Moorpark Palms - 25. Chapter 25

Fortunately, there was paperwork before the bank took over. Meanwhile, there were other distractions. Tim and Cyndi had bought Sense Surround.
BOOM!!!
“What was that?” screamed Holly, tearing from her apartment. Her husband, Kaz the painter, and Kelso, their dog, streamed behind her.
“Quake!” gulped Kaz.
Vic and I had scrambled, too.
“If that’s a foreshock,” Vic ventured, “We’re all dead.”
I’d come outside less in panic than to explore. “Is everyone all right?”
We waited. Suddenly, Tim opened his door.
“Neat?” he asked, grinning. “No?”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine.” His grin widened.
Cyndi peeked around him, cackling merrily. “It’s our new TV!”
Everyone who was awake – which may have been everyone in ten miles – crowded into their apartment as Tim replayed the tape. It was a battle scene from Tora! Tora! Tora!
BOOM! BOOM!! BOOM!!!
So how noisy, I wondered, did the ‘kids’ have to get before Denny threw them out?
“You’ll be careful how you use that,” he asked warily.
“Of course!” Cyndi promised. She and Denny had somehow bonded.
“I don’t want Edan waking up,” Annie warned, protecting her demon seed.
“I looove Edan,” Cyndi cooed.
“As long as that’s clear,” Annie decreed.
“On our honor,” pledged Tim.
Which seemed to match that of a jewel thief. And Sally, living just opposite them got the worst of it.
“He listens all day,” she reported. “And I’m about the only one home. Even Annie’s working part-time.”
“Doesn’t Tim work?” I asked.
“He does, but at strange hours. He’ll disappear at three in the morning, then come back at six, and sleep till noon. Or he’ll run out for an hour in the middle of the day and come back carrying boxes of tapes. Or he’ll go off, calling to Cyndi that he’ll be gone five minutes, and be away all weekend.”
I wondered about how much Sally knew about the rest of us.
“And when he is here, all I get is SOUND! I think he’s renting every war and horror movie ever made. All those screams.”
I knew what she meant. Several times, I’d had to walk across the courtyard to ask Tim to turn down his system. Mainly, the bass got me. But he always dropped the volume and apologized. He was another nice guy.
Claire also knew what Sally meant. “One Friday, I was off early from work, and all I could hear was rockets. I put my speaker in the window and blasted Vivaldi at him.”
A noble effort. But “The Four Seasons” could hardly match Rambo.
“Has Denny done anything?” I asked.
“You have to be kidding,” said Claire.
Impossibly, Denny had grown even less responsible as his bosses’ partnership disintegrated. “He stopped playing rent,” Lindsay reported. “He says, ‘It just goes to the bank.’”
He quit doing everything. The grass grew. Garbage engulfed the dumpster. Light bulbs zapped out. When the courtyard became a black hole, I went to the hardware store and got new bulbs, all clear, purging Mack’s whorehouse colors. Unfortunately, they made the courtyard look like a Grand Opening. The salespeople nicely let me swap for blue.
“It’s The Abyss,” I admitted. “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. But at least we won’t fall.”
“It rules!” Kaz cheered, possibly the result of too many drugs.
At the end of the month, I sent in the receipt with my rent, figuring, if I had to, I’d pay for the bulbs myself. But I quickly got a check. That Saturday, a man in a suit appeared.
Dark suit. Dark man. Constantly frowning. “Are you the manager?” he grumped.
I was weeding flower beds. I’d woken up too early and after reading for a while, needed to get out of my apartment. I pointed at Denny’s door, but our boy wasn’t home. Or he was beyond waking. So the guy ended up talking with me.
He was from the bank, which now owned the property. But it didn’t intend to keep it for long. “We’ll bring it to code and put it right back on the market. That’s all you can do with these places.”
“What do you mean ‘these places,’” I asked politely.
“This isn’t Bel Air.”
It also turned out that, while the bank waited for a buyer, everything froze: Rents. Leases. Denny’s stewardship.
