TAR (CH 1) - patrickbrehenyfiction
TAR
a novel
by
Patrick Breheny
CHAPTER ONE
He was in love. That was the most important thing to him, the most important thing anybody would have to know about him.
Everything else, all the wonderful things, were incidental, because even before they happened, she was there and his life was the best it had ever been. Truly, if the other good fortune never happened, he wouldn’t have cared. Even if he had know, he wouldn’t have cared, because---well, he hadn’t wanted anything to change. He woke every morning beside her, so intoxicated by her presence, so content to be in the bed with her, he didn’t want the day to begin. Never mind the sex, which was so exquisite that immediately afterwards he would look at her and become aroused again. Feel aroused, even if the equipment wasn’t operating yet. He didn’t want them to get up and go their separate daily ways. He wanted them to be curled next to each other through endless time, stirring only for love making or eating or necessary toilet trips. He wanted the experience of waking up beside her to be a freeze frame in reality, a moment held forever as a living snapshot, with breathing human beings inside the borders of the photo, hearts pumping warm blood to their bodies.
On Saturdays and Sundays, they often did stay in bed half the day (“they” because, lucky man, Allison was also in love with him), sometimes stayed in bed all day, with the telephone disconnected (but sure, with the radio or TV on) trying to make a weekend last if not an eternity or a millenium, at least as long as it could---the entire weekend.
Allison had grown up in Connecticut, and was now a substitute teacher in L.A. secondary schools. Subbing in public school meant she worked most of the time. She had been his neighbor, and they’d met in the laundry room of the apartment building. What was she doing in L.A.? What was he? What was anybody doing here? It seemed everyone in Hollywood was from somewhere else. Why did they come? Some were actors, some were rock musicians, some were speed freaks (One category didn’t necessarily supercede another.) Some came on planes, some on busses, some hitchhiked. Damien had once heard the analogy of the United States as a flat surfaced map held up at an angle, with L.A. .at the bottom in the southwest corner, so that everything loose fell into it. If so, in Damien’s case, Canada was at the top, so he had slid a long way down.
Allison was a dancer, but she could be a dancer in New York. She had been a dancer in New York, and actually worked there at it once in a while. Here, as there, she made her living primarily as a teacher. Small boned and appearing delicate though she was toned and strong, with her long black hair brushed straight on her shoulders and back, and her slender Asian features, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. That perhaps not everyone would perceive her that way was a blessing, because he truly believed that if all men did, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
Eventually, of course, they did have to get out of that bed and do things. No fantasy wish of Paradise would concern itself with the root of all evil, but in the world-after-weekends, the rent still had to be paid and the food bought.
He wasn’t doing bad. Not great, but not bad either. He was a furniture mover in Hollywood. Not any furniture mover, mind you---he had his own business built on referrals from realtors and word-of-mouth references from his customers, such satisfied clientele being none other than the elite of Mulholland Drive and Nichols and Laurel and Benedict Canyons and Outpost Drive, and other canyons and hillside roads running off of or intersecting those, winding their spider web patterns of curlicues and mazes in the world of twisting rustic streets above the city.
He was doing alright for a Canadian without a green card, operating a moving business with rental trucks and without the required license. Ah, but you could do that then, and in the way that everything changes, and sometimes very quickly, already you couldn’t do it. Not easily. The Public Utilities Commission, the agency in California that for some reason regulates furniture moving, a private enterprise, was cracking down on small unlicensed movers (as it was letting the state’s electricity go to hell). Damien had no doubt that some of the big licensed companies didn’t like that a considerable portion of their potential business was going to movers like him.
Damien had tried to get a mover’s license, or at least get information about it. A phone call to the PUC was like calling the L.A. Police Department at the Hollywood Station to inquire about dealing drugs. The PUC treated you like a criminal and wanted to know who you were. They didn’t believe that you weren’t already operating (okay, he was),
and if their rudeness didn’t immediately discourage you, they began talking about
application fees and exorbitant bonds. They wouldn’t mail an application. You had to go in, show ID and pay the two hundred dollar fee just to get the form. There was everything in their tone that indicated you were not welcome and would not get any more cooperation in person.
