The speaker in a blue blazer and Banana Republic chinos was hamming it up for an audience that couldn’t wait for the gasbag to sit down. With dinner nearly over, the guests were pining to dig into Federico Bakery’s bridge-shaped “celebration cake.” Afterward, they’d ride in decorated cars to recreate the procession across the Colorado Street Bridge for its unveiling eighty years ago this day.
Also, Murphy Brown came on at nine.
“They tried bulldozing her into rubble not long after she went up. America’s car society demanded state-of-the-art infrastructure. But we showed them. Our gal here head-faked death more often than Keith Richards.”
Percy Shine blinked, waiting for laughs. He’d been mulling doing stand-up comedy if his stock-trading career never recovered from his insider-trading conviction, of which no one at this soiree knew. There was a smattering of chuckles.
“Any-who, she had the fervent devotion of a community who appreciated that some old objects remind us who we are. Heritage matters in the Arroyo, so help me Thaddeus Lowe. Let’s give it up for our preservationists. They kept the bridge standing long enough to be the royalty of Route Sixty-six.”
Hands clapped, mouths watered. The invitees already endured a litany of speakers, from solemn council members to soporific state engineers, effectively repeating the same themes on this cloudless, sixty-degree afternoon. Everyone got it: the past is our parent, and prologue, and, Mr. Miyagi, blah-cubed.
“Before I turn this over to the mayor, who may be announcing a surprise guest that should wow us all, I want to pay homage again to John Mercereau and John Waddell for spanning this gorge with such durable élan. You think they could’ve managed that in LA, when jugglers and jezebels roamed Spring Street?”
Percy took a small step back from the dais, peacocking his head at his alliterative jewel, waiting for others to savor it. None were. They were pointing and muttering at an eccentric figure strutting toward them from the east side of the deck. When Percy twirled and saw it, he was irked, figuring a numbskull bureaucrat forgot to tell him about this impersonation.
“Hail to the chief,” said the aspirational comic, winging it. “Nobody start any railroad monopolies, ’kay?”
Teddy Roosevelt had returned to life in a rubber mask exaggerating his squinty eyes and shaggy mustache, and a green, hunting-type jacket poofed up around the collar as if there were shoulder pads beneath it. On his way to the podium, he dropped off a carton at the same bench where Reginald died, though only select officials were briefed on his misfortune.
Fake Teddy clasped Percy’s smallish hand and stroked his neoprene mustache. “How extraordinary it is to be at your rededication,” he said into the mic with a fake, gravelly bluster, “and not just because I’ve been dead for seventy-four years.”
The crowd roared louder than at any of Percy’s rehearsed punch lines.
“Long ago, I look out from here, awestruck at the grandeur of the natural lands below. It was heaven on Earth before the Busches created a world wonder. Yet because modernization was accelerating, I fretted this valley would tantalize those who valued the dirtiest shade of green. I cautioned your mayor: ‘what a splendid natural park you have right here! Don’t let them spoil that.’ Lo and behold, they mostly did.”
The audience hummed. There were baffled expressions and wry grins, people suddenly forgetting about Federico’s butter-cream frosting. One council member, a former Vietnam protester turned Brooks-Brothers-wearing, urban-planning junkie, clinked his salad fork against his plate in support. “Here, here!” he said.
“Now where Indians once worshipped and the Indiana Colony later settled, you have luxury homes, asphalt streets, as well as the total eradication of Adolphus’s gardens. How, good people, is that fair trade?”
Through his narrow eye slits, Fake Teddy zoomed in on three side tables that could’ve starred on Pasadena’s “Sgt. Pepper” album cover. The people there, either natives or city-associated, represented a town with talent in spades. TV show-runner Stephen J. Cannell sat next to guitar virtuoso Eddie Van Halen, who was beside band-mate David Lee Roth (a transplant from Bloomington, Indiana); paired by them were science-fiction writer Octavia Butler and Caltech physicist Kip Thorne; Vroman’s regular (and Oscar-winner) Sally Field and a grandson of General George S. Patton anchored another special table. L.A. Law actor Harry Hamlin was there, too, blocking Fake Teddy’s view of another costumed guest. The bogus ex-president really couldn’t stumble now.
