We called him That Fat Bastard Fatty Arbuckle because he was fat and that’s all we had. We thought about trying to be above it. I know it’s unoriginal and ignorant to point out the fatness of a guy that huge. But he just looked like every little thing Essex Properties Trust was doing to us. The rent being raised first 3, then 7, then 10 percent for the last two years. The shady utility company they switched to in the middle of my decade there, with all its hidden “fees,” so that the cost of a five-minute shower set us back like twenty bucks a pop. I’ve lived with so many dudes to keep living here, the latest one, Franklin, he didn’t even know of a time when stuff that was free, now costs. It’s like trying to tell some fifteen-year-old about how back in the day getting your luggage on the plane cost you nothing, because it shouldn’t have. Like the parking spot that used to be free, all of a sudden costs $150 a month to park my car that only runs some of the time. All this after the romantic years, the years when no one wanted to live in downtown Los Angeles, where your shoes slipped in blood and spit and urine and vomit, where you yelled at your dog not to sniff the needles in the gutter, because, in fact, you knew exactly where they’d been. And so they courted us, the first in the building. You’re pioneers! they said all chummy and enthused, like they were letting you in on some great real estate deal, when all they were doing was making sure they didn’t have any empty apartments. They even gave us duffel bags with the building’s logo on it: Banker’s Loft Since 1905. If old building management sniffed the vague scent of us about to jump ship, move to some other building that was trying to fill their apartments, winking and blowing kisses at would-be tenants with other useless but seductive merch, they got all Please sir, please don’t go on us. Begged us to sign a new lease. No rent increase.
But Fatty Arbuckle. He was the most recent in a line of building managers. The others would last a while but kept being shown the door, word was, because they didn’t know how to strike the balance between being nice and making money. Me, I hated him from jump because he looked like a dude in costume. And even my roommate Franklin hated him. “He is so not pulling that off,” he was always saying, but Franklin was a guy with his own fashion problems that I’ll tell you about in a minute. But this new manager: you’re asking for resentment and hostility if you’re the kind of person who wears a pocket watch and you’re on the shy side of thirty. Old-timey rounded collars with thin ties, bow ties sometimes. Suspenders on days when he seemed to be daring us to crack behind his back about the fact that a man that fat didn’t need suspenders, let alone the belt that wrapped around his body like he was caught in a black Hula-Hoop. He was never going to be one of our favorite people in those kinds of getups, but when he refused to hear our arguments about why, as longtime tenants, we should be shown the courtesy of a lower, hell, no rent increase, we went off the rails. Every day was all things Fatty.
My roommate and I, we sat in the office at a time for which we were made to have an appointment, when back in the day you could just wander in and shoot the shit over a too-small Styrofoam cup of hours-old coffee that tasted like lye. They were really doing up the historical aspect of the building, relics they’d found during the excavation and remodel, a few rusted beer cans, somebody’s glasses frames. Some ashtrays. When I’d first moved into the building, I tripped out over all these old things because they were proof that some guy I didn’t even know cracked himself open a beer and enjoyed it and smoked a butt and lived his life. It was like he raised a can for me, the guy way in the future, and said, Life’s a bitch and a laugh so, aw, fuck it. What are you gonna do? Look, I know, it’s not like they raided some pyramid tombs and pulled up King Tut, but it was something in a city that never feels that old, according to a bunch of dummies who don’t know jack. I don’t know, my father’s father’s father was a bricklayer somewhere in England, okay? And in 1905, some dude laid down some bricks and built a really cool building, not some tan, nondescript stucco crap you can find anywhere around town, but this, Banker’s Loft. Lately, though, the beer cans and whatever were just looking like stuff. In the rental office the walls were covered in grainy sepia-toned wallpaper with blown-up images of Banker’s Building in the past, before it was lofts, when it was just offices where some guy working toward the next payday punched a time clock. We sat there without being offered our lye coffee and Fatty was all business. “What can I help you with today?” He leaned back and made a little steeple with his fingers.
We were there because we were done with the 10 percent increase business. We had to talk this through like reasonable people. Any lunatic would have agreed: that was so much more money every month. Were they even for reals?