He wasn’t actually moving furniture anymore. As he told customers when he did in-person estimates, he’d rather look at it than carry it. His living room was an office, and the business volume had reached a point where he would lose jobs if he wasn't there to book them, so he had guys working for him. If a job was going long distance, however, he had to work. He couldn’t afford a driver’s salary and expenses to another city, and the only way he could pay the charges for a long distance truck rental and gas, and still make a profit, was to go himself.
He often just passed distance jobs along to other movers, who would pay a commission for the referral, but if the customer was one he knew and wanted to keep, he was on the job to load the truck (he didn’t trust anyone else to pack tight enough for the road and wanted to know where the delicate items were) and take it where it was going. He always hired help for unloading at the destination.
His customer one day was Nick Morrissey, whom Damien knew as a repeat customer who had given him referrals to lots of other clients in the hills, and who was a movie and TV producer. Mostly Damien knew him as “Nick”, everybody in L.A. being on first name basis regardless of station or age or bank balance.
Nick was moving several rooms of furniture to a vacation house in Tucson. Nick’s L.A. palace was off Mulholland Drive, on a street called Ridge Crest Trail, which was one of those tortured, wound spring shaped doodles in the pages of the Thomas Brothers Street Guide that manifest in reality with curves over precipices every bit as perilous as foretold by the map, especially for a twenty four foot long moving van.
Morrissey owned lots of properties that Damien had shuttled furniture between and among, but he had not been to the main house, chez Nick, before. Damien was driving, with his helpers---Ken next to him, Bob at the window---looking for street numbers on garbage pails, stencils on the ground and mailboxes often obscured by bushes and trees along the narrow lane. The last address showed they were getting close, so at the next driveway, Damien parked on the road to let Bob out for a look.
He checked the mailbox on a post in the driveway, then reported, “This is it.”.
Damien and Ken got out of the truck also. If the roads would barely accommodate a truck, sometimes the driveways couldn’t at all. Morrissey’s driveway was very steep, starting at a sharp angle to his street. The back of the rental truck hung low to the ground, and had a welded trailer hitch that dangled and seemed destined to get caught at the beginning of the driveway.
Damien was thinking, ‘This won’t do, I have to get another truck’, when, from out of the shrubs along the side of the driveway, where there was apparently a foot path coming down from the house and hidden by growth, Nick Morrissey appeared like a commando. A ranger by virtue of his surprise advance on them, this guerrilla was dressed for tennis in a T-shirt and shorts, sweating as though he’d just been playing a game or doing some sort of strenuous activity. Nick Morrissey was a man of middle height with a carefully developed body, a devotee to the movie industry’s philosophy of “winning”, which of course also included his physical conditioning. He had been around so long as an entertainment figure, since Damien was a child, that he had to be sixty, though he seemed much younger. That was no doubt a result of facial surgery, but with his self assurance and physique, he hadn’t done anything about his white hair, no doubt aware that it embellished his demeanor with the additional honorifics of patriarch and sage.
He was maybe thirty feet above them, and cheerfully called, “Good morning” as he walked down the driveway. “I was coming down to meet you, but I see you found the place alright, Damien.”
Damien hated to let the helium out of his balloon, but he might as well know right away.
“The trailer hitch is not gonna clear the driveway. I can’t use this truck.”
Nick said firmly and with finality, “I have a schedule,” as though if necessary the laws of physics could be changed to conform to it.
He sauntered down to the road and, with Bob and Ken, examined the hitch from every direction. It was then that Damien began to realize there was a counter argument emerging, from Morrissey and his own helpers, that if the hitch could just clear the first few feet, the truck would probably make it all the way up. Right. And if President Kennedy hadn’t been shot the first or second time, he probably wouldn’t have died. Damien was sure it would not clear. He wanted to return the truck and exchange it, even though, yes, the truck rental place was in Hollywood in the flats, forty five minutes from the job site, and forty five minutes back, so everybody would be sitting around doing nothing, and he would have to pay his crew for that hour and a half. And they were funny about that. They didn’t like it. They had plans for after work, Ken especially. They had too much energy for sitting. And there was Morrissey, antsy about his appointments, business he had to take care of before he flew to Tucson that Damien knew involved more money than Damien made in a year.
