Wherein our man, unmoored and sleepless, takes a road trip, northward, in the wee, small hours of the morning.
By Joel Deutsch
Wide-eyed, wired with insomnia, Daniel Silver barrels down the nearly empty 2 A.M Santa Monica Freeway in his gleaming onyx Camaro at nearly 90 miles per hour until he has to slow down for the gentle curve of the McClure Tunnel, which spits him out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, pointed north. he cruises up the PCH at a more moderate, if still illegal, 70, the sudden, salty chill of an onshore breeze through the open window raising Goosebumps on his bare left arm. All he’s wearing is a pair of khaki Dockers shorts, sockless sneakers, and the faded old blue pocket T he wore to bed.
A sweatshirt, also white, its front emblazoned with the call letters of the local NPR station to which he recently subscribed by phone during a summer pledge drive his first August living alone after 22 years of marriage, just to have someone to talk to, if only to confide the account number and expiration date of his Visa card, and to have something bigger than himself but smaller than, say, the Law or the Democratic party or America to belong to, lies neatly folded on the black leather passenger seat beside him,, no use to him there, of course. But given how disorganized he’s been lately, Daniel has to congratulate himself for simply having had the presence of mind to bring the sweatshirt along.
It’s the Friday night, now Saturday morning, of Labor Day weekend. Back in town, the heat isn’t as oppressive as early September can be, but it isn’t cooling off very much after sundown in his third floor apartment, either.
On his left, whitecaps twinkle like drowning stars. On his right, shadowy cliffs loom up just past the road’s shoulder. Occasionally, a pair of headlights approaches from one direction or the other and blows by him, but that’s about it for traffic. Mostly there’s nothing ahead, nothing behind. According to the orange analogue dial of the Camaro’s speedometer, he’s crept up almost to 80 again, and the speed feels good.
Entering Malibu, however, he has to slow down and come to a complete stop. A California Highway patrol cruiser is parked across his lane, its top light rotating, its driver’s side door flung wide open, and a uniformed cop is standing there with his hand raised, palm out, in the signal to halt.
Behind the cruiser, a procession of luxury sedans and high-end SUVs with a couple of stretch limousines thrown into the mix is emerging from the parking lot of a lavish ocean view restaurant.
As they bounce gently out of the driveway, some of the vehicles turn left and go north, headed , Daniel assumes, for multimillion dollar beachfront houses or exclusive canyon compounds. others turn right and go south, back the way Daniel’s just come from, where there’ll be a few more miles of the same kinds of destinations and then, for the rest, a longer drive back to similarly expensive but less far-flung domiciles in places like Pacific Palisades or Brentwood. Beyond the driveway, on the opposite side of the road, a second CHP cruiser blocks southbound traffic, its top light also rotating and another officer standing guard beside it, facing north. Daniel looks to his left and watches the southbound vehicles going past, but there are too many rolled-up smoked glass windows for him to see who’s inside any of them. . One thing he notices, though, are the red, white and blue bumper stickers that shout, from front or rear, or both, in huge block letters, FREE BOBBY BAIL.
Bobby Bail is a bizarre and ubiquitous public presence now, a sideshow freak kind of celebrity. Every day of his trial is being covered from gavel to gavel by Court TV, and every day he can be seen seated at the defense table,towering amidst his very expensive legal team, 6-foot-4 and gaunt in his black silk Italian suit, like an overdressed basketball player on a hunger strike, his dyed and receding black hair jelled and spiked as if he were half his age. Actually, back in high school, bobby was even worse at sports than Daniel, so the first time the hunger-striking basketball player image occurred to Daniel, he’d laughed out loud on his living room couch in front of the TV.
Bail had been Robbie Beiloff, then, not Bobby Bail. Daniel had been Danny, himself, but that was a name adjustment of a different order. The two of them had met when the Seventh Period gym class they were both in was supposed to be running on the oval track around the Fairfax high football field. It was a cold, cloudy November afternoon, threatening rain, and they’d found themselves sitting beside each other on the lowest plank of the bleachers, both having pleaded shortness of breath, pounding headaches, or something.
Daniel, like most of the other kids, was wearing the usual outfit of Keds gym shoes and white crew socks in need of a good washing, with baggy blue gym shorts and a random old white Hanes t-shirt, the kind he sometimes wore under his button-down regular shirt on a winter day.
Robbie, though he wore the same kind of footgear , socks, gym shorts and old t-shirt as everyone else, had also pulled on a gray hooded sweatshirt to warm himself against the chill, with the hood pulled up over his head. The hood gave Robbie a studious, even spiritual look and reminded Daniel of a monk’s cowl.
Robbie had produced a small library’s worth of paperback books from the bulging pockets of that sweatshirt, not a one of which 17-year-old Danny had ever heard of: The Way of Zen. The Myth of Sisyphus. Siddhartha. The Fountainhead. The Prince.
Robbie became his mentor. In the library or in the central plaza of the school complex or sitting after last period in those same bleachers while the varsity football team practiced, the two of them would discuss ideas, Robbie like a teacher, giving Danny reading assignments and provoking him to thought by means of a Devil’s advocate trick that Danny, sitting at the back of a huge lecture hall in philosophy 101 at Berkeley a year later , would realize had been Robbie’s version of the Socratic method.