“What about the empty apartments?” I asked.
“We’ll fill them.”
“Have you seen them?”
I first showed him what Mack, Joni, their kids, and their dogs had done, expecting dismay.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said, stonefaced. “It’s why there are contractors.”
Compared to that, he felt Donna’s old place could rent in a week. “It needs carpet cleaning and some paint. Not even much. These wood walls are an asset.”
Contractors came. They patched, painted, and hauled away trash. They finally took the earthquake rubble, too: the remains of the pool wall, the tilted gazebo, and the wrecked mailbox kiosk. They replaced windows, checked smoke detectors, and installed fire extinguishers. They even mowed the lawns on schedule. And they quickly replaced the concrete block pool wall with a friendlier wooden fence. Though it was topped with barbed wire.
“Are you afraid people staying at the motel will attack us?” I asked.
Stoneface stonewalled.
Meanwhile, Denny coasted. He seemed to still be working because he was gone all day. But as the days lengthened, I reset timers. When bulbs in the carport burned out, I got new ones. I didn’t even think about it. It didn’t seem like work.
After apartment 5 was rebuilt, I moved in a production friend from our office. I checked with the bank guy, and he ran a credit check and approved. We didn’t even need the For Rent plaque I’d found in the storage closet under the stairs. Somehow, the ugly, main sign out front had survived the quake.
Soon after, Meg’s former boyfriend, Quinn, started showing up and spending nights. “It’s the only time we’ve really been separated,” he told me. “We had a big fight just before The Big One, and I stomped out. But who can stay away from Meg?”
She laughed at that, then softened.
In early May, one of Cyndi’s increasingly many cats “wan away fwom home” as she put it. The “missing” cat – dark, hairy, and vile – soon took over the vast litter box that was the crawl space under our building.
“At least, it keeps away rats,” Claire said.
“Rats are only as unhealthy as the neighborhood they live in,” Vic lectured. But I wasn’t sure where that left us.
A few weeks later, our office drifted into a short hiatus, and the more I was home, the more I realized Tim was, too. Sally had been right – he worked strange hours. Cyndi worked 9-to 5.
For Memorial Day, one of Tim’s former army pals came for the weekend. It scared me slightly that Tim was a vet and had once been trusted with guns. The pal was on vacation from Waterloo, Iowa, where he sold surveillance systems.
“He’s not leaving,” Cyndi complained after the man’s vacation slid by. “He likes it here.”
“He doesn’t pay rent,” Lindsay soon added. “Though either does Cyndi, really. Her dad covers it all.”
“My dad nearly bought this building,” Cyndi gently bragged one evening. A group of us were around the pool. “Then I would have been manager.”
I wondered if that would make me leave.
The high point of their month, non-chemical variety – though Cyndi didn’t use drugs, and Tim always seemed under control – was their not appearing on Wheel of Fortune. Cyndi had answered an ad for something called Best Friends Week.
“We’re not really married, so I figured we could pretend,” she said. “And he is my best friend.”
She and Tim had practiced for weeks. They dutifully watched the show every evening, then played the computer version for hours. But the day of the taping, Tim wimped.
“He’s shy,” Cyndi told us, trying to hide her disappointment. This about a man who Lindsay claimed had once been in a porno flick.
“Did he tell you that?” Sally asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t have seen it, Grandma.”
“But did he tell you?”
“Cyndi did,” Lindsay allowed. “And she almost never lies.”
For a while that summer, Lindsay seemed to be in love – and not with Denny. Occasionally, a hulking, tangle-haired, chain-draped, pierced Rocker slipped into her apartment late at night and disappeared in early morning.
“Have you noticed,” Bobby asked, “that when he’s trying to sneak out, he always has his head down?”
“I’m not up that early,” I said. Bobby was, having a long drive.
“Why go so far?” I’d asked him.
“They like that I’m bilingual. And they pay extra.”
“The thing I don’t understand,” Birgit said – talking about Lindsay – “is why anyone would be embarrassed about having sex with her. She’s great.”
