CHAPTER IV

Carla was nursing her morning coffee. I'd finished my second cup, along with two bowls of oatmeal and cream so I began gathering dishes. "Carla, I'd like to clean for you, pay you back."

"Can't afford a servant." she said tersely. The change was so scary that I wondered if she was bipolar.
"I ought to pay you rent, or work for you."
"Tuberose will do for a week. After that, I haven't a clue. I can usually handle the jam detail. See, I do housework while I watch TV. Hell I do it while I install shelving? I plastered the walls on this room, put the tarpaper on the roof, there's not much I can't do myself. Wait, I'll tell you how you could pay me back. By learning to survive. By not being dependent on me for your next meal. Don't take offense, be flattered I tell you the truth. You very simply don't appear to have street skills. What is it, nine a.m.? By now you should have had a few crates of fruit in that kitchen and be helping me make jam.
"Buy fruit?" Panic filled me."How? I don't have a dime!"
"See this?" She handed me a net shopping bag. "Let's hit the streets and learn to use a shopping bag for what God intended."

* * * * *

We walked the two short blocks from Hollywood Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard. The boulevard was vacant except for an overdue-to-go home blonde street whore and when got closer, the whore waved to me, 'Hi Avery." Ed called. It was Ed/Edna in a blonde wig.
"Hi Edna, " I waved back at her. Carla blinked. "Ole Vassar College chum."
"I bow to your charm. You've walked this way only once in your life and you already have friends. I'll take it as a good omen; I was wrong about your street skills." We walked on for a while.
"OK. The Carla Survival course begins with" she indicated the Safeway Supermarket. "--dumpster diving 101. First, we slowly approach the back of the store. We're searching for grocery boys also traffic in the parking lot as we move along the alley. Bagger boys or Cops see a baglady near a trashcan they go into weasel hyperdrive. Now, usually, I just back up my van to any market but I don't want to put you on overload, learning wise and driving my van, loading a truckload of free fruit might put you off. Maybe next week, but this week, you'll be on foot alone so I'm just gonna show you the fertile fields that we 'freegans' plow. If  I'm not around, I expect you to take a morning constitutional  right after breakfast, always taking four shopping bags with you."

In my mind's eye I was counting off who of my Beverly Hills girlfriends would let me move in.

Carla froze, her hand on my arm. My heart started pumping. No one was in sight. She had stopped to show her awe. "That, Avery, is a dumpster. Such an ugly word for such a beautiful thing. Overflowing with good food and not a price tag in sight. We are going to approach it with reverence. Lesson one. Schmutz is all how you look at it. Schmutz is relative. Lesson two, Keep your eyes open. Look both ways, cuz it's illegal to go into trash as the cops think they have to protect us from non existent schmutz. In Beverly Hills or Santa Fucking Monica they take you to jail for putting a paw in one; And it's not just a ticket. It's getting booked, tried in court, then weeks of payback to the city, public service, slave labor 8 hours a day so if anyone ever catches you, make up a name and address. But here in Hollywood, it's a ticket or warning so never carry I.D. and when they write your name, give a name one letter off your real name, Avery Wendell becomes Ava Wendowsky , maybe.
"That's more than one letter off ."

"Fine, quibble. Go to jail, just don't call me for bail. Now, the dumpster is supposed to be locked but it never is and the lid lifts real easy cuz the employees gotta fill it ten times a day. Upsa daisy." She tilted the lid back against the building. "Voila.  Buried treasure. Now, prepare to DUMPSTER DIVE, verb form meaning dig in with right hand, bag in left, seeking edible trash and you'll note I say trash reverently. Trash is Good. A market dumpster is full of interesting delicious things all pre-wrapped at the factory. Oh, look, here's a spatula. If we had meat, we could make burgers. Let's take it as a good omen. Oh, by the way, if there is meat in here, it's most likely sausage, the date is one day late, sniff it, it's going to be fine. She used her fingernail to split an immense plastic trash bag. "We've got fresh fruit, smell that? " A tidal wave of molecules off ripe strawberries engulfed us.

" Perfectly fresh. Use a fingernail to rip open these black plastic bags and peek in. Ohhhh, fifty pounds of  peaches. God is great. Now, if it's a hundred pounds, you spend a dime and fone me cuz I'll come over with the van......" She was pitching plastic berry boxes into her duffle bag.
"Fresh is overstating it.

"We are going to float them in a sink, pick out the sinkers!"

