CHAPTER SEVEN

It took me two days to eat my way through half of Doctor Carter's twenty dollar bill. Carla and I ran a booth at the farmer's market for the entire weekend and even buying cold salads and lentils was costly there, though her friends gave me a deal on the kalamata olive tapinade. That dish is a piece of work. So on the third day out, a blue Monday, there was no boiling hot mug of Colombian coffee to awaken a sleeper and no breakfast was put on the table downstairs. I found Carla down in the kitchen reading the Joy of Cooking.

"So, did you hit the streets, already? Bring home a hundred pounds of fruit?"

"Carla, I just woke up. Anyway, I thought I had 29 days of credit for tuberose plants, not to mention working the marketplace with you."

Every landlord wants a month ahead. You move in you pay the first and last month of rent. So you have the ahead part done, the back part done. Now we're talking day to day rent. You see…"

OK. O.K.

"Don't make me out the villain. I'm being really good here. I'm going to let you off on jam making, baking and shopping duty this morning. You are going to get one cup of coffee, this one bowl of oatmeal then you will hit the streets and find either a part-time job or a hundred pounds of fruit. Your call.

Having had an ex Marine Sergeant for a husband this didn't bother me in the least. SHe'd trained me. I was ready. I quietly polished my bowl of oats. Strength to lift the lids of dumpsters, haul bags, shopping carts and the like. I contemplated the vista of that day.

Then I thought of something. Having married straight out of college, I'd never had a job. but I had seen Ginger Rogers search for a job once in a film. I knew job searches could be nice. They seemed to consist mostly of putting on a freshly ironed white blouse and knocking on doors. Clean and lacy? Didn't that seem better than mucking about in dumpsters? So, I went upstairs and put on my blouse and my only blue jeans. "Okay. I'm leaving now." She didn't answer. Again, having had an ex Marine Sergeant for a husband, that didn't phase me in the least. I walked down to Hollywood Boulevard.

That phased me. At this hour, the demented ones were already gathering for the parade. I stood before a window, realizing they would take me for a tourist in my neat jeans and white blouse.

I sighed and looked beyond the store window, into the store. The mannequins had large breasts, wide hips in bikini panties and were bending over in a seductive way I'd never seen a dummy bend at Saks. I looked up at the sign on the glass. I was standing in front of Frederick's of Hollywood.  I went in. Every dummy was dressed in very pretty lingerie, bras, panties. A black salesgirl was folding teddies. "Say, are you by any chance hiring?"

"Hiring.....you? This is hot lingerie, lady."

"I may look PTA but I've worn lingerie."
Yeah right. OK." She came over. Her name tag said Homzelle. "Pretend I'm a customer."

She took a pair of split down the middle panties, held them up and acted mystified. "Miss, what the heck is this torn thing here?"
"It seems to be a pair of panties. Nineteen…. Am I reading that price right?

"You are indeed. Now Miss, tell me please, why am I paying nineteen ninety five for some two buck panties with a hole in them?"

"Because it's going to improve your love life more than a four hundred dollar intimacy course from Barbara de Angelis, is why."

"Oh, that's good. Nice touch. Nice writing." She scrutinized me. "Are you an actress?"
"Well I was married once, I suppose that's acting. Let me guess. This is your day job and you are an actress?"

"I'm a stand up comic --first. An actress second. That's how come I can stand to earn minimum wage here and clean houses in Beverly Hills on weekends cuz nights I star at the Comedy Store and I'm going to make it one day. Get me a sit-com. I got what it takes."

"You do. You just went into that little skit so easily and it was so real."

You too, Gal. Let me tell you something. I meet a lot of people. I can make snap judgments. You have thee-at-rical ability. You belong in the biz."

If that were true, it'd would have shown up earlier than age fifty five."

"That old. Wow. You look good for your age. A very classy lady. Look, if I had a job opening, I'd hire you in a minute but…you're obviously west side. Why don't you go to your end of town. Get a job there?"

"I'd have to wait 'til things cleared up for me on that side of town. Until my ex husband the embezzler was out of the newspapers. And even then….I'd rather not go back and have my friends see me clerking. Well thank you, anyway. You're very sweet Homzelle." I toodleooed her with my fingers. "Good-bye."

"Don't be a stranger."

