HOPE FOR CHANGE... But Settle for a Bailout Read online

  Another thing I can say about Larry is that he still doesn’t know my name, even though we grew up on Treasure Island together and went to Naples elementary and Will Rogers middle school together, before going to Woodrow Wilson high school. Sure, for most people, “Larry” for Lawrence is an easy jump, but my name is not Larry. I hate the name, and it isn’t just because Larry van der Bix barged in to my life, usually to beg for money – as though his family doesn’t have any – or to sleep on my couch and spend days and evenings as my wife’s perpetual companion. That may have been years ago, but how do you forget stuff like that?

  I married the girl that Larry and I both had a crush on in high school, although it didn’t last. Lori had always been Larry’s girl in high school, pretty much from the day she transferred to Woodrow Wilson from Thomas Starr Jordan, in north Long Beach, after the Rodney King riots. Only her ranking as one of the district’s top swimmers allowed her family to get the transfer approved, since otherwise Long Beach Unified didn’t allow whites to transfer out of Jordan. Something about racial integration numbers.

  Each of them said they weren’t dating and would go silent if I questioned it, even after Larry’s car crash, which put him into an upper-body cast for most of our senior year. He’d say, “What are four shattered ribs between friends?”

  Larry had begged his grandmother for that car he totaled. Calvin said there was no way in hell he’d ever spend a dime on a car for Larry, no matter how much money he made from building tract homes and doing redevelopment projects for the city. When he got that car, Larry drove every morning at 5 am up Atlantic Avenue, to pick up Lori from her house near Houghton Park so she could make swim practice before school, and take the same route, past boarded-up storefronts and the graffiti, to drive her home. When she’d visit Larry on Treasure Island, the two of them would go in a rowboat to circle the Naples canal or row together to the Queen Mary or to Marina Pacifica to see a film. When she’d do her ocean swims, he’d row ahead of her, so he could keep visual contact and so she could climb in when she tired. There had always been an ease between them that suggested something was going on with them, even if they insisted there wasn’t.

  Lori seemed flattered when I started asking her out, when I’d pick her up for a date or open the door or hold her chair. She was always grateful when I’d pay for dinner or the movies. We were nice to each other then. It felt easy, like we were part of something larger.

  To his credit, when Lori told Larry just before we graduated that me and her were going out and, later, that we were getting engaged, he said that he only wanted Lori to be happy. “If that’s your choice,” he said. After that, how could I hate the guy, even if it seemed he lived on our couch and ate all our food? Still, he was always a shadow I couldn’t catch; the person I couldn’t be.

  When Lori filed for divorce and left me to enlist in 1999, she said it was so she could unwind. All through her army years, she’d send Larry long letters, saying she loved feeling useful and free. After 9/11, she wrote how she kept getting bumped up the ladder. When her contract expired, she wrote how she was “totally fine” that the army wouldn’t let her out, and how she quickly accepted a cash bonus and a bump up to E6 to volunteer to stay in theatre that last 18 months.

  .

  Me? I always wanted to be a banker, ever since I saw my Dad in the business. It felt like the industry I grew up in was gone forever after The Collapse. Decisions were all pushed up the ladder, making the branch managers little more than another face at the shop. Post-Lehman, all management cared about was cash flow and capital-on-hand. It had never mattered before what the branches had on hand.

  Corporate’s mantra had been: “Don’t let business walk out the door.” Paperwork, verifications, salary history... details just hindered us from capturing business. “If a customer walks out the door with a mortgage, we’ve got them for life,” the District Manager said at every staff meeting for years. “Nothing is more certain long-term than a mortgage.”

  I didn’t move mortgages or sell financial products. Perhaps if I had, I would not have been threatened with being fired for calling the District Manager to ask for a vacation. Instead, three years after The Collapse, every footstep at work is like walking on eggshells. My own profession was generally ridiculed at work. Accountants, intoned the District Manager, got us into this mess, by failing to see the warning signals and apply the brakes…. It was just like Enron, he’d moan.