“So,” Franklin started, all reason and politeness. “We’ve lived here for like, what? Eight years?” He looked at me and I nodded. Actually, he was my fifth roommate in ten years. Nobody liked to stick around too long. The idea of a loft that wasn’t theirs, with rent being raised willy-nilly just whenever? Turns out people didn’t really like that. Eventually they always ended up telling me in one way or another, It’s been real, rolling their dollies of hastily broken-down IKEA furniture down the marbled hallway. Franklin was only on his second year but I’d thought he’d be good ammo against Fatty Arbuckle, since they were representing similar decades, was my thinking. Franklin twirled the corners of his mustache, turned up on the ends in backward Cs. This all of a sudden frustrated me, this fashion problem that I mentioned earlier. He put wax on it. I had been cool with that, which is embarrassing to admit, until seeing him with Fatty Arbuckle made me feel like I was the anachronistic freak who wandered in from the future, in a strange costume of black Converse, jeans, and white T-shirt. Maybe I had. It was kind of a Happy Days look somebody pointed out to me. Franklin coughed. “I’m sure you know that already,” he said to Fatty, “how long we’ve been here. He’s been here,” he corrected, tilting his head sideways at me and stammering. He was starting out with no conviction. Dude, my eyes said, focus. I was going to use his barbershop quartet ass and then maybe not be all, Dude, don’t move out when he decided to move on. I had decided that right then. His limp handshake had foretold this moment, my moment of losing faith in the guy. But I don’t have that kind of emotional intelligence when I need it. Not when rent is due.
Fatty Arbuckle looked at Franklin and then at me. His kept his eyes doing that side-to-side thing like we were a tennis match and his smile was spooky as hell, a puppet smile or something. Still as a photograph. It never changed.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to recover the fumble. “I think loyalty should count for something. Never missed a payment. I break down all my boxes when I get deliveries. I’m the kind of guy that picks up other people’s trash, even. Walking down the hall? I see like a cigarette butt or something? I pick it up.” Franklin turned to look at me and telepathed the fact that we both had stepped over dog shit in the hallway that some d-bag had left behind walking his dog. But come on. You have to draw a line. “So,” I said, “not that you owe me, us, anything, of course. A courtesy. That’s all I’m asking. As someone who has been a solid, reliable tenant.”
Fatty looped his thumbs under his belt. Sat up straight. Smiled his frozen-in-time smile. “I understand you have been a good tenant. Essex Properties respects your tenancy. But we cannot make distinctions between tenants. Those who have lived here for a long time and those who are new.”
“Old management did,” I said, and Franklin nodded, even though he was just passing through and didn’t know shit about old management and new.
“That was then, and this is now,” Fatty said. He shrugged, but his face still had that mask smile. I studied the rolls of his neck, wanting to work my way into them, to the bony, chokeable part. “Look,” he said, holding his palms up. “This is a corporation. Whatever the market dictates, that is what we do. As long as the price of rents goes up, so, too, will the rents at Essex Properties Trust.” He delivered this brutal honesty with a dimpled smile and I realized that he didn’t look like Fatty Arbuckle at all, but Hardy from Laurel and Hardy. We’d gotten our fat guys mixed up from the very beginning.
“So, that’s it?” I looked at Franklin but his eyes said, I got nothin’.
“You’re welcome to consider other rental opportunities,” Fatty said.
“You mean like move?”
“I mean that you may find other, more suitable, arrangements for your situation,” he said. His eyes were brown and shiny and full of comedy.
“I’ll let you know what we decide,” I said, trying to sound tough and savvy, as if he was in danger of losing me, as if he needed me, as if I wasn’t just a part of a long line of people who had lived lives in apartments, gotten screwed over by some landlord or another, and moved on, part of a long line of people and their ghosts, in a building that was built before movies had sound.
I LOOKED ALL this stuff up. I may be cashing this week’s check on Friday and broke by Monday, driving a forklift at FedEx, a waiter before that, McDonald’s and Burger King when I was kid and didn’t know any better, but now I know how things work. If a building is refurbished in LA after 1990, even if the building is old as hell, like my building, it doesn’t count for rent control. So Fatty or Hardy or whatever his name was had some legs to stand on with his smarmy ultimatums. If I didn’t like it, I was “free” to leave because now there were plenty of what looked mostly like twenty-five-year-old kids with mysterious jobs that paid them in buckets of cash so that they could afford $3,000 rent. Everybody was a stylist or blogger or some crap. Downtown. Me, I was forty. And yes, I’d had it good for most of my years in the building and, after all, I was one of those kids ten years ago, moving in and pushing out people who lived downtown before anything was refurbished, when they paid $300 dollars a month for rooms and walked down the hallway to take a dump and brush their teeth. I had no business complaining about being chased out. Still. I’m asking. Where are people supposed to go? Where do they go? Does it really come down, always, to the cold, cold, hard, hard cash? I know. Where have I been? But I’m telling you. Down in the lobby they had this old-timey directory with folks’ names that used to live and work in the building. Crazy names with eight vowels in a row followed by ten consonants. Long-ass names. That directory? That’s some scary stuff right there. Who wants to get off the elevator and look at the names of ghosts every day? My point is this: people’s time in places has got to count for something. You don’t just yank the lye-tasting coffee out of a guy’s hand after ten years. I blamed Fatty Hardy for his Essex Properties corporate humanity-killing policies. All this was his fault with that ventriloquist dummy smile of his. That was what I thought at the time, but now I know I just needed somebody to pay for the injustice of some people being rich as hell and other people being forty years old with rotating roommates. I started watching the guy more closely, revenge in my heart. Nothing crazy like a mysterious pratfall down a flight of stairs or busting his noggin on a slapstick banana peel in one of our ancient, tiled hallways. Just a little humiliation to take him down a peg. Let him have the feeling of staring at a wall with suspenders and dimples.
