Moorpark Palms Letters - 7. Chapter 7

1998

At Large

After last year’s short story, I’ll slip back to a more trackable roll-calling. People wanted to know what was happening with the rest of the group.

Apartment 1: Summer and Cole are loners. (Cole’s a guy.) When they moved in – replacing Tim and Cyndi – they were friends of Meg and Quinn in Apartment 8. In fact, Meg said she’d found their last three apartments.
“They’re not so good at that sort of, you know, ‘social’ stuff.”
But now the two couples aren’t speaking.
“He’s gotten too paranoid,” shrugs Quinn.
Define “too.”
Well, Cole may be Cole’s actual first name, but his last name’s fiction. “We had to do something to fix his credit,” Quinn said, grinning. And this summer – during a heat wave when you couldn’t pay an air conditioner repairman to appear – our landlord amazingly found one to do maintenance. I posted a notice asking anyone who had problems with a serviceman being in their apartment to let me know. This is still LA, home of the casually-carried .45. The next morning, there was a scribbled note on the door of Apartment 1, saying “Air conditioner seems fine.” But it didn’t scream, “DON’T GO IN!” so we did. Good thing, too: after twenty-five-years, the machine was clogged with lint and huffing along with a derelict filter. Also, after three weeks of 100-plus days, with air conditioners steaming uninterrupted, this one was about to blow. The service guy vacuumed it shiny, then blessed it with a virgin filter, and I put a note on the door telling Cole and Summer what we’d done. That evening, Franck – Apartment 13 – was sitting on the steps as usual, smoking, when he pointed toward the small bulletin board over our mailboxes and said, “That’s crap!”
“What?” I asked. “Crap” describes a lot of things in LA.
“That note!”
He pointed again, and I went to look. On the bulletin board was a mini-manifesto – unsigned, but clearly from Cole – protesting a manager “Too dumb to read a sign obviously stuck right on our door!” Ending with, “When are we all gonna get keys to Rich’s place?” So I knocked on Cole’s door to apologize for the misunderstanding, explaining how lucky it was that we’d serviced their air conditioner. Especially because Meg and Quinn’s had burst into blue smoke just the week before, and if that had happened while Cole and Summer were at work, we might have lost the building.
Cole’s reply: “I didn’t smell smoke.”
I tried another way, gently reminding him that I wasn’t really the manager, just a volunteer who did the job, unpaid, as a favor for other people in the building – people who’d specifically asked me to.
Cole: “Well, if you’re not the manager, how come you got keys?”
I volleyed this carefully: “Remember the time someone left beans cooking, then went bowling.”
“Yeah,” Cole admitted, laughing. “We had to break a window. It stunk everywhere!”
“That’s why I now have keys.”
Cole: “Then we should all have ‘em. What if you’re not home?”
I pointed out that when we tried communally-stashed spare keys, one young, adventuresome-if-irresponsible, couple was lifting the keys then dancing naked in all our apartments. Also fucking in our beds.
That curled Cole’s isolationist lip. Though he still wouldn’t back down.
“What would it take to accept my apology?” I finally kidded him.
He verbally poked at me for another ten minutes, jumping me through his Oliver Stone-X-Files-doomsday-home-invasion-conspiracy scenarios, until Summer announced, “Dinner’s ready.” Then Cole rocketed off like a good li’l boy, to eat pizza in front of Cops.

Apartment 2: Still me. Above Summer and Cole, which is why I have to stay especially friendly with them. As with Cyndi, TV is their night light, and just a tweak of extra volume through our veneer floors would turn me into one of the unslept.
Overall, it’s been a great year, though not ending quite as I’d hoped. I did a novel version of these letters, hoping to attract an agent. But even my friends said: “Too many characters. Too episodic.” So I wrote another mystery novel, trying – one more time – to teach myself to plot. Got six dozen rejections just on the inquiry letter, though two agents offered me consistent, terrific advice. I did rewrites till it turned out that I just don’t like killing people, even on paper. And it’s not like I refuse to sell out – you’re talking to a guy who did six years on Wheel Of Whats-it. But I basically write light stuff. I’m no literary Dr. Kevorkian. And I never had the tools to compete with John Updike on the high ground. So I’ll try something else featherweight, and if that doesn’t work out, I’ll go back to design jobs. Real soon. Honest. Right after New Year’s. Before Spring. Definitely before summer.