  When I offered that accounting, in its purest form, can save a business — large or small — because it dealt with much more than just numbers, but in analyzing complex systems, I was brushed off. According to the Wall Street Journal, I’d chant, a third of all new businesses fail in their first year, and of those, half are due to inadequate accounting. “Go back to your cubicle and polish your eyeshade,” the District Manager would tell me.

  We all saw the giddiness – capital flowing based on paper and disbelieving customers walking out with mortgages double what they had originally sought. If accountants were not eating the pie, the loan agents and management certainly were. Junior associates barely out of college — like the one who fired my Dad for saying “no” to too many loans — drove up in new cars and left paperwork for me and others to finalize — just “robo-sign” — while they turned the next property.

  I couldn’t have saved a bank – I was just a little person. I didn’t like the swagger and dismissing accountancy on its face was worrisome to me, but our business was to turn capital. That’s how banks make money and that’s what drives our economy. To deny that impulse is to strike at the heart of capitalism. And so while I found government money to be a repugnant admission of failure, even that fit into everybody’s world. “What?” asked the District Manager. “Does anyone think we won’t pay it back?” Banks, the District Manager would say, had just hit “a rough patch.”

  .

  Larry spent his own life in a “rough patch,” seemingly by his own choice.

  Larry’s a legitimately-born van der Bix. That’s another thing I can say about him. Of the Long Beach van der Bixes, only his grandmother and great-grandfather can also claim to be legitimate; not the Old Man or Larry’s dad, Calvin. None of the kids that me and Larry avoided in the mansion could stake a claim on the family name. Calvin’s sole marriage produced only Larry and although Calvin was born only because the Old Man refused to arrange an abortion for Emma Mathilde, after the Scandinavian’s daughter was raped at the Pike, everyone accepted the deal on the Old Man’s deathbed that Calvin would inherit the family mansion if he outlived his mother. Otherwise, it’d go to the next legitimately born heir, which was Larry.

  Larry would tell me his family trivia when we’d sneak beers and listen to the shellac discs in his grandmother’s room of mirrors. How Astrid and Carl quickly had Emma, and how Astrid fought with her father-in-law, shunning appearances with the family, venturing beyond the suite only for outings with Carl and the child, like to cross the San Pedro bay by motorboat on a Sunday to reach the services for the Norwegian sailors church, where the Scandinavians would talk afterwards over coffee, breads, pastry, salads, and the locally-caught fish. Carl appeared regularly with the Old Man in photographs for business and civic leadership, starting with Carl and the Old Man sitting at a card table at the 1910 Dominguez Air Show, but the sole photo showing Emma Mathilde, Carl and Astrid with the Old Man depicted Emma dancing the Charleston with a blonde politician holding a straw hat. That picture is also in the room of mirrors, with foreign words printed under it.

  There was no reason Larry had to live like he was in a rough patch. His family had big, old money. The Old Man may have been penniless when he first got to Long Beach in 1890, but that was the last time the van der Bix family was busted. The Old Man quickly got rich selling sunshine by the seashore to friends and strangers in Des Moines and Council Bluffs. Along the hallways in the downstairs part of the mansion were ancient newspaper clippings of the family, in their striped tent at the Iowa picnic or of the Old
Man handing keys to a couple in front of a house, under a sign reading “1000th Sold.”

  When you’re very rich or very poor, one can he invisible, and so it apparently didn’t matter that Larry’s great-grandmother spoke no English and didn’t want Emma to learn. European servants taught Larry’s grandmother French and Italian and Scandinavian tongues. Locked in a fourth-floor tower, Emma Mathilde van der Bix grew up doted upon, but apart from children downstairs and in the neighborhood. Her dad, Carl, as an army aviator, split time between Long Beach and, later, officers housing at the Presidio, overlooking San Francisco Bay, and so Emma grew up riding on trains between California’s great cities, before she was given the suite, at 18, so she could raise Calvin, though the Old Man eventually convinced his great-grandson to move downstairs and later to take over the land development company.