Some lunch periods, Robbie would take him home to where he and his family lived in one side of a paint-peeling, cracked-driveway two-family half a block from the school, and have his mother make the two of them something to eat while they pored over passages from Sartre or Dostoevsky. The house was always clean enough, was Danny’s impression, although dark even at noon because of all the drapes being drawn and cluttered with abandoned books and newspapers in a way his own mother would never have permitted, not even between the Thursday visits of her Negro cleaning lady Mary,
“What the bologna means,” his father decoded from his end of the Friday night dinner table, “I’ll tell you. The bologna means they’ve got money troubles, and about that all I can say is there but for the grace of God go I.” He helped himself to another heavy-cut slice of beef brisket and transferred it to his plate with carving knife and serving fork. In the center of the pristine white tablecloth, the two white Sabbath candles flickered in their silver candlesticks beside the squat, battered silver cup his own father had brought to America from Odessa, the humble chalice still holding a drop of the sweet Concord wine he had used for making the Kiddush, the benediction over the fruit of the grape. “But the Wonder Bread?” he lifted an eyebrow at Danny, the suggestion of a possibly unapprovable friendship. “Are you sure they’re even Jewish? Do you know what congregation his parents belong to? ”
After high school, Daniel had lost track of Robbie Beiloff. It was a tumultuous time, and everyone seemed to be somewhere else. College, of course, but also India on a spiritual quest or Kenya in the Peace Corps or just stopped out of sight. Daniel heard all sorts of unconfirmed rumors about what had become of Robbie Beiloff. He was running a prosperous pot farm in the backwoods of inland Mendocino county. He had gotten together with a black chick from Oakland named Monica and they’d gone to Cuba to cut sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade.
Eventually, Beiloff started being seen around Los Angeles again, and rumors began to mix with confirmable reality. He had changed his name to Bobby Bail. Hipper, racially ambiguous-sounding, just plain cooler than Robbie Beiloff. He was running a human potential movement called MTW, for motivate to win, where hotel conference rooms full of high-paying acolytes would sit dutifully at classroom-style desks while Bobby Bail lectured them for hours on the techniques of success, the espoused principles a heady concoction of Machiavelli, Dale Carnegie, cognitive psychology and purely blind faith, while ski-masked monitors patrolled the aisles with flexible rods slashing sleeping seminar attendees across the backs of their shoulders to snap them awake.
Then you didn’t hear about MTW anymore and people said something about Bail getting into movie production, on the money end, using funds amassed either from that venture or coke dealing or real estate. Year by year, rumor by rumor, Daniel lost interest, lost track. And now here he was, good old Bobby Bail nee’ Robbie Beiloff, on trial for some very serious criminal charges, his face on every other tabloid at the Safeway checkout line and right there on TV, for hours a day, never mind Andy Warhol’s riff about how in a mass culture future, everyone would get a mere 15 minutes of fame. Andy Warhol may have been capable of envisioning enough canvases silkscreened with images of Campbell’s Soup cans to hang on every wall from Montauk Point to Mill Valley, but he had not anticipated Bobby Bail.
the restaurant’s driveway disgorges the last revelers, and the two CHP cruisers turn off their top lights and speed away. Whereupon Daniel surprises himself by continuing straight ahead, north. He has made this middle of the night road trip plenty of times, and Malibu is where he has always turned around and gone back the way he came. But tonight, whether because he doesn’t feel tired enough yet, or out of a sense of adventure, or just because simple inertia has him in its grip, he stays on the PCH until it feeds into U. s. 101 and just keeps going.
A big 76 station with four service islands bathed in the dazzling glow of mercury vapor lamps suddenly materializes ahead on Daniel’s right, like an Ed Ruscha painting of just such an iconic Southern California apparition. He doesn’t remember having ever seen the station before. But then, it’s been years since the last time he drove this far up the coast.
Painfully cramped from sitting behind the wheel, running low on fuel, and beginning to get very hungry, he lets up on the gas pedal and slows down for a look. At the rear of the station, A few yards to one side of the cashier’s booth, stands a big white Mexican food truck, of all things. A lonchería, like the ones that show up every day of the week at factories, construction sites and office buildings, horns blasting La cucaracha, la cucaracha/ya no puede caminar, double-time, to announce their arrival.
Daniel has his own favorite, not a truck but a taco stand near his home, or near where his home used to be, a car wash with a food counter that sells the best burritos de carnitas he has ever tasted anywhere, a generous helping of succulent pork chunks and rice festooned with sprigs of fresh cilantro just before being wrapped in a warm flour tortilla, so that every bite liberates a blessing of pungent fatness cut with the counterpoint of the cilantro’s fresh, leafy scent.
He still stops there for lunch on a weekend now and then if he has an excuse to be in the neighborhood. He hands over the Camaro to an attendant, orders his food, and then sits down at an old, scarred picnic table beside the plate glass window that looks onto the car wash track, devouring the burrito, a two-handed job, watching his car glide down the wash tunnel while a crew of Hispanic men scurry around it like a courtly retinue , stabbing at the dirt with long-handled brushes, hosing down wheel covers and rocker panels, then moving ahead to wait outside while the car submits to a foamy detergent shower, an automated wiping by a thousand blue sponge fingers, a clear-water rinse, and a hot wax spray. It emerges like a newborn thing into the sunlight, dripping wet, and the men converge on it again with towels and chamois cloths, drying, buffing, blessing the delivery by a laying on of caressing brown hands.
What the hell, he thinks, turning in. A fill-up, a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, and then back home.
To be continued….