Jake & Conor - 1. Chapter 1

Soon after the LA riots, my parents decided to visit. They’d seen Europe, though never California, and with me living there, the trip seemed only natural. But coming so quickly after the riots, it also had the tiniest taint of “checking up.”
“What’s Number One son’s schedule?” Dad asked, quickly anointing me tour guide.
“Slow in May,” I allowed. Our show was on hiatus. And while our producers were using some of the staff for prep work, the rest of us were free. Work wouldn’t pick up till June.
“Would you mind company?” Mom put more politely
“I’d love to see you,” I said, completely meaning it. We normally had fun together. What worried me was my apartment.
The last place of mine they’d seen was outside Boston. I’d grown up in western Massachusetts and had stayed there for college and grad. school. But I began teaching at the other end of the state.
“I’m glad you’ll be living alone,” Mom told me that summer. For years, I’d shared a huge, and from her point of view, falling apart house with seemingly dozens of people. She always worried the place would catch fire.
But rents were high near Boston, even in the suburbs around the small college that had generously offered to underpay me. On my baby salary, the best I could find was a studio in a building that – sixty years earlier – had been city offices. The walls were paneled the color of old bread. A dropped ceiling was easily in reach – OK, I’m 6'-4; I have no problem touching an eight-foot ceiling. The main room was maybe twelve-by-eighteen, with an airplane kitchen in a kind of L off that.
Before my parents saw that place, I’d pulled out the dropped ceiling, revealing pressed-tin panels six feet above. That gave the room some height. I painted the ceiling and everything else white and yanked up a carpet stained with liquids I didn’t want to try to identify. I sanded the floor, built a loft bed and bookcases, found some fairly-solid, used oak furniture that only needed glue, and scrubbed the tall windows till they were almost clear. The place looked so good, the first guy I invited to dinner climbed the ladder to my bed and tore off his clothes. My parents weren’t as impressed.
“The bathroom’s pink,” said my dad, in his maddeningly deep voice.
It was tiled floor-to-ceiling, and nothing could cheaply change that. Though I’d bought manly brown towels.
“Do you really sleep up there?” Mom asked, staring at my towering bed. She’s only five-two.
“I’ve never fallen out of bed in my life,” I reminded her. “Not in camp. Not freshman year of college, where – both times – I had a top bunk. This is just a few feet higher.”
“Do you really sleep up there?” she asked again.
“What if you get mugged walking home?” Dad added, unconcerned how I slept so long as it was with caution. He was always put off about my sanding and painting.
“I’ll drive,” I promised. Though the college was a ten-minute walk.
“And park in that dark lot?” he asked. “I’ll give that wreck of yours two weeks before it’s stolen. Boston has one of the highest theft rates in the country.”
“This isn’t Boston. And my car’s only five-years old.”
“It may as well be the city. You’re living downtown.”
“And over a bar!” Mom added.
“The bar’s at the end of the block. I live over a laundromat.”
“But drunks’ll walk past your apartment. And they’ll be students – with no manners.
“Actually, it’s a townie bar, Mom.”
“Worse.”
Of course, they were only concerned. And the Boston apartment skirmish was nothing compared to the rout over my move to California.
“You quit your job!” Mom practically shrieked. She has what Dad sometimes calls “a Depression-era” mentality.
“I’d make more selling shoes, Mom. Even you’ve admitted that.”
“You’re a college professor!”
“Instructor. I’d have to get a Ph.D. and wait twenty years before getting promoted.”
“Why television?” Dad wanted to know. “If you have to write, why not books?”
I’d written one, unpublished, novel – a mystery, which Dad fell asleep trying to read. And a close friend of mine pointed out – after only starting the first chapter – “Larry’s the murderer, isn’t he?”
I said, “Karen, you’re on page three. No one’s even dead.”
“But Larry’s the murderer.”
When I had to admit he was, she said, “Needs work.”
Before heading west, I’d explained one more time to my parents that a friend of mine from grad school was happily writing sit-coms in Hollywood. “It’s a huge industry,” he’d encouraged me. “There are jobs out here you don’t even know exist.”
He was making three grand a week. I earned less than that a month. True, he’d spent two years in LA waiting tables. But he’d gone west knowing no one.
Through him, I’d gotten my job as a script coordinator. I wasn’t making close to what he did, but when my name dashed across the screen – though distorted and shove to the side – my relatives freeze-framed it to show friends. Even my parents seemed proud. Still, all that – plus a Pulitzer Prize – wouldn’t make my casually-furnished apartment seem substantial.