Apartment 3: If you remember, Steve has an ex-wife – quasi-ex. They both want out, but – between them – can’t really afford to whisper the word “lawyer.” He also has two, rapidly developing daughters, who visit alternate weekends with their loving hands out. Plus a pretty Malaysian girlfriend who turns up regularly after work, for sex ‘n’ stuff. (The “stuff” must involve garlic because a whiff of that frequently oozes from under his door.) Steve has a seemingly lucrative data-tracking job, but his quasi-wife freelances and is often out of steady work. And though they moved to California two years ago, she’s still living in her sister and brother-in-law’s guest room and partly depending on Steve’s child support. Now Steve’s a Virginia gentleman, who’d rather keep his kids in Play Stations and Furbies than pay additional rent – which is why he hangs onto his studio. He also hasn’t had a home phone since Bell was a boy, and he gave up his car, favoring the bus. He works just over a mile away, so he walks a lot, too. Great legs, though maybe he wears shorts so often because he can’t afford pants. Still, with Christmas here, and Steve’s holiday bills probably stacking like F-16s over Baghdad, how many nanoseconds do you think it’s gonna take till I open my door one morning and find him naked, drooling, and nuts?

Apartment 4: Lindsay’s given notice. Again. Since her hair’s too fine to color and too slow-growing to cut, and since her secretarial job doesn’t really pay enough to be wantonly frivolous, and since every time she gets a cat – or a new guy – they don’t last any longer than a journalist’s perspective, when she really “needs a change,” she gives notice. Then, a few months later, without so much as an “Oh, didn’t I tell you? – I couldn’t find anything,” she gives notice again. (In her mind, I guess, she knows she’s told us.) If she’s too-recently given notice and still needs an change, she calls for a plumber. Sometimes multiple plumbers: one for the kitchen sink and one for the toilet. But they never find anything. So each time she calls – even with the seventy-five buck visit being paid by our landlord – they’re a little less eager to come. As are her boyfriends. But don’t get me wrong: Lindsay’s my friend – she always gives me great homemade fudge for the holidays. And she’s quiet. What more could I ask?

Apartment 5: JB makes beer. JB bakes bread. All in his apartment. He has an extra refrigerator in his dining room, too, just for fermentation. And he bakes faux English muffins, though nothing like Martha Stewart’s. These are masculine. Scorched. When there’s finally a killer quake, we all assume JB’ll whip out a generator from his store of camping equipment, then selflessly feed us – plus keep us giddily sloshed. Till the rescue Marines come marching up Moorpark Street.

Apartment 6: BIRGIT IS BACK! And you can’t even remember who she is. Why Birgit is the Swedish beauty! Now, you remember: Rob’s wife. (Not Craig’s. That was the malevolent Joan Crawford – okay, technically, Rosalind Russell, remade with Crawford.) Anyway, one day Rob was up on the balcony, chatting on his cell phone, and the next he was winging off to Stockholm to reclaim his not-quite-divorced-bride. They could afford a lawyer and had actually started proceedings, but, just, kinda, well, you know, forgot. So she came back, and Bobby – Rob’s twice-and-we-hope-not-future-roommate – moved to an apartment near his mother and girlfriend. (That’s two separate women, just to clarify.) Rob and Birgit plan to move, too. “We want a fresh start,” and carpet cleaning alone won’t do it. To be helpful, when Bobby left, he also took the dog. (“Rob never had time to walk him.”) Birgit also recently got her driver’s license. “I could drive in Sweden, but cars and gas are so expensive, hardly anyone does.” (While recently visiting, Rob scandalized his in-laws by accidentally filling their tank. Most people buy gas a demi-liter at a time.) I’ve asked when they’re thinking to go, but they can’t be sure. “We’re looking for one of those government defaults – with a pool.” Rob’s given up studying architecture and has settled in as a computer tech, building a career where Bill Gates fumbles. So they should be financially set. Soon there’ll be little Robs and little Birgits – the wired and the beautiful inherit the earth.