* * *

I crossed Hollywood Boulevard and went down La Brea Avenue to Sunset Boulevard, looking for shops that were hiring, realizing what a 'full on'  unique, lofty, isolated mountain peak I'd been living on. Los Angeles  had ten million people and maybe a dozen lived the way we had. The other nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand lived like this. Grim, hungry and jobless. Did they feel like me, so overpowered by their limited prospects that they just wanted to lie down on the sidewalk, turn their face to the wall and sleep?

I stopped before an Arabian cafe. Breakfast had worn off and I was hungry. In the window I could see sheaves of meat broiling and dripping into a pan below.  The aroma of lamb and garlic engulfed me. And riding alongside it, waves of the sweetest, blackest Turkish coffee charged through the air. I sucked in a high calorie breath and pushed myself on. Further down the street, the aroma of Chinese Chop Suey hung in the air. I turned around and went back to Carla's ultramarine blue morninglory cottage. "Carla, I'm starving, you wouldn't have a cold piece of leftover anything, would you?

"I warned you, I'm not going to feed you again. You come home with food or money. You've got to learn to make it on your own on the street."

"Just a crumb. Don't bother to heat it."

"I'm not feeding cold or hot. Avery, you're like a tiger kitten, first day in the wild. You have just been weaned. It's a crucial moment for you. Today, you must learn to pounce on mice and find food or you are going to starve."

"But you said it yourself. It's a jungle out there."

No Avery, it's an hospitable, fruitful environment and you can learn to survive and moreover have laughs while you do it."

"I don't laugh that easy."

""Negative mind set. You're thinking about the negatives out there. Listen, everything you prayed for is coming toward you. Every 'no' is guiding you toward the big, perfect yes. See how the universe is a perfect, caring mother that just wants to be interacted with properly while she's runnin' around seeing to answering your prayers. No negative cup half empty mantra. That's an insult. Angels go deaf listening to that kind of moan mantra. You need patience, trust and inner silence."

"I was silent." I said stubbornly. "I got turned down for a job."
"If you had been without that continual, inner negative mental yammer, you'd have keen eyesight. You'd spot opportunities. When you watch people in stillness, you get heart centered. That compassion gives you the ability to see beauty in anyone, to care, and be heroic. You get soul sucked. That's when you enter into group activity, commit yourself! Dare! That gives you stature and that is luck. But the beginning of it all is the inner silence and the eyes to see everything as beautiful. I'm telling you this? A girl who's dating a convicted murderer? That's proof you can see the perfection and wholesomeness in all of it, in the grime, in poverty, in unstylishness and joblessness, and sheep without flock and not eating --because all those things are what's going to wake you up and make you a success. You were asleep before you got here. All these things you claim to hate are doing you the favor of waking you up!"

Admonished, I hung my head. A tea kettle whistled. "Morninglory seed tea. It's all you get." She put a fist of black seeds into the food mill and whiz-ground it to powder. She threw it into a tea pot and poured the boiling water over it. "While this brews, I need you to shower and put on any of the loose muumuus I left on your bed.

"I doubt if anyone's gonna give me a job in a muumuu."

"Just do it."

Puzzled, but again, living with a soldier, you just do as you are told. I showered, shampooed, put on one of her flowered muumuus with white tennis shoes, then came back down to the kitchen and wolfed down the bitter tea. "Yuck. Why would anyone drink that?"
"Oh I dunno". Carla smiled enigmatically."Cuz maybe you can forget about food for nine hours?"
"Dieter's tea. That's nice."

 By the time I hit the corner of Hollywood Boulevard, the tea had worked its magic. I had no hunger at all. In fact, there was no me -- to be anything. The locus of the universe was suddenly outside me. I focused with wonder on antique toys in windows, food shops, the faces of laughing pashas who cooked exotic recipes from distant land, all previous upset gone. The despair ticker tape in my mind had shut off --and with it, all sense of self. There was just an amusing cinerama technicolor mondo bizarre show going on, for my pleasure..

I watched a Turk deftly baste the many sheaves of roasting lamb with some oily herbs. He speared the best cooked piece of meat off the slow-turning rack to build a sandwich. His patron scuttled off to a table to wolf it down. From the back I could see his elbows fluttering, his head working something and feel the meal being chewed,  yet I had no thought of my own hunger, or my empty pockets. There was no one home to fret.