I thought about buying stuff, but I really didn’t want to. I was fine.
“What’s the worst thing they’ll say?” one of my friends asked.
“At least, Mom won’t worry that I’ll fall out of bed.”
“You should put your mattress back on the floor.
That’s how I’d slept for the first six months, until I’d paid off some bills and bought furniture. Still, my fears about my parents went in the wrong direction.
“How bad’s the place shake?” was the first thing Dad asked. We were barely up the steps.
“Not much,” I assured him.
“I read that LA has three-hundred quakes a day. Only they’re too small to feel them.”
“Everyone hears that,” I said. “Some times it’s three-hundred, sometimes, it’s thirty. The thing is, they’re all under 3.0.”
“What’s the top of the scale?” Mom asked.
“I’m not sure there is one.”
“What’s dangerous?”
“Six – I think. It depends on the thrust.”
“So you’re halfway to disaster thirty times a day?” she determined.
“Or three- hundred,” Dad corrected.
“It’s nothing like that,” I insisted. The danger doubles geometrically. A 3-point is like a ride on a train.”
“That doesn’t mean the earthquakes aren’t there,” she persisted. When I was a kid, she could also spot dirty dishes under my bed.
Still, my parents liked some things:
“The wood paneling’s great,” Dad complimented -- as though I’d hewn it myself. “I always liked knotty pine.”
“It’s very rustic,” Mom offered. She continued to look around. “No couch?”
“Not yet.”
“Director’s chairs are interesting.”
“Interesting,” was the family code word for “death.”
Dad sat in one of the chairs. For a moment I thought it might give – he’s almost my height, though thirty pounds heavier.
“Surprisingly comfortable,” he pronounced.
“Directors wouldn’t put up with them if they weren’t,” I defended.
“And when you get a couch, you can throw them away,” Mom counseled. “They don’t look expensive.”
“I do most of my reading in bed,” I reminded them, herding them from the living room.
“Is that your pool?” Dad suddenly asked.
“Not mine personally.”
“I mean, it’s not the motel’s, smart ass!”
The motel where they were staying – though I warned them it was moored in the shag-carpeted 60s, and there was a far nicer hotel one block away – could be seen from my dining room windows.
“The motel has its own pool. You saw it.”
“Do you swim often?” Dad went on.
It’s not like I hadn’t answered all these questions before – when we were on the phone, or when I was east at Christmas. Some things just need repetition: Nixon was a crook.
“I haven’t been in the pool yet, ” I admitted. “It’s not heated and won’t be warm enough till July.”
“I thought it was always summer here,” Mom said. “Isn’t that the charm?”
“It sure ain’t the architecture,” Dad said, laughing
Mom laughed at that, too. They’d criticized almost every building they’d seen since they got off the plane. “Is that a flying saucer?” Dad asked about the retro airport restaurant
The weather that day was typical – seventy-five and sunny. Though – in mid-May – it might have been close to that in Massachusetts.
“It just seems like summer,” I told my mom. “It doesn’t really stay hot till June.”
“Is it too expensive to heat the pool?” Dad asked. You’d think he’d come west just to swim.
“I guess.”
Despite these questions, and many others I couldn’t answer – about the history of LA, California, and the Pacific Rim – their two-week stay was wonderful. We toured the studio where I worked, and other local places, then we moved on: to Santa Barbara, Hearst Castle, Big Sur, Carmel, and Monterey, before ending in San Francisco.
“The Earthquake Tour,” Mom dubbed it.
I’d rented an air-conditioned car. “You must be the last person in LA not to have one,” Dad joked. I was still driving my “wreck” from Boston. It had dependably gotten me across the country.
“Some of the poorer people still open their windows,” I joked back.
“You drive very well,” Mom complimented as we edged the cliffs of Big Sur. “But I don’t want to come back this way.”
“California has other roads.”
So we drove back through flat farm country, about an hour well inland.
“Why does that name seem so familiar?” Mom wondered as we reached a town called Coalinga. “Oh, I know! It was nearly leveled by that huge quake!”
“Step on it, James!” Dad ordered.
We laughed through the trip, took turns driving, and always ate well, if too often. That was my dad’s influence. In nearly every town, Mom scouted garage sales and thrift shops, claiming, “I love to see what people throw away.”
“Is it different here?” Dad asked her.
She couldn’t form a conclusive answer.
I was glad to see my parents, I had a terrific time with them, and I was happy to see them joyfully leave. I was also glad I had another two weeks off.