I tried to get Franklin on the case, too, but the disassembled IKEA furniture writing was on the wall. He wasn’t going to be my roommate for much longer. He was already making noise about how the extra 10 percent was going to be steep, and he didn’t know, so on and so forth. “I dunno know, man. Kinda steep. I can check out Culver City for that price. It’s supposed to be pretty chill over there.”
When I watched Fatty Hardy, as it turned out, I learned a thing or two, for real. Dude was ruthless. Turns out, we got off light in his office. That was him being warm and hospitable. He was tearing the work crew new ones on the regular, but only when he thought he wasn’t being watched. When he didn’t think eyes were on him, he played the warden. “Javier. Get this mop and broom out of the way. We’re always showing, you know that.” Or “Hector. Don’t you ever leave the security desk for longer than five minutes. We need someone present at all times.” One time he caught me looking at him. He was yelling at Janet. Nice. Always talked about how hot it was in the lobby, didn’t I think? She always wiped down the fake red velvet in the elevators. People wrote fuck you with their fingers and drew uninspired dicks that were majestically lit by the halogen lights in the ceiling of the elevator. One day she forgot to use the lemony-smelling stuff to cover up the funky smell of dogs too big to be living in apartments in the first place.
“If I get in another elevator,” he said, pointing a finger in her face, “and it don’t smell like lemon? We’re going to have a problem.”
“Yes, sir,” Janet said, nodding, and some braids fell out of her scarf and onto her face. Hot. She was hot. Not a part of the story. I’m just saying. Right when I stopped looking at Janet, though, was when I saw Fatty Hardy see me. Up popped the puppet smile. But before that, there was a moment. Maybe he saw what he looked like through my eyes: a guy way too big to be looming over and pointing a finger at a woman who happened to be not his color. Yeah. It looked bad. My eyes agreed with his eyes. But then the moment was gone and we were back to the dimples. He gave me a nod and strolled back to his office. Another time, in the lobby, I watched him bend over to pick up a piece of something on the floor, and when he bent over, his ass looking like a pinstriped mattress, I was hoping so bad that his pants would split straight down the middle with the loud sound of ripping sheets, laugh track in my head. But no luck. When he stood up and turned around, what he saw was a dude staring at his ass. His eyes got small, trying to figure out my motives, but this time he didn’t even bother with the nice act. He nodded, his lips pinched together, and gave me a look that said, Why should I be nice to you, you goddamn pervert?
STILL, I GOT what I thought I wanted. I saw Fatty Hardy go down.
There’s this big conference room in the lobby, with glass walls so you can see in. Whoever’s in there working or whatever. It’s supposed to be for anybody in the building, but I never see anyone but the old guys who own the building in there. About four months after Franklin and I dropped our pants, bent over, and got charged another 10 percent, Fatty Hardy was sitting in the room with three guys with white hair, striped oxford shirts. I was sitting in one of the truly stupid, overlarge silver chairs that were supposed to be all about deco elegance or something, pretending to go through my mail. Franklin buzzed himself into the lobby just then and sat on the arm of my chair.
“What are you doing? You never sit down here.” His eyes followed mine. “What’s that all about?” He tilted his chin toward the conference room. There was lots of hands waving, nods, staring into space, notes being taken. “I’m trying to see,” I said. I was talking out the side of my mouth, trying not to move my lips.
“Are you purposely talking like that? What are you, some spy now? Nobody cares,” he said. “They can’t even hear us.” He looked back at the room. “Jesus. Look at the sweat on Arbuckle. It’s really coming down.”
“Hardy,” I said.