All this was chafing the ego of the speaker he interrupted, craving as Percy did to impress the VIPs with the glitzy morsels he dug up. How pilot Al Goebels flew a biplane with girls strapped to its wings under a bridge arch in a 1926 Flag Day stunt; that, six years later, actor Eddie Cantor drove a chariot beneath the colossus in “Roman Scandals”; or future leading man William Holden, as a local hellion, tiptoing outside a bridge column on a juvenile dare. Now a charlatan was upstaging him via righteous indignation
“A pox upon you if you haven’t toasted the four construction workers who perished so his gal could rise,” Fake Teddy said. “When we neglect others’ sacrifice, we debase ourselves. John Visco, Harry Collins, C. J. Johnson, Normal Clark: this city is indebted.”
Fake Teddy, much like Alternative Nick during the Arroyo-101 tour, couldn’t believe the passionate language sailing out of his mouth. Nor that he was watching Sally Field ask someone, “Who’s John Visco?”
He wasn’t alone in crashing this December 13, 1993, party, just the most cartoonish. South of the ceremony, on the embankment below the orange-ish federal appeal’s courthouse, twenty middle-aged and older women were arrayed in two choir-like rows. Each of the black-dressed ladies had lost spouses, siblings, children, and others from the deck, inducting them into a club they never sought to join: a club of people with missing pieces, in a city where the bridge was revered as its concrete grand dame, its touchstone.
During breaks in the earlier speeches, the ladies quietly chanted nondenominational prayers and sang verses from James Taylor’s elegiac “Fire and Rain.” Their leader was a fleshy-faced woman whose clinically depressed son leapt the same day the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Her name was Connie Prunell.
“We must distinguish fable from myth,” Fake Teddy continued after steadying himself. “We must remember that when we gawk at man-made beauty, we blind ourselves to smaller wonders. Don’t—”
“Take a hike, clown,” yelled someone from the rear. “Who are you to scold us?”
Percy, energized by that catcall, sidestepped toward the podium with Pasadena’s city’s symbol, a key-crossed crown, on it. He tapped on Fake Teddy’s jacketed arm to pressure him to yield. When he wouldn’t, Percy, cheeks reddening, hovered.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” said Fake Teddy. “America could do worse than imitating the best of Pasadena in its ardor for the sciences and arts, in its stand against the unjust, in its opposition to spectators hurling marshmallows at those guys in white suits riding scooters during the Rose Parade. But you’ve closed your eyes for too long about an uncomfortable reality, or dis-reality: certain objects absorb the energy of man’s lesser instincts.”
Percy glowered at the police chief at one of the tables, making a throat-slashing gesture. Fake Teddy needed the hook. No one, though, expected canine surprise.
“Look, Daddy,” yipped an attendee’s young daughter. “A cute puppy crawled out of the president’s neck. He has a little beard.”
This was true, for Royo, the beige Lab-boxer with the gray Fu Manchu, had been situated clumsily around Nick’s neck, under his stuffy jacket, for the speech. The dog needed fresh air, and also to pointedly remind Nick not to forget to say what he promised to add. Trying to communicate telepathically into such a full mind was like rowing through mud.
“Get back in there,” the mic caught Nick whispering to him. “I’ll tell them.”
Royo wiggled back under the jacket, which knocked Fake Teddy’s mask askew, which in turn prompted the audience to snicker and point again. At their table, Kip Thorne giggled at Octavia Butler’s crack about a cross-species mutant. The pretend POTUS cleared his throat for his ending remarks, just the same.
“One quick aside,” he said. “When in doubt, heed the purer species. And never again should we compel our dogs to wear reindeer sweaters at Christmas or deprive them of daily bacon. Indeed, if we were less arrogant, we’d realize it’s not just cancer they can sniff out but thirty-seven other diseases doctors struggle to diagnose. The most evolved of pooches can even predict disasters and detect evil. How dare we insult them by baby talk?”
The eighty-member audience was now speechless, and Percy was done being patient. Back at the dais, he brazenly shoved Fake Teddy to the left, saying into the mic, “Okay, okay, show’s over.” Thinking it was, he straightened his tie.
But Fake Teddy snatched the mic from its holder, and when Percy tried wrestling it away, he hopped to the side. “A last thought from my bully pulpit. As I told your YMCA in 1911: remember, not all movement is necessarily progress.”
Percy lunged to retake the mic, yet Fake Teddy shuffled farther to the left, stretching the cord. “In honor of my friend Lilly Busch, I say, “Ich bin ein Pasadenan!”
Fake Teddy then dropped the mic, which produced a burst of ear-splitting feedback, and started walking the direction he came. Percy picked it up, trying to be the consummate pro. “We thank,” he said, “the Doo Dah Parade for sending us a representative to talk hogwash. Mr. Mayor, the stage is yours.”