”

“See? There’s an advantage to being the only
white girl on your block,” said Larry.

“Arabic, in the war,” Lori said, “playing
backgammon between convoys with the translator.”

“That’s a lot of backgammon,” said
Larry.

“I don’t see pickin’ up Danish,” she said.
“And you learned it over there in, what, a summer?”

“A few,” said Larry, pouring his beer into
the glass. “I can’t read it... can only speak it.”

“Oh,” said Lori. She pointed to her bags,
sitting alongside the table. “Can I run those?”

Larry and his grandmother talked briefly.
“Actually, she’s doing linen,” said Larry. “Has tablecloths and
place settings running now, but she’s making us some food.”

“A huge place with servants and shit,” said
Lori, “and she doesn’t get help with laundry.”

“Well,” said Larry, anger in his voice, “my
dad won’t let anyone help her.”

“Asshole,” said Lori.

Larry promptly, gleefully translated the
opinion to his grandmother, who replied, simply: “Nej.” Larry
looked at his cell phone. “Actually, he’s supposed to be here in
like an hour, so we should be out’ta here soon.”

.

Larry drank from his beer as his grandmother
brought out a basket of dark and white bread slices, crisp breads
and crackers. Turning, the grandmother smiled and put her hand
softly on Lori’s cheek and whispered sweetly. Larry finished
pouring his Carlsberg, and the bottle swiftly disappeared, as his
grandmother returned with it to the kitchen. Lori drank her mineral
water and looked out at the setting sun.

A knock loud enough to be heard from the
balcony prompted Larry to look with panic at his cell phone. “He’s
not supposed to be here for 45 minutes.” A moment later,
ruddy-faced Calvin was being walked to the balcony by Emma, who
wordlessly waved with her hand for him to be seated.

“You always know where to pick up a free
meal,” Calvin said to Larry. “And look, another hungry mouth to
feed.” He sat, his legs apart, leaning back, and reached across to
snatch the still untouched bottle of beer next to Emma’s place
setting. Calvin sat back and drank directly from the bottle,
swiftly draining it and setting it back next to Emma’s plate.

“Pig,” said Larry.

“I love you, too, son,” replied Calvin.

Emma swept away the empty beer bottle
alongside her setting, gave a fresh bottle to Larry and collected
the Perrier bottle. She set them down on a rolling tray on which
were plates that she transferred to the table. She set down a
platter of herring in a cream sauce, a baked liver pate, a plate of
salami and cheeses, olives, pickles, mustard and an assortment of
thinly-sliced vegetables. Larry had opened his fresh bottle and
poured half into his grandmother’s glass and the remainder in his
own. Calvin reached across for the glass half full. Larry used his
fork to poke his hand away.

“Don’t you poke me, boy,” said Calvin, as
Emma returned to the table with another Carlsberg. Seeing her own
glass half full, she set the bottle down. Calvin swiftly snatched
it and searched the table for an opener. Larry growled.

Lori reached for the bread, cheese and
vegetables she had placed onto her plate.

Calvin reached across the table for the
plate of fish, pulling two fillets off the platter and setting it
back down. He grabbed white bread and spread it with mustard and
piled on salami. He put cheese onto a cracker, and pate onto
another piece of white bread – all without looking up to anyone –
and powered his way through his plate, taking time only to hand his
bottle to Larry and, after the top was popped, grabbing it back and
taking a deep swig.

Larry turned to his grandmother and they
spoke in their familiar, foreign tone. Larry dug a spoon deep into
the pate and spread the steaming baked meat onto a slice of thin,
dense, dark bread. He topped it with a wafer-thin pickle slice,
cooked beet and a sprinkling of chopped onions.

“What’s wrong, granola girl? Cat got your
tongue?” Calvin said to Lori, as he wiped cream sauce from his
lips. “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Just a bunch of people with guns,” said
Lori.

“It’s that shithole part of town you live
in,” said Calvin, belching. “Everyone packin’ heat.”

“It was on Second Street, a quarter-mile
from here,” said Larry, “in our shithole part of town.”

A basic Nokia ringtone sounded from Lori’s
phone, as Calvin reached for his beer. Lori stepped away from the
table. “Hey,” she said, not out of earshot of the table. “Naw, I’m
still in Long Beach. I don’t like running away.” She paused and
listened. “How many? With FOX News?” More listening. “The car’s
fine. Sure, Asst Mgr would be great. I can definitely use a better
job. Benefits, if I’m more than 30 hours? I still have VA, but
that’d be great.”

Larry and his grandmother looked at one
another as Lori returned to the table, Emma with a worried look and
Larry with his lips locked around another Carlsberg. Calvin ate,
moving food from plate to mouth in an unceasing cycle, with the
only sounds to be heard being of the water, the wind, a single bird
sounding a call, and Calvin – chewing, swallowing, drinking and
belching.

.

Lori drove silently, her hair whipping in
the wind, as Larry lolled his head idly in his beer buzz in the
passenger’s seat. She turned into a strip mall off of Atlantic, the
engine sputtering as she slowed so as to allow a haggard man to
push a baby carriage laden with everything but a child across their
path. The car slowly passed a liquor store, a payday lender, a nail
salon, a donut shop and a smoke shop before parking in front of
Wash-A-Teria late-nite Laundra-Mat. “You wouldn’t happen to still
have any of those quarters from earlier?” asked Lori.

“Bought real food at an actual store,” said
Larry.