HOPE FOR CHANGE... But Settle for a Bailout (4 page)

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,
becoming 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.