“Maybe she’s too normal,” Rob offered.
Perhaps in Metal Boy’s honor, Lindsay began nesting, constantly spray-painting found objects and furniture in the courtyard. “I don’t have a lot of money to spend,” she admitted, “being a student. But that’s no reason my place can’t look nice.”
“You can take anything you want from my apartment,” Sally said. “You know that.”
Lindsay was tactful. “I love you, Grandma. But everything you have is yours.”
Meaning she hated it.
“Just be careful when you’re painting in the courtyard,” I cautioned. “There’s a dropcloth under the center steps.”
“Sure thing,” said Lindsay. She put down scraps of newspaper after that.
In my time home, I also noticed our crawl space seemed to be housing animals. And not all of them were cats.
“Do we have possum around here?” I asked Vic.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, unconcerned.
“‘Cause something larger than a squirrel is going down there.”
“Squirrels don’t usually live in crawl spaces. More like attics.”
“I didn’t know we had one.”
“Yep, there’s a trap door in my closet.”
I checked mine the next time I thought about it. I’d never looked up. My hall closet had a solid ceiling, but I asked Sally about other entry ways.
“I think there’s one in apartment 12,” she said. “That would match the one in Vic’s. And there’s one in my old apartment, number 6. There should be one entry for each of the three wings. Not that I’ve ever been up there.”
I was almost curious to explore. But I didn’t want to bother anyone.
“It’s dark,” Vic assured me. “And really low. And there are spiders.”
I should have guessed he’d know.
When Lindsay’s romance died, she became strangely quiet. “I’ve had relationships with two different guys in this building,” I heard her tell Birgit. “It’s depressing.”
“Dating’s tough,” Birgit replied. “I’ve been lucky with Rob.”
I wondered who else Lindsay had been seeing. I hadn’t noticed anyone. Maybe she only met guys at night.
In July, Birgit went home to Sweden for month. “Mostly to visit family.” It might have forced Vic back to the Playboys I sometimes saw him throwing out. But once the pool was steadily swimmable, Meg and Holly started using it, along with Lindsay.
Bobby told me something else about Birgit when he stopped by one night to talk about bugs. It seems that, during the renovation, they’d migrated upward from Mack and Joni’s. “Birgit’s been working part-time as a dance instructor for Arthur Murray. So this is a good break for her. Can you imagine doing the Cha-Cha all summer?”
I couldn’t imagine the Cha-Cha.
“And she has a part-time gig with The Hollywood Reporter,” he continued. “Sending back Swedish film news.”
“Is there much interest?”
He shrugged. “I don’t see foreign movies.”
“I warned Birgit not to stay too long,” Franck, our other Swede, soon told Sally. “You want to get out before the dark season.”
“When’s that?” she’d asked.
“About nine months a year.”
“How long were you in Sweden?” I’d asked. “I didn’t know you traveled.
“I lived there till I was twenty-one,” he said. “My first wife and three of our grown children still do.”
“And grandchildren?” Sally asked.
“Those, too. But I’ve got so many I stopped counting.”
“They don’t want to see him,” Annie told me, when I happened to mention her dad’s background. She seemed bitter. “He didn’t leave them well.”
“He was pretty young...”
“Almost thirty.”
“I must have heard wrong.”
“No, you probably didn’t. You just can’t believe everything Dad says.”
When Bobby had been in my apartment, he’d glanced around, seeming almost jealous. “How come you have adult furniture, and we don’t?”
I’d never thought of myself as “adult.”
Midsummer, Meg’s boyfriend, Quinn, quit his long-held job as scene painter for the studios. With his jail-bait face and the tattoos of an arc-welder, he quickly skidded into work as a motorcycle messenger.
“I hated working for the studios. Too many bosses,” he said. “And every single one making changes. Now I only have one boss – me.” At that moment, his 24-hour pager went off, and Quinn’s lip curled.
Earlier that month, he’d renewed our apartment tradition by cannonballing off the carport roof. It seemed a guy thing that didn’t have to be taught. As soon as he did it, Rob followed. Then, reluctantly, Bobby.