Apartment 7: While everyone was focused elsewhere, Jonathan graduated from the University of Judiasm, married his girlfriend, and moved out. Soon after, Avigayil (av-ee-gay-uhl) and Yair (yah-ear), another pair of Israelis – Yair being the guy – moved in. Also, an untranslatably-named, probably under three-year-old, piano-throttling kid. They’re Israeli – even the piano, which was shipped. Yair’s an entrepreneur, currently working one job during the day and nurturing a pair of budding businesses evenings and weekends. Avigayil works, too, though she’s pregnant with another probably soon-to-be-untranslatably-named bouncer – or maybe they just mumble and their kid’s named John. And Avigayil smokes. I keep wanting to say, “Hey, in LA, we’re not allowed to smoke in restaurants and wombs.” But that’s probably being nouveau Californian. Actually, I’m fudging a bit: Avigayil and Yair moved out in mid-October, to a place with central air. You’d think, after being raised in the desert, they’d be used to inhaling grit. But maybe they’re just star-struck. Their new home abuts the pre-Rocky digs of Sly Stallone.

Apartment 8: Meg and Quinn have lived in Apartment 8 since just after the earthquake, but – when Avigayil and Yair left – they traded up for the two-bedroom Apartment 7. Actually, they were planning to move to Prescott, Arizona, and “Buy a nice piece of land,” Quinn drawls, settin’ wide his newly acquired boots. “Build a house, too. Raise kids.”
“Not just yet,” Meg hedges, and Quinn recoils.
“Hey, I’m thirty now. How long you think I’m gonna be able to keep it up?”
Meg merely smiles. You can get away with that when you’re wearing a Union Jack bikini.
Still, just as they were getting the Prescott News bi-weekly to hunt long-distance for jobs (Prescott, by the way, is pronounced “press-kit,” perhaps having been founded by a lost band of PR reps.) Just when Quinn was about to land the perfect bartending gig, he tripped across a local Snap-On Tools franchise, which was seriously underperforming. Now try to remember this: until last spring, Quinn sported shoulder-length, shaggy blond hair, mutton-chops, a handlebar, mustache, and a pair of thoroughly tattooed arms. Now, he’s clean-cut as a McDonaldite and always wears his sleeves long. And we have a Snap-On Tools truck big as the Ponderosa parked in our front drive. It does drop the property values yet another notch, but as Meg pointed out this summer by the pool – Quinn was Olympic cannonballing off the carport – “Didn’t you know that Moorpark spelled backward is Kraproom?”