“Go slow,” Morrissey said. “Back up easy.”
Helper Ken knelt beside the truck, leaned forward on his hands, brought his head down almost to the concrete as he twisted his neck so he was looking level up the angle of the driveway.
“I think it will make it,” he said.
When Ken wasn’t moving furniture, he smoked a crack pipe. That was a literal truth, because when he smoked he didn’t sleep. When he worked, he was the best mover Damien had, but when he got paid, he was gone. This was his first day back at work. Ken had been off it maybe since last night, maybe only since he started work this morning, and he was making a judgement call.
“It’s not gonna make it,” Damien told all of them.
“Try it,” Morrissey declared with his confident authority.
Damien knew you never go against your instincts, he knew it wouldn’t clear, he was pissed off that Ken had given Morrissey encouragement, but he started thinking that maybe if he did back up slowly enough, he could stop at the first sound of contact, prove to Morrissey he was right, and then go and exchange the truck. If he didn’t make the effort, thanks in no small part to Ken, Morrissey was going to freak over the delay.
He tried it. He got in the truck, started it, stepped on the clutch pedal, put the stick in reverse, eased up on the clutch and pressed lightly on the gas. The truck lurched for a milli-second, then he evened the pace.
He knew, could see without seeing them, that Morrissey and Bob were on one side of the truck, Ken on the other, all eyes on the trailer hitch and the driveway. He heard simultaneously two sounds: The CRUNCH and three voices screaming “Stop!”
He had agreed to Russian roulette and lost. They spent another half hour trying various ways to drive forward and get the truck unstuck from the driveway. They tried placing wood and cardboard under the wheels as it the problem were mud. Morrissey and his helpers tried to lift the trailer hitch with Damien driving, but they couldn’t, not even with Morrissey’s muscles. The weight of several thousand pounds welded it to the pavement. Now they not only had to change trucks, they needed a tow truck too, and, as he soon learned, not just any tow truck, but a heavy duty one. Most shops had regular tow trucks that couldn’t do the job.
All this took more time as he called around on Morrissey’s house phone from the kitchen, using the yellow pages. He’d expected Morrissey to have an aneurysm, what with his pressured commitments of, one could imagine, power lunches and con fabs and pow wows or whatever, but instead he actually became calm and seemed accepting of the situation. Maybe because he knew it was his fault.
When Damien first went into the house to make the calls, Nick’s wife was in the kitchen. Jeannie Figueroa, a former Miss Universe, former Miss Argentina, was a blonde beauty who, he really couldn’t help but notice, was still looking good in her mid-forties. She was a local evening talk show host on Channel 11, so maybe was at home because the show didn’t tape until afternoon.
At some point while Damien was stressed making his calls, he realized she was no longer in the kitchen. He finally found a heavy duty tow truck guy located near them on the west side who could get there within a few minutes, and would move it for a hundred dollars as long as he didn’t have to tow the truck more than a few feet.
He had actually been using the phone for a half hour. As he hung up, Jeannie Figueroa re-appeared with an early lunch of burgers and fries from McDonald’s for her, Nick and the crew. If they were going to have to wait, they might as well eat.
They were all---Damien, his helpers and the Morrisseys---sitting around on the outdoor furniture of the redwood deck chomping when the tow truck driver beeped his horn to get somebody down to the road.
As Damien stood up to go down the driveway, Ken and Bob started to move too, but he signalled with his hand for them to stay and eat. But Nick he asked,, "Can I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Morrissey?" and with his chin indicated the road. Morrissey seemed confused that Damien wanted him along, but got up and went with him.