“Cautious,” he claimed.
“You want to be a fireman,” Rob ribbed him. “What’s cautious about that?”
“I don’t want to be paralyzed when I pass the exam.”
Denny also jumped off the roof. “I’ve got no responsibilities her anymore. No one can sue.”
In most ways, he was a squatter, but the bank didn’t seem to care. “Did you work something out?” I asked.
“No. There were just never receipts for my paying rent. We were supposed to pay two hundred a month but never did. I think the bank’s too busy to notice.”
The rep seemed more careful than that.
“Maybe they think he’s still managing,” Lindsay suggested.
“There’s a joke,” Vic said. He was with Lindsay at the pool but was fully dressed. “I burn,” he explained.
“Take off your shirt,” Lindsay teased. “I’ll put lotion on you.” That sent Vic running upstairs. “I shouldn’t be nasty,” she apologized.
The guys tried to get me to jump off the roof, too. But I wouldn’t be shamed.
One drama of August came when the smaller of Meg’s two cats was accidentally sealed in a wall. The bank’s plumber had unscrewed an access panel to fix a leak and wasn’t careful putting it back on. When Meg hear mewing from behind her tub, she panicked. The cat was easily rescued, but that wasn’t her concern.
“We got him fast,” she said, relieved. “The last time, it cost me a thousand dollars.” “For what?” I asked.
“Cat therapy.”
I didn’t know to respond. Meg smiled and explained.
“They held him and stroked him all day. Fed him wonderful things. Make motherly sounds.”
“Did he really need it?”
Meg laughed. “Judas had never smelled paint before. When he did, he freaked and bit one of the painters. Then he ran out the door. He’d never been outside, either, and doesn’t have claws. He stayed out all night, and I think that scared him more than anything.”
“There are coyotes,” Quinn added.
“C’mere, Judas!” Meg lured. “Here, pampkins! Show Jake how well-adjusted you are.”
The cat looked at me and slid under the couch.
When Ed reappeared, we all first realized he’d been gone for several months. Annie and Franck had known, but they never mentioned it. I had no proof, and surprisingly either did Sally, who seemed to know everything, but I think Ed may have been doing a little time. There was his wee gambling problem.
With Ed gone, Annie’s job must have gone full-time, because she wasn’t around a lot. Instead, Franck took over care of Eden. He took her to pre-school and picked her up, they went to movies, and they did the grocery shopping. “Did you finally retire?” I asked him at one point.
“No, I work.”
He freelanced, doing voice overs and dubbing. He spoke five languages.
“I’ve been doing a lot of cartoons... foreign commercials. Long hours, but I do them on weekends and earn a week’s pay.”
When I mentioned how fortunate that was to Annie, she laughed. “He’s lucky he still gets hired.”
I wondered who was telling the truth.
Annie was also a cat-lover and seemed inspired by Meg and Cyndi. When she and Ed moved in, they had one cat. And then there were four.
Once the refurbishing was done on Donna’s place, the bank guy found new tenants as quickly as he promised. They were Isabelle, Marie, and the kid. He was probably Marie’s son, since she seemed friendlier than Isabelle. As soon as they moved in, she began to complain.
“No one cleans the laundry room but me.”
“Someone’s always in my parking space.”
“Those people...” she pointed down the courtyard toward Tim and Cyndi “...play their music too loud.”
Admittedly, she was right, but this was a democracy.
When her garbage disposal jammed as she made dinner, she asked me to help, though Denny was lolling nearby. “I’ve heard you’re better,” she whispered, once we were inside.
I looked at the disposal, first warning her that she probably knew as much about it as I did. Fortunately, one of the few things I knew fixed it.
Another night, the fault was hers – Marie’s, actually. A huge tow-truck was crammed in their tiny parking space. The truck had been there before, but since their space was on the end, next to mine, the truck only seemed to bother me. It was late, but their lights were on, so I quietly tapped on the door. Marie – who-never-speaks-English-but-seems-to-understand-it – answered.