Apartment 9: Ed, Annie’s second husband, is almost permanently gone, assuming he was ever really here to start with. He still occasionally appears, like Bluebeard’s ghost, to take Annie out to dinner with Edan, who it now appears is her daughter by her first marriage. Ed, at least, is presentably bland. Annie’s first husband – who we previously didn’t know existed – is six-eight and weighs over three-hundred pounds. It explains where Edan gets her height.
“I thought Ed and Annie named Edan after themselves,” I mentioned to Franck one afternoon. “How could they do that if Ed isn’t Edan’s father?”
Franck stubbed out his latest cigarette and explained. “Annie hated Edan’s original name after the divorce. Her first husband had picked it. So since Edan was still a baby and wouldn’t remember anyway, they renamed her.”
“Must have been a quick remarriage,” I tallied.
“Like father, like daughter,” Franck said, shrugging it off.
Despite her height, and the fact Edan looks nearer sixteen at nine, fortunately, she hasn’t discovered sex. She mainly busies herself whomping wiffle balls off courtyard windows and SuperSoaking innocents – if there are any left in LA. Franck, who lives surrounded by Franklin Mint mini-castles and faithfully attends the heiress Edan, doesn’t seem to mind Ed’s uprooting. He even gave his second ex-son-in-law his collector-era Datsun to speed him away. Though, recently, he seemed pissed because Ed ditched that car and is now renting a five-hundred-a-month, this’ll-get-you-laid, slick red pick-up truck. Still, Franck has bigger things to bash.
“How’s Annie’s new job?” I asked the other day. She’s quit bagging groceries and assembling rhinestone earrings on her dining table and is now full-time managing the meat department at Ralph’s.
In answer, Franck grumbled, “He shouldn’t be sleeping with a married woman. Even if she is throwing herself at him.”
“Who?” I asked. “Ed?” It hardly seemed to matter, since he and Annie were practically divorced.
“Not Ed,” Franck rumbled. “Luke!”
Luke was Annie’s latest, a formerly scraggly-haired, cement-truck-driving, rock guitarist, now clean-cut-as-Quinn and working as a TV stagehand through his dad’s union contacts.
“Luke’s sleeping around on Annie?” I asked, surprised. The few times I’d met him, he’d seemed like a decent guy.
“No!” Franck rebuked. “Luke’s sleeping with Annie! She’s the married woman!”
Franck’s gotten real cranky since turning 75.

Apartment 10: Isabelle, Marie, and the kid: two mainly quiet nannies and a Latino Gary Coleman. But though they say little, they have a strong moral effect: when Edan briefly adopted a Chihuahua this summer, she impulsively named it Spic – because it was Mexican, see? – Franck quickly re-christened it Speck.
Other than that, Isabelle and Marie are a silent presence, partly because Marie still prefers not to speak English. Though after four years of living and working in the US, she certainly understands it. But if I have to communicate something complicated to her, like, recently, “There’s dead possum in your flower bed,” – I get her son, Ricardo, to translate. Mostly, I wait till Isabelle comes home, though she’s not the easiest person to talk with, even when you both know the words. Lately, she tends to lurk in the darkened laundry room, I guess for a shred of privacy. “We do have electricity,” I tried to joke, after I’d gone to check a wash, and she popped out, scaring the bleach out of me. “I like it this way,” she insists.

Apartment 11: Two years ago, when Korki moved in, she was a personal trainer, finishing her Master’s. Then she was a high school gym teacher. Now, she’s applying to become a cop. She once had the quietest Labrador you’ve never seen. Sadly, he was an old Lab and recently died. Now, she acquired – at least on weekends – three yapping, crapping toy poodles – well, one’s another stunted breed, but if you think I’m gonna learn dog species, you’d also bet I’d vote for the younger George Bush. (And when is his mother gonna learn to dress? That striped, bean bag thing she just wore in Time magazine could have been P. T. Barnum’s back-up tent.)
One of the pets Korki dogsits for is named Sadie, one’s Peanut, and the third must actually be trained because she never shrills its name. (It’s Peaches, by the way, and she has her own hand-knit mohair coat.) As diligent as Korki is, she also “forgets” to clean up after yon pups. (Did I sound convincingly animal loving? When they appear in squadrons, I sometimes hate them all.) Last Friday afternoon, Korki was shepherding the teeny terrors, unleashed, on the short trek from her car to her apartment – where she weekly shaves the wee buckaroos with a whiny electric trimmer at hours even the rudest frat boy wouldn’t mix a Margarita. (I guess she figures that if she closes the blinds, the neighbors can’t hear). As I passed the dogs, I asked pleasantly, “Are you planning to clean this up?” (“This” shall remain undefined, as my friends tell me their kids now read these letters.)
“Clean what?” Korki blinked innocently, so I pointed toward the pottied sidewalk. “My dogs didn’t do that!” she insisted.
“Kork,” I eased, “the gardeners five minutes ago. They just washed and blow-dried the courtyard. It was spotless.”
“It wasn’t my dogs,” she flipped, trailing tails into her apartment. She’s gonna be some cop.