The turk winked through the glass at me as if to say, 'how can you resist this stuff?'  I smiled back at him. There was. no one home, no need to bolt the windows, or protect myself from a man with a black handlebar mustache. I was no longer being basted in my own fearful thoughts. I didn't have to be on guard against myself. I could just be a tourist and eyeball the rich, incredible landscape of Hollywood Boulevard in the late California afternoon.

The tourists were the bizarre ones. Stiff polyester fabrics, the women were starched and wore crayon colors. Wal-mart t-shirts and skirts. In contrast, how decorative and imaginative were the locals. Kids with blue hair, blue fingernails and matching blue, enameled bracelets. They cared, they lived to design. They wore black  leather to insulate themselves from Walmart world. They were like florid, little jungle parrots with crested heads, magenta circles painted around their eyes and heavy ostrich feet grounding them so they wouldn't fly off.

I caught sight of myself reflected on a store window. The muumuu had indeed been the right choice. How had Carla known? I fitted right into this florid Brueglesque peasantry that had come from the jungles beyond the boulevard. In it, I was invisible.

The shops knew who was out there and offered souvenirs of Hollywood to the Walmart group and beads, bracelets, studded dog collars to the locals. I moved through the trash like an art collector, spotting great and unique things. Peacock feather earrings, Balinese jungle paintings alongside a bronze Grauman's Chinese Theater paperweight.

The Chinese noodle shop no longer screamed to my stomach. Carla's diet tea was good! I felt lean, mean, energetic instead of weighed down with food. People's faces were of interest, the stories the faces told me, their frowns, and sometimes, some faces, their pain.

A teen aged girl trudged toward me, weary yet patient,  her skirt oddly askew, hemline at her thigh on one side and below her knee  on the other. One sock was normal, the other had been sucked into the heel of her tennis shoe. On her back, a heavy schoolbag loaded with books. As she passed, I searched for signs of hopelessness and fatigue to explain the wardrobe choices. I was wrong. The girl inside the crooked wardrobe was perfectly un-askew. I turned to watch her pass  and instantly absorbed her disinterest in the clothes on her own body. What was this? A new generation of crazies, driven mad by high school cafeteria food? I sat on the planter ledge outside a shop.I imagined a future where people didn't care about tilted hemlines or socks. It boggled the mind.

A street girl was following a tourist, hassling him for a cigarette. She was dying for a fix and the tourist fellow was abusive. "Get a job. Did you hear? Girls can work now".

"Hey mister" I said from my ledge. "Why don't you just give her one? You can see she's dying for a smoke."
The man turned slowly, so slowly and looked down at me. I saw he was in a unique pain all of his own. I stared into the exact flavor of his tribulation. He was cheap. He was attached to the cigarettes' cost. Suddenly, I was filled with infinite compassion. "I know, -- they cost you money," I heard myself say sympathetically. "But just one." I smiled a maternal hopeful smile and suddenly he broke into a smile; We were like two underwater paper flowers slow-moing into bloom. I had this feeling of wanting to pat him on the arm and he seemed to know that I wanted to do it. "They are damned expensive," I acknowledged and I turned back to the street girl.

"Listen, sweetheart, I had two friends who are dragging oxygen tanks around with them as we speak, advanced emphysema from cigarettes, in fact, the woman who was my age, just died of them. Maybe it's time to quit."

The man turned to her. "Tell you what. I'll give you the pack if you'll make it your last."

"We could share this pack and both make it our last few. Can we do that? Can we really do that?" she asked uncertainly. This was a girl who understood addiction.

"I have the will power if you do."

"Hey mister, you're going to be very rich one day." I said, somehow, really knowing that about him as if a voice had told me. The man beamed.

I walked away, seeing they were working things out. I understood suddenly that life was about participation, not staying on your hill. Every second of life on the sidewalk down here was an adventure you could fall into wholeheartedly. Odd, my guardedness had disappeared, along with my good manners. I had talked to absolute strangers. Maybe there really were no strangers -- If so, why not talk to strangers.

Life provided me with a reason. A young man with too much loose fat on his face and hollowed out black eyes was watching me as if he sensed my entire, former life. He looked at me as if I were something he could use, do something with, in terms of my use to him. I rattled my ten fingers behind my ears and crossed my eyes at him. He was startled but he thought I was crazy -- safe for me. He was crazy and bad news.