“Is that your tow-truck?” I asked politely.
Marie’s presumed boyfriend was flopped on the taco chip-littered floor, watching Mexican gangster movies with the kid. “It’s mine,” he grunted.
“Could you move it to the street?” I asked, still polite. “It was hard to get out of my car.
Quote the boyfriend: “Nah.”
“It could get towed,” I warned. “It’s happened before. And this building’s too small for people not to get along.”
The boyfriend swigged his beer. By this time Rob, Bobby, and Meg – who had obviously all seen the truck and maybe been inconvenienced by how far it was sticking out – were on the balcony above me whispering, “Tow it! Tow it!” Bobby was also giving me double thumbs up.
“You don’t even live here,” I went on, to the boyfriend. “Why risk someone else’s reputation?”
Maybe faced with my logic – or aware of the hissing mob – the boyfriend abandoned the TV and moved his truck. The next morning the bank rep called me unexpectedly at work. I suspect Vic was his informant. “You should’ve towed the truck,” he said.
“I really didn’t consider it.”
“If it blocked the access way around the building, it could have been dangerous.”
When I mentioned this to Sally, she said, “You did the right thing.”
Lindsay simply asked, “How many trucks could a tow-truck tow if a tow-truck could tow trucks?” That took all evening to get out of my mind.
When he’d called, I’d also asked the Bank Rep why he’d elected me.
“People seem to trust you,” he complimented, adding, “I’ve already spoken with the tenant.”
Isabelle, it seemed, had slept through the whole thing. She gets up early for her work as a nanny. Also, she and Marie don’t have a car, so they have to take busses. But she wasn’t happy and reportedly fought with Marie before I’d come home. Sally told me that. Still, Isabelle insisted the whole thing wouldn’t have happened if she and Marie weren’t immigrants. “We’re being persecuted!”
“Tell her I was born in Serbia,” the bank rep laughed when I reported back. It was his first unguarded moment.
Maybe in retaliation, Isabelle bought a kitten.
Kaz, the painter, spent most of his down time watching videos with Tim and the guy from Iowa. He was still sleeping on Tim and Cyndi’s couch. At least, Denny’s brother had moved to Pete’s old room.
Part of the summer, Claire also had a visitor – her mother. So Claire was sleeping on her living room couch while her mother took the bedroom. I noticed this – innocently enough – from my front window. Before that, I’d also noticed men.
“How does she meet them?” Lindsay asked. “They’re all really hot.”
“Well, she works for a corporation,” I said. “She’s intelligent. Friendly. Speaks well. And she’s fairly pretty.”
“But some of these guys are my age,” Lindsay went on. “At least, twenty years younger than Claire. I could never meet them.”
“Ask her.”
“No way!”
“It’s phone ads,” Cyndi later told Lindsay. She passed the word on to me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know – those ads in the back of the LA Weekly’s she’s always carrying.”
“You mean the Personals?”
“No... those are for people who want to meet people. These are for people who pay.”
I asked how Cyndi knew.
“She said she and Claire sometimes talk – about antidepressants. Claire’s job’s a lot of stress.”
She seemed fairly relaxed to me. Almost any time Claire and I saw each other, we talked, casually. The last time she saw me working in the courtyard, she said, “You should be manager.” I’d laughed. “Well, you do more work around here than Denny,” she’d gone on.
“It’s a way not to think,” I’d replied. “I wouldn’t do this for money. Besides, the bank’s hired a gardener, a pool guy, painters, a plumber, and a handyman. I just pick up loose ends.”
Claire kind of made a pass at me, too, one night when I tapped on her door to drop off a misdelivered letter. She asked me to fix her toilet. Her mother was already asleep, and after I stopped the toilet running, Claire leaned over, asking me to show her which valve I’d adjusted. She was wearing a caftan and accidentally showed me her breasts. When she realized this, she laughed.
“Not bad for forty-two, huh?”
I grinned. “No... not bad at all.” Then we kind of stared at each other for a moment. All I had to do was touch her. But I both wasn't interested and was seeing someone.