You sure it's ok to eat berries out of a cootie laden trash can?"
"They're wrapped in plastic! You should be so fine when they bury you. Okay, it's not refrigerated like at Avery's million dollar kitchen, which is currently occupied by a rich Chinaman but hey last night was chilly -- dive on in, the fruit is just fine. Come late in the day, you can get it when it's just been put out. That satisfy you?" It was a rhetorical question so I filled my  bags with peaches, strawberries, blueberries, apples, bananas, guavas, pears, oranges, lemons and even a few cactus pears  while she topped her bags of fruit off with a few dozen boxes of breakfast sausages that smelled fine and we both sniffed. There were hundreds of frozen biscuit cylinders. "I don't eat flour in any form but these are a delight. I will bake one up for our high tea and you can try out my different jams. Just biscuits really plug you up with flu if you do them reg. Oh, lookie there..."

Carla crossed the alley to a plum tree loaded with purple fruit. Its branches protruded from high above someone's back fence but that someone had forgotten to prune the outside branches off. Half the tree's fruit was available to strangers.. Carla grabbed a stick that someone had carefully set on ground, invisibly along the base of the fence.  "My invisible magic wand. Yep, I set that there." She reached over the top of the fence and hockey pucked plums down. We picked up the fallen fruit. "Even the smashed ones. Think jam. Plumberry I'll call it this week and those society ladies will believe it's my Irish grannie's recipe when all the time it's dumpster jam but we don't tell our secrets, do we. Did you ever tell your husband you'd had a guy before him?"

I blinked. "Actually Carla, I didn't, have one that is, so….no."

She whistled. One guy in your lifetime? Reminds me of that old joke. Bridegroom paints it green, and on wedding night, she screams, in horror, it's green! And he blacks her eye. You never heard that joke? I shook my head and tried to think who had a guest bedroom in the Palisades. Westwood?

Carla moved us down the alley. "Now, there are blackberries up on top of that fence but if the old gal is in the yard, she goes bats even though her vines hang over the alley which is public domain. We don't even whisper as the dog hears, shhh, the berries are insane." We loaded smaller bags with berries.

I put one in my mouth. "Nah-Nah! Don't eat them without washing them. The smog if full of heavy metal and I don't mean Pink Floyd." A Rottweiler heard her voice and came plowing toward the fence, woofing. We ran when an old woman also started yelling.

We raced out of the alley toward the Boulevard. Ok, there's a healthfood store which has the best dumpster in the country, organic berries, romaine, but it's not close. So we're ready for Lesson two. Hitchhiking."

"I've already learned how," I said apprehensively. "Never do it, right?"

"Yes, do it. You gotta do it! A good market isn't always five blocks, sometimes, it's fifty. Welfare office is more like a hundred blocks. Hitching's safe as long as you only accept rides from couples, women and men under eighteen.

"I'd have thought boys were dangerous."
"Not at all. They're fixated on girls, to them you're old lunch meat. It's the middle age to geezer crowd ya gotta watch so put your thumb out, one foot always on the curb, you see a unit, you jump back and haul in the thumb."
"A unit?
"Cop. They can spot a thumb at about fifty car lengths so you have to see in both directions, fifty cars, or risk taking a bust. Hitching is illegal. Now, do as I'm doing. Work the cars right in front of you, pathetic expression, hopeful look.  We shoulda had a ride by now. Two girls put them off they figure we're dykes and dykes can be serial killers. But you'll be alone.
"What if a dangerous age group man stops?"
"Pretend you caught something in the air that you were fishing for like a mosquito, smash it between your hands, throw away the corpse and just turn away real blase. It'll be two blocks before he figures out that nobody catches bugs with a thumb."

* * * * * *

Not being able to hitchhike, being taken for killer Lesbians, we could not go to the healthfood store but Carla promised we'd do that trip the next day, in her van. Oddly enough, the thought made me happy. If you'd told me we were going to Disneyland tomorrow, I could not have been happier. Or Saks. Or Magnins.

We returned home, I learned to spot floater vs. sinker berries and made 50 pints of plumberry jam, baked the biscuits and I tried her various jam flavors. The one that knocked me out was kiwi with lemon peel. Though whole kumquats (halved and seeded,) mixed with lemon peel was a close second.

We then set to building the plastic tent over the tuberose pots, which could not go below sixty at any time. We stretched plastic tenting from roof eaves to 1 x 4's lying on the ground.

By lunch time I was famished. She laid out a plate of chicken curry. "You're spending all this money to feed me." I pretended to protest.

"I don't think so. I buy ten pounds of quarters, nobody wants legs and thighs-- 39c a pound. I wash the raw meat well, as it comes from two thousand miles away in Arkansas, I freeze the raw meat in smaller packages. Every morning I put one here to thaw. Each dinner costs me 39c and it feeds two people. Howd'yalike them apples?"

"I do."

"The trick is good basmati rice, curry powder, raisins and a lotta greens like spinach and coriander. Good for you. Stick to your ribs so we can hit the streets again.

Today? Well, we did the D for dumpsters, H for hitching and J for jam so next Lesson is M for markets. Super markets, and we are going to learn why they call them SUPER."

<----- PROCEED TO CHAPTER V.