  .

  Why do I even care about this stuff? Larry confused my acquiring all his secret family trivia as my being interested, when, of course, I listened to it all only so I could join him in stealing beers from his grandmother’s pantry. Larry always confused captive listening with friendship.

  I remember Larry on our first day of kindergarten at Naples Elementary telling me how his family was really rich, but he didn’t like them. His words have gotten cloudier since then, especially after discovering beer, but the feelings obviously never changed.

  When I first started going over to see Larry when we were growing up, he lived downstairs, in the main part of the mansion. I hardly ever saw Calvin, though his voice was everywhere. When Calvin did appear, he’d typically take me away from whatever it was that me and Larry had been doing together – though Larry never stopped – to tell me things he said I should always remember. Show up on time or, better, be early; people don’t expect it. Better to have short hair then look like a Bolshevik. Keep your head while others panic; let others run away from opportunity. He seemed convinced of everything, and then off he’d go, with his huge ring of keys.

  Calvin never spent more than a few minutes in his mom’s suite, unless family was expected to show up, which Larry explained is why he later asked to move in with his grandmother. That was just after Calvin brought the last woman, Candy, to live at the mansion. So just before starting at Will Rogers, Larry moved upstairs to live with his grandmother and shortly after that he began pilfering bottles, storing them carefully in his closet. When we’d get home from school, we’d quickly climb the huge marble stairwell, go into his room and carry out our ritual of splitting one bottle, before I had to go home. The only time Larry didn’t seem angry was when he drank. He’d talk about what he’d do if he had money of his own; how he would be free.

  Larry living in the suite worked well for his grandmother, who had lived alone for decades. When I’d come over, all she said to me each time was, “How… are… you…, Law-rence?” and every time that I started to tell her, her eyes would glaze. Larry would take me aside and explain that the question was a courtesy. Some called Emma “The Scandinavian,” although that was her mother, since Emma was born here in Long Beach. Calvin just called her, “The Cow.”

  After high school, and only after he had spent almost a year living on me and Lori’s couch, Larry moved into an apartment in Belmont Heights, which his grandmother arranged. When I helped move things from the mansion, Calvin yelled, “Live on the street for all I care.”

  I don’t know if Larry ever worked. Can’t think of any marketable skills he possesses. He certainly never showed any personal discipline. He speaks some languages, but when did anyone get hired in southern California because they could speak another language?

  .

  Eight hours trapped in a car with Larry van der Bix on The Five?

  Yeh, right.

  CHAPTER Three

  Sorting Memories

  Emma Mathilde van der Bix, in slippers and housedress, with sunshine streaming in through the windows and bending into bands of colors, sat at a small table next to a thriving plant and held a magnifying glass over a stack of postcards. A faded pink ribbon lay limply around the postcards, as the magnifying glass traveled across the delicate colors, showing a hacienda-style inn with smiling vacationers seated on a terrace, looking out upon a vast valley of citrus trees, underneath the words “Pasadena, Calif.” Emma gazed at Mission San Gabriel and Fullerton, before placing the cards again in a pile and folding the pink ribbon across them, leaving it untied.

  She picked up a framed photo, showing ruddy-faced Calvin, wearing only swim shorts, handsome, like a movie star, with his young wife perched, smilingly, on his lap. The woman stayed long enough to bear Larry, but, like almost every woman who entered the van der Bix mansion, she fled quickly. Emma looked deeply at her ruddy-faced son, studying his face under her magnifying glass.

  .

  The Old Man had been in Long Beach almost 20 years when city officials awarded him control over development of the mud flats that he would convert into the high-end community of Naples – its elegant Italian-style main plaza lined with a colonnade leading to an enormous fountain surrounded by olive trees, and fine homes that fronted to the Venetian-like canal, all protected by publicly-financed seawalls and waterworks, and the opulent, tranquil Treasure Island, with its large lots and private docks. With the military dredging crews shaping the mudflat to fit the Old Man’s development plan, he spent a great deal of time and money erecting his great mansion upon the sweetest lot on the most desirable portion of the entire development. The Old Man ordered a flat roof over his three story home – built exclusively of Pacific lumber and household materials crafted locally or bought in California. “My roof tells good citizens in Council Bluffs that no snow falls on my home,” the Old Man wrote in the series of letters that he sent to every newspaper in Iowa, changing only the name of the towns so that good citizens there might also wish to read about bright, warm, sunshine in February.