The Hollywood hoards: stressed, insane, happy, dippy, young, old, hairy, unwashed. And dangerous. There were elegants perusing second hand book stores, Mustachioed cooks calling 'Sharma, kabob,' from inside Arab food stalls, Fat Buddhas in beads eating at chop suey bars, ancient mandarins in dirty whites cooking the chop suey. There were hip jazz blacks unapologetically sunning on ledges, crones waddling along the sidewalk, industriously plucking bottles and tin cans from trash cans and bus benches. It was club rock bottom and I was invisible here. I fit right in.

I stopped before a dress store window. A mannequin stood frozen. It was me. I was staring up at the exact, indigo Chanel suit I'd been searching for, well --a rip-off of same worn by a stiff mannequin that looked like I once had,  wooden, flinching my wrists elegantly, eyes staring off, seeing nothing. I marveled that it was the exact Indigo suit I'd set for myself as a find-it chore. Here it was, for fifty nine dollars. I looked down at my silly florid muumuu. In a million years I wouldn't be caught dead in a muumuu but here I was enjoying the looseness of a splashy, no waistline brilliant field of flowers with tennis shoes no less, as tasteless and garish as one could get but I didn't care. Caring was gone. How weird was that? To get into Club Rock Bottom, I'd discarded good taste, decisions, attachments,  identities, memory maybe in a last minute dash for my soul,  before I'd rooted on my Beverly Hills mountain with all the other wrist flinching stodgies, just before I'd gotten too old to be able to climb off it. If Bill could see me now, melting into this spinning carousel of garish humanity, the reality of the human race that wandered Planet Earth. In a florid Muumuu, I  qualified perfectly for membership in a group I'd previously taken great care to insulate myself against.

I pressed against the window glass. The old Avery stared up at the stars and preened for me. There was no way to get back into the safe old Avery. She'd died and was frozen up there in a glass coffin wearing the indigo suit that Yogi Baloney had said would be so good for her. Still, the old Avery died hard. I craved to own that suit.

I went in to the store where a gray haired woman turned pages of a magazine. She looked up over reading glasses. "I'd like to layaway the suit in the window.

We have it right here." She reached up and took one down from the rack, and held it forward. "Looks to be your size. Your lucky day. You wanna try it on?"

"Errr. I don't think I should now, you see, to pay for it, I'd have to get a job. But I don't have a paying job. I guess that's the definition of a catch 22. You can't......work at a real job without the, elegant office wardrobe FOA they call it. Front office appearance." I pulled out the wings of my muumuu and did a little dip. "And this muu muu on loan from my current roomie doesn't cut it. Nor does making jam ten hours a day So I want a real job. You see, right now my job is kind of like slave bondage to a jam maker, to pay rent and rent alone. So I don't have the money to buy the suit.

"So how much can you put down?"

"Money? Nothing. You see I haven't explained myself. I pay rent with kitchen work. I work for Carla, the jam maker for the Hollywood Farmers' market. Now, if you gave me some glass jars, I could make a few extra pounds of jam for you every day of the week. You could sell the jars to your neighbors or sell it here at the store, even. Our kitchen is not a block and a half from here. Around the corner. Up two doors. The house with the morninglories.

She nodded "I know it."

I wrote down Carla's address. "If you drive, just deliver some glass mayo jars to this address and I could walk down a half dozen filled jars each night. We do a hundred pounds of fruit a day. You know, Peaches, Berries? Concord grapes, mangoes …"

"Oh, I'm crazy about concord grape jam. Ok. You could pay me in concord, any time."

"Well, what do you say fifty nine jars of jam. Fifty nine dollars of suit?"

She looked at the address. Two doors up? A dollar a jar? That's very reasonable. She took the suit off the hanger. Size eight. If you think you need a size ten, bring this one back with the tags still in it. She stuffed it in a bag. Now I'm holding you to your word."

":My word is gold. And so are my accountancy skills. I was married to an accountant. Famous guy probably in today's newspaper.....Six jars of jam, six dollars, in l0 days I will have paid the suit and tax.

Well, technially, there' s no sales tax on grape jam trades. But Ten days of jam deliveries.
"It is? Well, in ten days I'd have paid the suit off."

There are women in my building who would pay two dollars."
"I'll let you make the buck profit. Your trust in muumuu lady here deserves that." I went to the door. "Fine. I'll keep bringing jam until the suit is paid for." She smiled and waved.