And then, the conference room door opened and the old guys came out, all of them wearing pleated khakis and loafers. I don’t know what got into me, but right then, I would have taken Fatty Hardy’s suspenders and rounded collars over any one of those guys’ bread-colored pants and loud Easter-looking shirts. Timeless. One of them patted Fatty Hardy on the back. He shook his hand and said the worst words in the world that one human can say to another human. He said, “Good luck.”
BUILDINGS TALK. THAT’S the cool thing about them in case you don’t live in an apartment. It’s true: Maybe I don’t really know anybody in a building of what? Three hundred lofts or something? But how do I know all the stuff I know? That’s what I’m talking about. The building’s got a big mouth. That’s how I know that Fatty Hardy lost his job and that’s how I know he lost it by trying too hard to hold on to it. The dudes in the khakis weren’t fucking around. They wanted mo money, mo money, mo money. They made Fatty Hardy the enforcer, but that was his doom. So many people said, What do I need to pay another $200 a month for? I’m out. I saw it coming, myself. The big turnover. From my apartment window, I could see into the windows of so many empty apartments across the way, and those windows looked like eyes staring right back at me like, What are you looking at? You’re next.
Maybe a week later, Franklin and I went downstairs to the bar underneath the building. It’s the oldest bar in LA, built in 1908. They sell French dip sandwiches and cocktails that are tasty, but me, I’m not the mixology-type guy. I’m just a straight-whiskey-in-a-glass-no-ice-type guy. I just like places with liquor. But I tell you the thing I like best about the place downstairs: it’s the first place in LA that had a check-cashing service, way back in the day. I like the idea. You get your check cashed, get yourself a sandwich and a nice pop of something not fancy but strong, and you’re good to go.
When Franklin and I got downstairs we saw right away, bellied up to the bar, there was Fatty Hardy. There were exactly two seats left, of course, right next to him, and so Franklin pretended that he had to tie his shoes when we were walking up to the bar, I guess so I’d have to sit next to him. Jackass. That made me get to him first but then I took the seat next to the seat next to Fatty Hardy, because Franklin’s no chess player. He couldn’t see the move after his. “Jerk,” he said as he sat down.
“What?” Fatty Hardy halfway turned to Franklin and took a sip of something brown.
“Oh. No,” Franklin said. “Him. I was talking to him.” He pointed his thumb my way.
Fatty leaned over. When he saw it was me, he held his glass up in a toast. I didn’t know what that meant. It gave me the creeps. He and I? We were not cool. We were definitely not down. He was not my peeps. Thanks to him, around the same time the next year I’d have another roommate, this one with a 1980s Mohawk and those fucked-up plugs in his ears that stretched them to shit.
But a funny thing happens when you drink with somebody. You get to be somebody’s history, the memory of a stranger. That night we had some laughs sure, but also, I remember this: we were steady getting drunk but I was getting sad. Fatty Hardy kept saying, “You’re all right, the two of yous” and “That looks all right, that mustache” to Franklin. Fatty Hardy kept putting his sentences out of order and sounding weird like somebody’s grandfather from the old country. I started missing him already and that was good, I guess, because I never saw the guy again. And my new roommate, I can’t say to him and have him understand, no matter how big his drooping ears are, I can’t say, “’Member that one manager? Fatty Hardy? That belt he used to wear? Damn.”
That night was a good night. The backbar is old, dark and oaky-looking, soft lights and the names of guys from years and years ago who drank enough to have their names up there from 1908 to now. The music was good. First Bowie then Aretha, then Zeppelin. In the mirror of the backbar, I could see the framed black-and-white photos on the wall behind us, people who were history looking back at us in the mirror. One of them looked like Marilyn Monroe.
“Marilyn Monroe!” I turned around and pointed. There was a guy next to me with a huge Afro. “Naw, dude. That’s some other lady that just look like her.” He pointed at me. “James Dean!” “No, no, no,” his friend said. He pointed at me and covered his mouth with his fist. “Oh shit. You know who that motherfucker look like? What’s that dude on Happy Days?”
“Screw you guys,” I said. I was so faded. Franklin was working on some girl with a ring in her nose, I remember that, and by then Fatty Hardy was gone. Vanished. I said it again. I said, “Screw you guys!”
“Man,” the guy next to me said. He pulled on my T-shirt. “Sit your drunk ass down.”
“No,” I said. “No! My name is Marty Allen Jones and I been living here for ten years and I’m going to live here for ten more, maybe even forever, and I’m home and ain’t going nowhere!”