  The Old Man’s twelve-room mansion, with its servants’ bungalows and orchard of fruit trees and vegetable garden and spice terraces, made the compound an ideal spot to raise a brood of kids, though after Carl van der Bix was born, the children came from the string of women who passed through the Old Man’s bed, as the teenaged girl who crossed the great southwest desert on horseback with her runaway husband and arrived in Long Beach pregnant soon grew weary of the life she chose. She nursed her baby as she also snatched coins and currency, until she could pay third-class passage on a steamer for San Francisco and, some say, eventually to a town at the mouth of the great Columbia River. The Old Man never chased her.

  Plenty of kids grew up at the mansion, some who shared their father’s blood with Carl, most who didn’t and all who knew there was only one heir. Still, the kids all ate fruit from the orchard and swung from the trees and jumped from the mansion’s private dock into the water. Carl would row the younger kids in his Whitehall across the bay to the public beach or take the older boys into the open, choppy waters of the harbor, to leave them close to the Pike for the day. Carl showed the oldest boys how to construct the fat-tired bicycles that the Old Man had shipped from Ohio.

  Inside the mansion, the Old Man personally installed multiple bolts to lock off passageway entries on the third floor and had workers install padding and heavy drapes along its long walls and covered all the windows, creating a den of isolation to which the Old Man nightly retired, pulling the latest woman by the wrist with one hand and carrying an enormous ring of keys in the other. During his marriage to Astrid, Carl listened each night to the screams and other sounds that nightly floated up, muffled, from the locked chambers on the floor below them.

  Calvin van der Bix may have been the Old Man’s great-grandson, but he lived under his roof well into adulthood. He observed the Old Man openly kiss and grope every woman he brought into the house, pulling each by the hand into a hallway of padded walls and locked passages. Indeed, since each van der Bix mother typically bred young and fled young, the Old Man and Calvin spent decades together as each other’s principal company, beco
ming the family members most like one another. Calvin’s womanizing began in high school, with a Long Beach State student who had been a senior at Wilson when Calvin first got to her when he was only a freshman. After chasing a string of women throughout his 20s, Calvin married Larry’s mom, who left the mansion shortly after Larry was born. When Larry was 10, Calvin brought Candy, then 21, into the house and proceeded to spend the next twenty years repeatedly making her pregnant, though they never married, leaving Larry as the only legitimate heir to the van der Bix fortune.

  .

  Emma set the magnifying glass atop the postcards and drank her orange juice.

  CHAPTER Four

  Milkshakes on a Sunday

  “You think this place in Hermosa has wireless?” asked Larry, as Lori drove through the industrial moonscape of Terminal Island, home to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, America’s gateway for imported goods. On either side of the elevated roadway were stacked shipping containers, like Lego piles, bathed in stadium lighting.

  “No idea,” said Lori, slowing behind a big-rig.

  “It’s probably some yuppie building,” said Larry. “I can probably bootleg.”

  Lori climbed the Vince Thomas Bridge, its blue bulbs glowing, with trucks chugging in the right and cars speeding in the left. Lori glided onto the 110 Harbor Fwy north, her hair whipping about as they drove with the top down. Lori exited at Pacific Coast Hwy. The car stalled as she played with the clutch, waiting for the light to turn.

  “Shit,” said Lori, restarting with her left foot all the way down on the clutch and her right foot on the gas pedal. Lori slowly eased her left foot upwards and the car jerked forward. She made the right turn onto PCH.

  “Didn’t they have stick shifts in the army?” asked Larry.