        * * *

I had just done my first full on street business deal.  Carla would have been proud of me. "Hi, I'm new here" I said to some teen aged heroin addicts with purple hair. "I just arrived," I said, waving the suit bag like a flag.

They congratulated me, smiling, "Don't go back to Trenton," they said. 'Hollyweird rules." Trenton, I thought. Not far from where I was born actually.

I turned. Coming toward us was a cop on the beat, swinging his night stick. The purple children turned and disappeared. Not as smart, I froze facing him, deer in headlights. He moveed into my stare with a stare of his own, a dark cloud of suspicion mixed with uncertainty poured out of him. "Hi, how are you?" I said sweetly. "I'm Avery. I'm new here."

"Avery. Hey, it's Avery" he said in Long Island tones then  kind of did a ballerina crouch as if to show surprise. "Outta sight." I realized he was patronizing me and playing with me at the same time. Hmmmm. If he needed to think I was crazy and indulge me, that was OK. And if he didn't, he should go back to New York where being a street cop was not all foolishness and light like it was here on the magic boulevard. He was privileged to be here in charge of all these fairy children. I leaned close to him, catching him off guard. "You should go soft on these kids, officer. They're like parakeets. They mean no harm but they do frighten easily. I'm glad to see you're a playful guy. You could be worse. At least, you're not paranoid, are you?" He just stared into my eyes, uncertainty starting to engulf him. "No, you're not. You're a good boy."  I nodded and let him back off.. In the center of my forehead, I heard the word 'schizophrenia' and I knew it came from his mind. It didn't matter what he thought about me. I hoped he remembered about the beautiful parakeet children on drugs and wasn't afraid of them.

I came upon a beautiful bookshop framed by two Doric columns of antique wood, making it appear to be a temple from Ancient Greece. Everything in the stacks outside was old and yet sold for pennies. Didn't they know how valuable these books were? Philip Wylie from the 1950's, worrying about the A bomb from Russia, never knowing Muslims would be slinking toward Bethlehem in another much colder war, fifty years hence, turning themselves into bombs. Arthur Miller's bio…"Time Bends." Who ever knew the man wrote such a thing? And only 99c. That was very cheap. What could I trade to get it? I was stumped. I went in. The man was old, in a cardigan and bifocals.. He looked through them at me, expectantly.

"Sir, I will work for this book. Let me clean your bathroom. Sweep out the store. Uhh. I uhhhh. Hmmm. I'm trying to think of my other talents. I cook but you don't have a kitchen here.

The man was old, in a cardigan and bifocals.. He looked through them at me then turned his head to see the title of the book I clutched. He nodded. 'That's a good one."

"I suppose that with Miller's abilities, he knows something that  we ordinary people do not.
"Keep the book. It's yours. Anyone else in your cash position would have stolen it.
"You keep it here. I'll come back for it tomorrow, maybe with a few jars of jam. Do you eat jam?
He nodded.
"And maybe you need a worker?" Hopeful upturned lilt at end of sentence.
"I may," he said grudgingly. He inclined his head toward a male clerk high up on a ladder. "This kid knows bupkis about books. What non-fiction book have you read recently."

"Well, there's nothing wrong with fiction, except 99% of it is utter junk. But..."  I tried to remember words. Names. Titles. "World without End, because I read Pillars of the Earth and Eye of the Needle. But that was a few months back. The actual lastest  latest was the biography of Kissinger. Mortimer Halperin or somebody? I did read it and I was thinking that Henry indulged the craziness of Nixon. He let Chile happen. But the poor man never dreamt it would be such a blood bath. I don't think Nixon did either. Isn't that funny, their minds said, go ahead, make the Chilean economy scream. Unseat the pinko president and .....you know the rest. Thirty thousand dead. How on earth did that happen? And supposedly our fleet was parked in the harbor while it did. Wasn't Nixon's mother a quaker? How the hell did he stray?"

The man stared at me, chewing the inside of his cheek. Bill and I had once been at a Hollywood dinner honoring Nancy and Henry which is why I even read the book. But I didn't think I should tell the man all that. It seemed vaguely show-offy.

