CHAPTER IXI never slept deeper, didn't dream, didn't get up to go to the bathroom once, just out cold. Nine a.m., I woke from a hundred years of sleep, every part of me turned to stone. While I brushed my teeth my knees nearly buckled twice. I held onto the sink knowing I'd take it down with me if I passed out.
Carla was up pacing. I turned down scrambled eggs knowing it would send me right back asleep, nibbled at beans and tortillas and concentrated on getting two cups of black coffee into my bloodstream. Then, I sat there staring mindlessly ahead trying to feel the nice, newly caffeinated blood rush to my extremities. Carla was pointing to the screen of the computer. "That's the fudge recipe.
"Ahhhhhaaa" I could see the printing on the screen. No other thoughts came to me.
She tipped a cauldron so I could see sugar and chocoate pieces. "I doubled the recipe, figure we make 5 double batches before we try to make a ten batch size. So we can learn what' s going on with fudge. This is a candy thermometer." She waved it before my eyes, as if to wake me up "You're the homecoming queen from the Home Ec building, so the whole production is gonna be your personal Broadway show. I'm going to watch and learn, from you, aren't I?
I nodded. "I once wanted to be a hoofer. Studied tap dancing."
She snapped her fingers before my face. "Earth to Avery. Stick to the recipe. I'm counting for all those years of Home economics to come back to you."
"They will. Can't remember tap dancing, but how hard can fudge be-- to remember? "
"Can't be hard at all. Soft, melt in your mouth, soft."
Yes, Carla. Soft. How soft can we make our fudge ? Creamy soft. That means no crystallization. Something about.." I strained to remember," buttering the crystals that from on the edge before they can infect the batch. It's a chain reaction."
"You're doing good,' she nodded and pushed another cup of coffee at me.
By noon, it had all come back. How you don't stir, how you add corn syrup to prevent crystallization, how you butter the edge of the cauldron so crystals at the top can't move into the batch. Before you knew it, we had a pan of creamy, soft fudge which had been poured and scored. Carla cut a piece off and tore it in half. We each bit in.
"You have the fudge gift." She declared. From Carla that was high praise. She pointed to the last line of the onscreen recipe. "Air tight tins it says.
"Yep. It will harden in contact with air. Crystallizes That's what happened to my marriage. Contact with the air. It crystallized." She was staring at me. "So ya got tins, Carla?"
"No, but this fudge is worth a capital investment. I'm going to look for a tins at the five and dime. Have some more coffee. I'll be back in an hour."
"I'll have time to shower?" My hair was glued to my neck. I had that fudge molecules chest to scalp feeling.
"Take a swim next door. Tell the guy at the front desk you live with me. His name is Rufus.
"That apartment building next door has a pool?" I was surprised. It was a decayed terra cotta building covered with ancient greenery like a hummock of California hills itself, a chunk which seemed to be melting back into itself..
"Don't discount the Palomar, --the place was once plenty posh. Each room is like a whole apartment. Now true, it's a Section 8 slum dwelling housing now but once upon a time, Old Hollywood lived, fucked, breathed, feasted, drank themselves numb and died there. Probably still haunt it.
"Do I want to swim there?
"Don't worry. Ghosts can't make a place dirty, It's sparkling clean. Has to be, city inspects real reg. Section 8 Slum housing is protected by law. Enforced. They can't even piss in the pool or it's everybody out of not just the pool, but the building. Really. I swim there daily in summer and I can taste piss in a pool thru my skin.
"One of your many talents." She squinted at me balefully. "SO OK, I'll swim there but I haven't a swim suit. "
I have some oldies I was saving for a garage sale… let me just put this away". She covered the fudge plate with saran wrap and stuck it in a cupboard then led me through the laundry room into the first floor bedroom, piled through a cardboard box marked 'garage sale' and handed me a vintage Catalina swimsuit with a firm bustline already in it. "You can scissor out the boulder holders -- be just fine. OK?" I nodded. "Back in an hour." I heard her murmurring as she left the room, 'One of my many talents, my eye." She grabbed her keys and thank God was gone. I appreciated her but the woman was stressy.
* * *
In the Palomar's lobby, an old black guy watched Oprah on a small color tv. "So, Rufus, I'm Avery. How much for a room? "
"180 a week when we gottum, 650$ by the month if you pay ahead, but again only when we gottem but aint got one now.
Oh. Well I'm ok at Carla's. Hey, she said it would be alright to swim here?" I held up the suit.
"Anything for Carla. We who eat her jam are the permanently indentured. You the new dumpster diver, fruit poacher, jam-making fool, huh?
What, did the last one die? Fell into a dumpster?
Something like that." He smiled with a mouthful of ancient yellow teeth but wasn't saying. "Right down that hall and thru the back door, Wait a minute, I found a whole lotta new places with guava trees. She'd wanna know about 'em". He rummaged in a drawer, came out with a note pad, tore off a page. "Give this to her. Pool's through there. Nobody'll bother you. Buncha geriatrics is all we got. Beats me how guavas are 5$ at markets and right here in Hollywood we got the stuff growing in forests and nobody knows what it is so they won't touch them."