Apartment 12: Here’s a math problem. If Kristen’s a Second Assistant Director trainee for the mega-competitive Directors Guild of America program, and if she works eighteen-hour days, five-days-a-week, for two uninterrupted years, blindly sleeping through weekends so she can creep pre-dawn to some new set each Monday, and she never has a moment even to consider throwing out anything she inadvertently pack-rats – like crew gifts, Japanese take-out, and the inevitable 24-hour Ralph’s pasta – how much do you think she’ll accumulate before the things that go bump under her sink claw her throat out some midnight?

Apartment 13: Franck finally retired. Good thing, too, since he’s 900-years-old and used to sit under bridges harassing trolls. “I did it!” he laughed, after consecutively-canceling three summers’ worth of scheduled trips to Oahu with Annie and Edan because of last-minute film dubbing. “This time, they’re not talking me out of it. Not with raises. Not stock options. Not even three-for-one splits. I’m just gonna sit on my couch and watch the Dodgers.”
Fortunately, he’s not a basketball fan.
Also, occasionally, he flies to Las Vegas, though he too-quickly crapped out in this year’s Midsummer Blackjack Fest. “I was gonna stay for five days,” he said. “Had the room comped and everything.”
As a previous Big Winner, he automatically rates luxuries without asking.
“But I folded the first afternoon. Had the unluckiest cards.”
“You could still have spent the weekend,” I suggested. “Just relaxed.”
“I thought about that,” he admitted. “But what’s there in Las Vegas I can’t see here?”
Beautiful, half-naked women, strutting down steps?
“Besides,” he sighed, “I didn’t have it in me this year.” He paused to light one of the now merely dozen cigarettes he rations himself each day. Then he repeats his mantra: “I just want to live to see Edan start college.”
If she’s as bright as she is screechy, she might be able to skip a grade or two, but that still puts high school graduation seven years off. And though Franck had a grandmother “in the old country” who “made it past 100 while still managing her own farm,” I doubt he’ll stretch that far. He’s beginning to remind me of my Aunt Min in her withering years: one eye, one breast, one lung, one kidney, and forget about teeth, uterus, or ovaries. Even her husband, Sam, died with only one leg, courtesy of diabetes. But Franck could surprise me.
“On my seventh birthday,” he said, “I thought about what a wonderful party they were gonna have in the year 2000, and how I wanted to be there. Now I almost am.”
For comparison, on my seventh birthday, I thought about how much I wanted a coonskin cap. But that’s why Franck speaks multiple languages and is a millionaire. Maybe on his hundredth birthday, he’ll still be sitting on the steps smoking, and I’ll still be hacking out these letters. Excuse me. Gotta go kill myself now.

Apartment 14: Noy and Arieh (noy and ah-ree). “It’s Noya,” she corrects, despite what the landlord told me. “Noy,” she continues, “is an old woman’s name.”
My name site – my new writer’s toy that replaced various aging phone books – says Noy means “beauty,” but adding one little vowel ups the stakes to “divine beauty.” I guess it’s a kind of Israeli vanity plate. And Arieh means “lion,” suitable for a hardy man raised on a kibbutz, perhaps overbuilt to withstand nightly bombings.
Here, things in their apartment constantly self-destruct. Doors throw themselves off hinges. Garbage disposals pop like supernovas. Smoke detectors scream without a wisp of smoke. Way-too-personal items clog bathroom drains. Even newly-installed air conditioners spit oil and flame, though not – miracle of miracles – for eight days. And it’s not Hasidic poltergeists. After all, this is one, ordinary couple – they haven’t shipped the guilt of the Bible across the Mediterranean. Still, I’m finally thinking of buying – if you simply purchase these things without an exorcist – one of those religious doohickeys you nail to the side of your door. You know, a bit of consecrated goatskin – don’t ask which part – sanctified by rabbis, and Hebraically-inscribed. I believe the prayer goes: “ Bless this hovel, Lord we pray. Make it safe till we get the hell out.”