" Listen, honey, you come back with the jam. If I fire the jerk, you're in like Flynn cuz you have the book bug, don't you. I like infected people. See, a clerk like you infects others. Dats a good thing." We smiled and nodded conspiratorially to one another. I  waved the five fingered 'toodleoo' that I'd imported from Beverly Hills to great effect on the Boulevard and I went outside and stood in the sun. Wow. A genuine maybe. A glorious 'maybe' that felt like a jewel had just been pinned to the breast of my blue Muumuu.

As I walked, bare handed but somehow triumphant on my mission to find a job, having found so many yeses around me,  I began to wonder how so many people starved. Then I began to think about how many people had dined with poor Henry and fretted in sorrow yet zipped their lip and never mentioned thirty thousand murders by Nixon's puppet, Pinochet. What a smash up that had been! When life was so easy to get right? How did the brightest and best run the world so badly? How had nobody in Congress ever commented on what was going on? Perhaps because it had been classified a CIA cover operation. I suddenly thought I wanted to be in Congress, run for office, and see that such things never happened again. Passion was in the air and it was leaking into my lungs and I was on fire with ideas, compassion, caring, all the ingredients passion was woven from. I wondered how anyone could starve and be jobless when knowledge grew on trees and eating it gave passion. I started to dream of being a congresswoman and telling people about the CIA. I'd be like Nancy Pelosi on steroids.

Be careful  what you dream. Angels listen to dreamers and to dreamers only.

* * *

On the corner, three boys barely out of their teens lolled smoking in leather jackets I'd never have said hello to the like in any recent incarnation, but today they got shy waves. They surrounded me laughing insinuatingly. " Cutie pie." One of them said. "Whose mommy are you?"

"Yours if you don't have a mommy. Where's your mommy, little boy?"

Sorrow rose in him but he didn't answer. "Oh my goodness." I breathed. "Well she loves you very much you know and one day you'll meet her in heaven and it'll all be forgiven and forgotten about and you'll just tell her everything you did today. Today is all that matters, anyway. What are you going to do today?"

"Rob a liquor store…. was the plan."

"Don’t do thaaat," I said as easily as if he'd told me he was going to grab a bus to the beach. "They shoot kids who do that. With real bullets which wouldn't be a problem if you died immediately but you'd probably live….No, definitely don't do that. You need money?" he nodded. I looked around. "half the businesses in this city need a kid to clean up in there. Half the homes, too. Five an hour up here, but on the westside, they pay twelve. Of course, you'd have to be alone. Are you afraid to be alone? No, of course not. You're a brave boy. I mean, you see me, alone strolling through the jungle. It's the only way, for us tigers!" He smiled. I'd always wished for a son. Today, for a minute I had one. And since today was cigarette day, I waved a little air toward the burning Camel he had hanging out of his mouth. "Those things are damn expensive. You wouldn't need to rob stores if you didn't have to pay for that nasty habit. Well, you'll give it up in your own sweet time." I winked and walked on.

I sat on a bus bench to rest. The bus roared up and dropped off an old woman who sat down on the bench beside me to wheeze and cough and light up a cigarette. Was the common denominator of all these people that they smoked? Do all people who don't take care of themselves end on Hollywood Boulevard?

The bus belched off leaving a cloud of black diesel smoke. That must be like smoking the exhaust pipe of a bus.. Why would you want to pay so much and get cancer go run after that bus!

"I should. It's foul enough. Seventy years I been smoking. Why pay when I can inhale a bus, instead?" She looked at the burning tip of her cigarette. I concentrated with all my might, hoping she would throw the lit cigarette into the gutter. I prayed. I did mantra. I pretended I saw her tossing it. As long as I concentrated, she just kept starting at the burning tip, her will frozen. 'Please God," I said in my mind. 'Please make this poor old lady see the light and throw the butt away.' She kept staring at it. "Ehhh," she said finally, and took a suck.

I walked away stunned, wondering if my magic was wearing off. After a while I realized that you couldn't win them all --but I was good. Maybe there were jobs available in getting people to quit tobacco because I'd shown a real bent for this profession today. Anti tobacco Congresswoman. Hmmmmmmm.

The sun was pleasant on my face. I smelled food and licked my lips. Now I was hungry. I went up to an ancient and grizzled tramp seeing immediately that he was the total tour guide of the day. "Where can you get food around here?

