It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour before the five o’clock deadline, mid-June, summer solstice, and it had rained. Out there, steam rose from the hot streets, the pungent odor of wet concrete wafting over the downtown landscape. At eighty degrees, in an hour it would be dry again, but for the moment, everything out there had a wet reflective murky glow, the clouds parting into what I typically call pewter skies.
As usual, Emi called. “Hey, Gabe! Break time!” she announced over the phone. “Get away from that monitor before you catch cancer!”
I put her on hold. “Listen,” I said to Terry on the other line, “You’re right about the pewter skies. I got carried away. Strike it.” Actually I never get carried away. Well, rarely. It’s just a joke around the office. It’s how I test out new editors. See how they handle an edit. When a new editor like Terry comes on board, I always find a way to plant a pewter skies line into the body of my story. About a week later, someone will say to the newcomer, “Pass the pewter test yet?” The smart editor may simply strike it without a word. The shy editor may wander through previous articles nervously trying to find a precedent or whether I’ll bite. One editor changed it to putrid skies. Another suggested buffed tin or tarnished silver, or was it stainless steel? Someone left the pewter in and added something about how it darkened the Southern California landscape like heavy metal. Most editors are polite or politely sarcastic, but one editor said haughtily, “I’ve only been here one week, and it’s already obvious you guys can’t write to save your behinds. Major L.A. newspaper my ass.” Clearly, this editor was God’s gift to the business.
I didn’t feel like giving Terry a hard time. I had met him in the elevator. He complimented me on my mothers of gangbangers story. He seemed wise and bookish, a true editor type. He didn’t seem like the sort who would become a problem; he wasn’t a wannabe reporter. Wannabes could be trouble. Years of turning sloppy, albeit perhaps creative, writing into terse cogent prose could make an unsung talent pretty damn frustrated. But Terry was probably one of those editors whose finely tuned sense of grammar was a source of modest pride. Knowing how one word should follow another, one sentence follow the last, and one paragraph unfold upon the next, and applying those rules to sometimes unruly text seemed to be, for Terry, the whole of his fulfillment. Oh yes, and he was a precision speller. I could write a book about the pewter test, but that’s beside the point. All this to distinguish myself as a reporter who understands the worth of a good editor. In this oftentimes cutthroat business, I might even be considered sensitive in this regard.
Perhaps you’ve seen my by: Gabriel Balboa. I do the local news and sometimes the East L.A. metro beat. I’m one of a handful of Chicano reporters on editorial staff. I did a rare thing: worked my way up from messenger. Did this all through college. To be honest, I did it for completely idealistic reasons at the time, not necessarily because I could write or even liked to. It was because of Ruben Salazar, the Mexican American reporter who was killed at the Silver Dollar during the so-called “East L.A. uprising” in the early seventies. Of course I never knew him personally but had read about and been inspired by the man. By the time I got my first story, he was long dead, but I was there to continue a tradition he had started. That’s the way I felt. This was going to be my contribution to La Raza, to follow in his footsteps. Now I’m not so pretentious as to think I’m some kind of modern-day Salazar, but remembering my roots can keep me on track, steer me away from the petty jealousies that seem to pervade this office. So I might be considered idealistic in that regard. On the other hand, I must say I keep a handle on the nitty-gritty. It’s the detective side of this business that gives me a real charge, getting into the grimy crevices of the street and pulling out the real stories.
“Gabe! So what are you working on now?” Emi nearly yelled into the phone. She knows this is the most loaded question she can ask a reporter in a crowd of other reporters. You only need to lose one scoop on a story to learn evasiveness on the phone.
“Rained you out today, eh Angel?” I answered.
“Can you believe it? I wasn’t gonna lose the commercial. No way. We played the tape. Bob whatshisname-the-weatherman is talking like a fool about sunshine in the afternoon, and it’s pouring out there.”
“The paper predicted rain. And that was yesterday as of five.”
“Who reads the paper for godssake?”
“We know you don’t read, but who tunes in for the weather at two-thirty in the afternoon?”
“Surfers? Who knows. Hey,” she interrupted herself, “Hot tip. Invest in rubbish. At one point four billion, it’s our tenth biggest export item.”
“I believe it.”
“Did you wrap up the linguini?”
“It’s in the back of the car.”
“It’s going to rot in this heat.”
“It’s part of the plan, although I doubt salmonella can kill you. Besides, you owe me. You left me with the bill.”
“Did we have great sex last night or what?” This was another one of Emi’s tricks. “Come on, Gabriel. Say it out loud. Repeat after me: We . . . had . . . great . . . sex. God,” she whined, “it’s so stuffy over there. Okay, then. Say it in Spanish.”
“I only speak Spanish with my family, with my mother and her priest. I can’t talk dirty with you,” I joked.
“And I thought you were bilingual.” She said bye-lingualll, like she was licking her lips.
“Gotta go. Gotta interview.”
“What time tonight?”
“That’s what I meant to tell you. It’s gonna be a long haul tonight. I haven’t even started.”
“Then I’m going to the gym.”