"Yes, life is like that," I said going down the hall. "the best stuff is always right at hand, like you and the Palomar pool." The door opened to a rather beautiful turquoise pool, set in a rectangle of ancient tile dotted with lawn chairs which extended out to a ring of tall cypresses that delineated the edges of the garden. Three floors of apartment windows looked down on us but most curtains were drawn. An old man sitting by the pool tipped an imaginary hat as I came out the back of the building. He lay in a lounge chair in the shade, long legs extended, cowboy boots on another chaise, listening to a walkman with headphones, long, gray hair in a pony tail. "Afternoon," he said and tipped an imaginary hat. He was a kind of courtly bum but with a John Carradine flavor." Where can I change?" I indicated the bushes and held up my suit. He slid off the ear pieces . "There is the gardener's room. Nobody's in there. " He pointed to a door in the back of the building. I smiled and nodded. He seemed to be in his early seventies. Probably not going to waste time flirting. Wasn't a masher type, anyway. More of an aging hippie poet, I guessed. I went to the door. It opened. Inside, pruners, brooms. Trash cans. I stepped inside, closed the door and changed into the antique bathing suit which had the ridiculous chest armor scissored out.
I dove into the Hockney pool, sank to the bottom and hung in the water relaxing. In my underwater reverie, I thought I could hear Bill and my daughter calling to me, Mom, Avery, what the hell are you doing?
"Putting one foot in front of the other, focusing on what's out there, available, not what's missing. I was your wife Bil, your mother Candice, but you left me cold. Anything that's here has to be way kinder. Mom's life saver. Jam and the Palomar pool.
I floated gently up to the surface leaving my family behind at the bottom of the pool. Took a deep breath of air and looked up at the cypresses that ringed the sky. An ancient, mediterrenean monastery. One day the world would look back on the early 21st century and think, Wow, Renaissance California, when they still had pools.The good old days. The plush days. Homeless but joyfully making jam, plucking fruits and nuts out of every corner of the environment, Farmers markets and Ebay just waiting to lavish cash on us. Plush times.
I swam a few laps to get the muscles going then walked out of the shallow end. I toweled off with my blouse. "So, what are you listening to? " He took off the headphones. "Oh you find these tapes in alleys. Kids today abandon them. Got boxes of 'em. Orphaned by evolution. Technology moved on. This particular one's how the government knew about 911 but didn't do anything. They call that the False Flag maneuver or the Reichtag fire gambit. You know, burn City Hall down, say the commies did it, get the people mad at commies then you get to kill all the commies you want.
"Why would we want to kill commies?
Well the Reichtag fire was 33. Got Germany in on the ground floor on Commie killing so that England and America could be chums with them, pour money in for 6 years. Bush family did, got nailed for it. Anyway, today the equivalent is 911 so we can swoop down over the Middle East, wipe out all the oil rich Muslim kings, install patsies, steal the oil. Different fires for different reasons. Today it's about getting hold of oil production in Iraq.
"All that's on that one little tape?
"Yep and a lot more, how they put bombs on every floor of WTC to make sure the job was done. Building as asbestos, had to come down. How the prime people didn't show pu at work that day.
He held up another tape. "Then there's a nice Gerry Mulligan. Lively but no Charlie Mingus. And a few Ram Das tapes. Him I like. One of the great rap artists along with Lenny. " He peered into the box of tapes. "Kind of a cross section of archealogicial strata in late 20th century California. Highly Perishable. Tapes cannot be made to last, so no museum is going to show up for this. The artists died and their work with them unless you got a box like this. Go get your own, sweetie. Alleys are full of 'em. Everybody who moves in the history of L.A. leaves their tapes in a box by the curb. You live here in the building, now do you?"
"Next door." I monotoned, staring.
"Ahhhh. With the Jam bitch. Poor you."
"She's OK."
"Nahhhh. Call a spade a spade. She's a bitch. I once asked her for a tiny discount on one of her jars of Dumpster Damson plum muck. The woman almost bit my hand off. Mean as a junkyard dog. And got very insulting."
"She wasn't born mean".
"Yeah, we was all cuddly puppies once. Even Hitler.
"So what do you think makes a ---" the words caught in my throat… "a woman turn into a bitch?"
"I'll tell you exactly what does. Her own bad choices which she blames on her parents and husband. That's the starter kit. Rage and self pity but the spark that really ignites them is blame. It's then becomes the formula for dynamite. And the longer you keep the ingredients alive on the shelf, the more concentrated it becomes. And as everything bitter and toxic repels …it attracts failure so the ingredients stand longer & multiply again and again, become stronger, more volatile, more easily set off."
"There's a book in that. The Bitch Formula. Be a best seller."
"Yeah, I could write it, too. Ruth walked out on me and the boy but hey, it's not just women. It's the formula for the sociopath, the rapist, the murderer, the wife beater. The demagogue. Rage, blame and too much memory. Can't you picture Hitler homeless and starving after the first war, fuming at how the Jews and their banks were the cause of his poverty?"
"Another best seller."
"I would write it, used to teach English so I could, too but fame would out me. I'm an ex….he looked at me. "Jail bird myself."
"Fist fight with my son's drug dealer. Traced him to the barrio, leapt out of my car slugging, the guy lost his footing and fell, hit his head on a Chevvie fender. Like I told the judge, the Chevvie killed him, I didn't. I just did the time.
"You blame anyone?"
"If you're gonna hit a junkie you gotta anticipate that he's going to be sloppy on his feet. My own damn fault"
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