He eyed me suspiciously "Me, anywhere. You?" He looked me over." I see you don't carry a purse. You are....one of us?" I nodded. He beckoned knowingly. I followed him over to the window of a food shop. Inside a man minced meat on a truncated slice of a log. "Mohammed, got any of yesterday's barbecued lamb?

"Try me at midnight, Yoseff. I'll have a lot."

"Yeah. Lady," he returned to my side,  "it's early in the day for the good  meat but if you ain't fussy…" He led me to the alley. "See down there? That's what came out of the MacDonalds during lunch hour. He looked at a non-existent watch on his wrist. "Still fresh. You may get lucky. Here, I'll help you. Let it never be said Ole Joe couldn't get a meal for a pretty lady."

The dumpster preened at us like a buxom coquette with her full bosom exposed and lumps of wholesomeness piled in her cleavage. The trash was a rainbow medley of interesting objects. Including several wrapped hamburgers and lots of loose fries. "How did all these get here?" I asked, peeling paper off a MacSomething.

"Trickle down. Your basic, Keynesian money theory. There are families that order a dozen Big Macs and can't finish them. Eyes bigger than their stomachs. Throw 'em in the trash can, still wrapped. To them it's like nothing. "

"There are families like that? I said guiltily thinking of me and Bill.

"Well, this year there are, who knows next. They say the icebergs are melting and the ocean is going to rise up over the whole city. Nevada will be the new Venice beach. The temperatures will get so high we can't grow wheat for bread or to feed cows all because of cars heating up the world.

"Wow." I said munching my burger appreciatively as if it were the last waltz on the Titanic, and the water was around our knees and musicians strummed the last chords of the belle Epoque. Made me want to have a second and a third Mc Something before the Apocalypse came and the ship sank.

"Right now, we still got plenty but who knows tomorrow.  Just the meals out of trash cans? if I had to buy them? Would cost my whole Social Security check. Just the meals! We're not even talking rent."

"Really. Food is that expensive!"

"Every crumb gotta grow on land somewhere.  Land is high now, imagine when the water rises up and we're trying to grow tomatoes in the middle of the Mojave desert--  what it'll be like. You can't grow anything in Nevada. I don't care the Israelis turned a desert into paradise.. They got communes. Communes can do anything. Regular people can't farm the desert. The Palestinians could never master the trick."

I nodded, chewing wide eyed. A Jewish tramp economist with a PH.D in applied street theory and a minor in ecology and a damn good grasp on agriculture. He reached into the dumpster and nibbled a French Fry. "I'm having lunch with you, I figure I should know your name."
'Avery --Avery Wendell."

"Joseph Goldfarb." Then slowly, "Avery Wendell. I never heard that name before. It's a weird set of words. You have a very weird name, lady. But it suits you cause you're weird." He wiped his hand on his shirt then put it out. I shook it. We finished off all the food we could see in the top few inches of the dumpster as if it were a table at the Colony and Henry and Nancy were dining at the next table.

It turned out Irving had grown up somewhere called Boyle Heights which I understood to be down near Dodger Stadium. His father had a been "a cutter", something to do with the clothing industry. And his grandfather had come from Russia when the Czar decided to give Jews a special twenty five year draft stint in the army. Joseph dreamt of going to Palestine, he called Israel, to work on the communes but then he'd married. " He shrugged..

Fascinating. I'd never met anyone who had a recent relative who'd lived contemperaneously with Czar Nicholas of Russia. One of my uncles had gone to school with Garrison Keilor but it just wasn't the same.

It was hard to pull myself away from the life story of Joe Goldfarb, the son of a Boyle Heights cutter, grandson of a defector from the Czar's army, but I had a mission. To come home with a job or one hundred pounds of fruit. I explained that to Joe who understood and said 'not a problem.' 'But I will see you again Joe, I assured him. "I live here now. " He nodded knowing I meant the street and we said tender goodbyes.

I headed for the Supermarket  where I would have to get a rent downpayment for Carla. The idea made me mildly sick to my stomach. I concentrated on clearing my head. There had been so many people today. I was dizzy from them all. Until I spotted a big paper bag. I instantly realized I'd need that bag for fruit. I grabbed it off the top of a trash can and began focusing on searching for empty bags with wonderment at how fast I'd adapted to the jungle. And bags appeared. Things apeared when you searched for them. Damn Carla was good. And so was I. I would bring home the l00 pounds of fruit.
<----- PROCEED TO CHAPTER VIII.