“Do me a favor? That video store next door to the gym. See if they’ve got Angel Beach.”
“No way. This is disaster movie week, remember? I’m taping the series. We’re gonna watch real TV, color TV, commercials and everything.”
“Angel Beach is a disaster. An artful disaster.”
“See you lay-ter.” She hung up.
Knowing Emi, she would find Angel Beach for me. That’s the way she was. The complaining and the bitching were the surface of a very big heart, the most generous I had ever known. The character of our relationship only seemed stormy. It had started out that way, with the smart talk and mouthing off, the snide repartee of two people who hate each other’s guts and then fall into bed together. I admit Emi had it all over me; she never lost her cool, but I could really get mad. And she knew it. “I thought you had some hot blood,” she crooned. She could be wicked, but I admit I loved that side of her. I loved her fast tongue, her spontaneity. She had said so herself. “Gabe, you’re then. I’m now. For a reporter, you oughta be more now. Let’s do it now.” She kept dragging me into now. Most of the time, I felt grateful. But I had one thing over her. She acted like she didn’t care. I knew better.
I snuck into Beth’s office, one of those glass enclosures earned by seniority. Beth was always good about letting me have a private conversation when necessary. She wasn’t around at that hour, but she wouldn’t mind me using her phone. I paged my contact and waited. Usually it was a five minute wait, but never more than ten. I looked at my watch. Three minutes. Buzzworm was in form that day.
“Balboa? You? You paged me on my coffee break.”
“It’s the other way around, Buzz. I paged you on my coffee break.”
Buzzworm laughed.
“So what’s up, buddy?”
“Strange day, dude. Strange day. Rain over your way?”
“Yeah, sure did. Hey, turn that thing down. Sounds like a bad connection.” I could hear Buzzworm fiddling with his Walkman. He was never without his radio. Asking him to turn it off might make him hang up the phone, but I had learned he wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
“Okay.” He was back. “Write this down. L.A. River. I’m checking out the transvestite camp along there. We get a wall of rain. And I mean a wall of rain. Flood conditions. Dumps a whole foot in five minutes. I timed it, so you know I know. Shit floating down the river. Car parts, hypodermics, dead dogs, Neanderthal bones, props from the last movie shot down there, you name it. Folks in the bridge rafters tossing avocados and screaming. Got a cross-dresser who was doing his regular laying around, near drowned with his wig on. Had to pull him out and pump the lungs. Brother saw God. It was like a baptism. Then it was all gone. Concrete bed’s dry. My pants’re dry. Like it never happened. And you look up. The sun’s up. I mean up. Like it’s never gonna go away. And by my synchronization, it’s near going on seventeen hundred. Daylight saving my ass. This is like Alaska.”
A flash-flood-L.A.-river-transvestite-drowning story with a happy ending. I thought about it. “What else you got?”
“What else I got? Balboa, you always saying, what else you got? I know you’re producing pulp. I even read it from time to time. Not that it isn’t good pulp. Who else but Balboa’s gonna write about us? But around here, brother, we recycling your pulp as beds. Maybe you can turn the stuff back into trees and build us some real beds.”
“I’m trying, Buzz. I really am trying.”
“Hey, I know what I was gonna tell you. Yeah.” Buzzworm’s pause was pregnant. “This one is good. Real human interest. But he’s shy. Been around a while now, but moves around a lot. The easy thing is he only moves around the freeway system.”
“Freeway system’s big, Buzz.”
“Yeah, but you can’t miss him. Picks an overpass, see. Looks out over the traffic, the freeway, and—” I could sense Buzzworm making gestures through the phone, “conducts.”
“Conducts?”
“Music. With a baton and all. You know. Like Leonard Bernstein. Like Esa-Pekka Solanen. Conducts.”
“Conducts what?”
“I could get philosophical with you man, but so what if he’s crazy. We all crazy!”
“He was a conductor?” I scratched my head.
“Is Seiji Ozawa still around?”
“I think so.”
“Then it’s not him,” Buzzworm confirmed.
“He’s Japanese?”
“Probably an American breed. Hey, you downtown. You never see him? Thought by now somebody’d see him. You too busy on the car phone, man. Don’t bother to look up and see the sights.”
“I don’t have a car phone.”
“Ever notice the Washingtonia Robustas?”
“Buzz. The story. Give me the story.”
“Hey, I read this story where a writer and a palm tree face it off. Wouldn’t you know it, the palm tree wins.”
“I don’t have all day, Buzz.”
“Okay. So, I offered him mental health services. He just laughed. Maybe he’s schizo, but maybe not. They can fool you good. Totally lucid. And somebody takes care of him. He’s out on the streets, but he’s got a stash somewhere keeps coming to him. Come winter, he’s got a jacket. Come summer, he’s got a hat.”
“So what’s the angle?”
“I gotta write the story for you, Balboa? Look him up. See for yourself. You wanna humanize the homeless? Then humanize the homeless.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“It’s a wake-up call, Balboa. All these people living in their cars. The cars living in garages. The garages living inside guarded walls. You dump the people outta the cars, and you left with things living inside things. Meantime people going through the garbage at McDonald’s looking for a crust of bread and leftover fries.”