“Night,” I told her.
“Yep,” she said. “And thanks.”
As I opened her door, Franck – across a landing as small as Vic’s and mine – also opened his. “Oh, I thought you were Edan,” he said. “She sometimes comes up for a bedtime story.”
“This late?” I asked. It was after eleven.
“She comes up when Ed ‘n’ Annie are fighting.”
After his wife died, Franck began to spend nights on Annie’s sofa. It seemed another apartment tradition. Annie was his youngest child, and the one who lived closest. When Apartment 13 came available after the quake, Franck sold his house and moved in.
In the mornings, as I left to work, he was usually sitting on the third step of the flight that led to his and Claire’s apartments – smoking. He seemed to chain smoke because I sometimes watched him at the pool, monitoring Edan. He carried an empty peanut butter jar for the butts.
“You ever notice how many cats we have?” he asked me on morning. He was always ready to talk. “You and I might be the only ones who don’t have one.”
I needed to think about that. Sally didn’t. Vic didn’t. Denny didn’t, along with my friend from production. But there was a slew of cats.
“What ya gonna do?” I said, shrugging.
At other times, Franck and I talked about the TV and film industries. He’d done voice overs for much of his life in California. It helped that he spoke five languages.
“I can’t say I’ve loved all of it,” he almost sighed. “But it pays well. Though everything I have’s in trust for Edan. She’ll be rich when I’m dead.”
“I’m sure she’d rather have you alive.”
“If she doesn't go to college,” he confided, “she’ll get half at twenty-five and the other half ten years later. If she goes and graduates, she gets it all as a present.”
“I hope it’s not too much to spoil her.”
He only smiled.
Some weekends, he worked sixteen-hour days. The Fourth-of-July, he worked straight through from Friday to Monday.
I was dubbing a Japanese cartoon series into Danish,” he explained. “I normally make three thousand an episode, but since I’d missed being with my family, I billed them four grand each. And they paid.”
He grinned, as would anyone. For twenty-six episodes, that was $102,000 for four days’ work. No Biz like Show Biz. Of course, Annie would have me not believe anything Franck said.
One especially hot night, I came home to find a note on my door from Kaz. “Air conditioner out! Help! Pleeze!”
I really didn’t know much about air conditioners, but I went back downstairs to tell him.
“You got our message right away,” Holly greeted me.
“How long was it up?”
“I just stuck it there,” Kaz said. “The AC just wiped out, and it’s too late to call anyone else.”
I popped off the cover. The thin silver parts – the condenser? – were frozen solid.
“We’ve been cranking it,” Kaz admitted.
“There’s no filter,” I pointed out. Even I realized that.
Holly looked embarrassed. “I washed it the other day and set it out to dry. The dog got it. I kept meaning to buy a new one.”
“As hot as it is, the ice will probably melt pretty soon,” I told them. “And I have some spare filters in the courtyard.”
When I came back from the dark closet under the stairs, Holly was helping the ice with a hair dryer.
“Think it’ll be okay,” Kaz asked.
“It might be. If you didn’t fry the motor.”
The machine must have survived, because the next evening, they thanked me – in wine. This note said, “Kaz and I could have gotten through last night, but we were worried about Kelso. Last summer, it was so hot, our ferret died.”
Ferrets, I knew, were illegal. Suddenly, cats didn’t seem so bad.
Because of the extended heat, I also asked the Bank Rep to call an air conditioner company to do some building-wide maintenance. It had probably been neglected since Gabe and Dorothy left.
“Everything’s solid,” the AC guy assured me.
“That’s great. How long do these units last, anyway? Mine looks like it was new with the missionaries.”
“The older they are, the better they’re built,” he guaranteed. “They rarely die ‘cause there are so few moving parts. The only bad thing is they fuck up the atmosphere.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone in the industry’s knows.”
Fortunately, by September, things began to cool. But Birgit was back, with several promising months by the pool. So Vic’s windows stayed steamed.