The free lunch was prodding Damien to press Morrissey’s generosity a bit further. Halfway down the driveway, he put Southern California’s populism to the test, turned to the burley producer, and asked,
“Will you split it with me, Nick?”
“What?”
Did he think he was talking about the last hamburger?
“The tow charge.”
“Why should I?” he growled. Morrissey looked genuinely astonished at the gall. Brought from his lunch for this!
Damien tired to keep the anger out of his voice, tried to remember what a good customer Nick Morrissey had been.
He said, “Because there was a chorus calling to me to try it, and your voice was among them.”
“In my business,” Mr. Morrissey said, “I’m the captain. I have to live with my decisions. You’re the captain here.”
There was a glimmer of put-on, though, in his green eyes to accompany that remark, and Damien thought---not sure he wasn’t imagining it---a hint of respect. Rare indeed would be those “in the industry” who’d talk back to this man.
A little quick math told Damien he would still be making a satisfactory profit driving to Tucson, and he forced himself to think about the repeat customers Morrissey had sent him and all the good jobs he’d done for Nick himself. He’d have to do this one too without bad feelings getting in the way. He decided not to mention the tow again, nor to let it be an issue in his dealings with Morrissey the rest of this day.
Five minutes after it arrived, the heavy duty tow truck had the rental truck off the driveway. Damien exchanged the truck in Hollywood, then came back and loaded Nick Morrissey’s furniture.
Loading a moving van with household goods is an obscure and esoteric art form known only to its practitioners., and can be a pleasant mental exercise like solving a math problem or doing a puzzle, except that, with the combined factor of physical exertion involved, there is an endorphin high that accompanies the gratification. Actually, more than resembling a puzzle, it is a puzzle, a giant jigsaw puzzle, and the pieces are in the customer's house. The driver, as crew supervisor, decides how the truck will be loaded, and what will fit where. The objective is to build a wall from the front of the truck back, keeping the tiers as even as possible for as long as possible. For example, a king sized box spring and mattress first, with any flat glass tops or pictures in frames in between. On top of the bed sections can go light boxes. For the next tier, maybe two dressers across, with wardrobes boxes or small light rectangular items that will not cause damage on the dressers. The furniture is cushioned with heavy protective pads that also help to pack it in, and the load proceeds like that that until the end, when the plants and hoses and garden tools and trash cans go on, and, well, nobody can keep it even forever. A tight load is a marvel of improvisation and arguably a creative work. Like a stage play, or sand castle, It can't be kept and viewed later. You can take a photo to remember, but once experienced, it is gone.
When his project was complete, Damien paid his helpers and got ready to go. Morrissey had a Tucson phone book, and again let him use the kitchen phone, this time for long distance, waving away Damien’s offer to pay the charges. Damien called a couple of Tucson moving companies and told them he was a long haul driver in need of a helper that evening. The places he contacted told him he was arriving too late to have a helper waiting, but one dispatcher suggested he call the Arizona Department of Economic Security's casual labor office, and gave him the number. Through DES, the state's unemployment benefits office, he arranged to have someone waiting at 9:00 PM and promised to be generous to him for working the late hour. He gave them Morrissey’s address and phone number in Tucson, and in the afternoon began driving toward Arizona on I-10 from the Sepulveda Boulevard on-ramp in West L.A., where 10 is known as the Santa Monica freeway.
He got off the freeway at La Brea Avenue long enough to drop his helpers off where they could catch a bus to Hollywood, then got back on and went downtown. From downtown, I-10 goes east into the San Gabriel Valley, then out past Riverside and San Bernardino into the desert, through Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs and eventually Blythe. (Or is that Blight?) Blythe, pronounced "Bly", is a California town far into the desert, right at the Arizona line, that has discovered where the middle of nowhere is and paved it. It consists almost entirely of motels, fast food restaurants and gas stations, and it's your last chance to fill up on anything. Sleeping, eating and gassing seemed its raisons d’etre. After Blythe, there is a hundred and fifty miles of desert and nothing but until you get to Phoenix.