“Can I quote you?”
“Weren’t for the deal, you could go to hell.”
“Don’t count on any deal, Buzz. I made a promise to you. That’s all.”
I felt myself squirming. Buzzworm had a stake in my stories, deeper and hungrier than that of the most competitive reporter. He wanted desperately to see in print the stories of the life surrounding him, to see the wretched truth, the dignity despite the indignity. When I first met him, I had no idea that I was making a pact with a taskmaster more demanding than any editor. He was ruthless in his criticism, his disdain for my soft educated style. “East L.A. boy makes good and gets out of the barrio. Get real, Balboa.” So I said if I ever got a Pulitzer, he could take the prize money. “Fifty percent is fine. Otherwise you got no incentive,” he smirked, but he never forgot this. He was always waving this thing in front of me like he was the one giving out the Pulitzers himself.
“You Pulitzer material or not, Balboa?” he now injected into the conversation.
“Maybe I should quit this business and do something really altruistic. Like go into teaching.”
“You won’t. Teaching is a recognition of talent, Balboa. First kid you flunk gonna go out and get himself a million-dollar record deal. At least out here on the streets, you have me. If you’d been connected before, you wouldn’t have gotten your ass kicked by that Webb reporter in San Jose.”
“Right.” What was there to argue? “So where do I find him, and what’s his name?”
“Last sighted: Harbor overpass, near Fifth. Name’s Manzanar.”
“Sounds vague, Buzz. Maybe we better go back to the drowning.”
“Trust me on this one. It’s gonna be big.” Buzzworm liked to taunt me with banter he believed to be newspaper talk. “I got a hunch,” he said, as if this should seal the story’s fate. Trouble with dismissing him was that lately he knew better than me.
“So what’s the latest conspiracy theory on the street?”
“Word is the players change, but the game’s the same. And on that note, Balboa: that other hot tip you been waiting for? Tomorrow a.m. LAX. Mexicana. Ten twenty. C. Juárez. No luggage. Carry-on only.”
“That’s it?”
“Just be grateful.” He hung up.
I went back to my desk, opened my afternoon mail, flipped through some personal stuff like the copy of a bank transfer of money to my account in Mazatlán. I thought about Rafaela down at my place in México. It had taken so many years to build the place, I didn’t really care anymore. I just wanted to see it finished even though I knew it would never be finished. I imagined Rafaela there, padding across the tile floors in her bare feet, her dark hair crinkling in the summer humidity, her soft Afro-Mayan features bronzed by the Mexican sun slipping in and out of the green shadows. I imagined the industry of her hands and mind, running my accounts, paying the workers, planting, placing, arranging, completing my foolish love affair.
How many friends, how many women had I taken there, forcing them to share my excitement, enduring their veiled compliments, knowing it was just another vacation for them? If I were ever to live there, my friends would not follow me, least of all Emi. There were only variations of nothing to do. Or as Emi commented, “There’s only so much sex and tequila you can stand.” It was the sort of place writers love. But as time went on, I had to admit to myself that I was really not a writer: I was a reporter. The current event, the late-breaking story, the three o’clock budgets, deadlines, secret sources I had painstakingly built up over the years, and the cutting edge of the interview: I realized I could never abandon this life for the endless lull of a private paradise.
And yet lately I found myself thinking constantly about Rafaela. I remembered her fingers lightly tickling the lines in my palm. “It seems you will encounter some big adventures,” she suggested. “And a long life.” She followed my life line. I couldn’t imagine her returning to her husband, returning to her janitorial jobs, ever again running the vacuum under my feet in the evenings and gently complaining, “Gabriel, drinking coffee again at this hour. It’s bad for you. Time to go home. Come on now. You’re in my way. How can my crew do its job when you reporters never leave?” This was a world I was sure she had left for good, and I could now only imagine Rafaela in my place, in my home, there.
I took the stairs down, my heels squeaking on the last flight of marble steps and out the foyer. The rush of heat and humidity outside the glass doors was sudden and oppressive. I walked quickly through scattered crowds and traffic, all moving as if in unison in one great stoic groan, languishing under the hot sunlight. And then I realized how strange this was: in the middle of towering thirty- and forty-floor buildings there was not a single shadow, not a sliver of a cooler gray to slice the concrete walks. The sun had aimed its rays straight down into the downtown canyon. At this hour it seemed impossible. Everything had the eerie tones of searing white and grimy black.
I walked west with some urgency, determined to find my subject. I marched toward the bridge over the Harbor Freeway, but no one stood out. About midway over the bridge, I paused, looked over into the river of traffic below. A sooty heat and din emanated from there, pressed against what I imagined to be all the elastic parts of my body: my lungs, my diaphragm, my tympanum.
And as I looked across, I saw him. Buzzworm was right. There he was larger than life, under the raging sun and a disheveled shock of white hair, a face both of anguish and incredible peace, his arms reaching and caressing the air for the sound and rhythms of . . . of what?