Underworld (37 page)

I told him Jimmy was dead under his own name. We were the ones with assumed names.

But the curious thing, the contradiction, is that I was standing in the middle of a fenced enclosure in a bungalow slum looking up at the spires of the great strange architectural cluster known as the Watts Towers, an idiosyncrasy out of someone's innocent anarchist visions, and the more I looked, the more I thought of Jimmy. The towers and birdbaths and fountains and decorated posts and bright oddments and household colors, the green of 7-Up bottles and blue of Milk of Magnesia, all the vivid tile embedded in cement, the whole complex of structures and gates and panels that were built, hand-built, by one man, alone, an immigrant from somewhere near Naples, probably illiterate, who left his wife and family, or maybe they left him, I wasn't sure, a man whose narrative is mostly blank spaces, date of birth uncertain, until he ends up spending thirty-three years building this thing out of steel rods and broken crockery and pebbles and seashells and soda bottles and wire mesh, all hand-mortared, three thousand sacks of sand and cement, and who spends these years with glass specks crusting his hands and arms and glass dust in his eyes as he hangs from a window-washer's belt high on the towers, in torn overalls and a dusty fedora, face burnt brown, with lights strung on the radial spokes so he could work at night, maybe ninety feet up, and Caruso on the gramophone below.

Jimmy was an edge-seeker, a palmist, inferring the future out of his own lined flesh, but he looked at his hand one day, according to my little brother, and it was blank. And did he become, could I imagine him as a runaway eccentric? In a way, yes, a man who doesn't wash or change his clothes, bummy looking, talks to himself on the street, and in another way, maybe, I could imagine him rising this high, soaring out of himself to produce a rambling art that has no category, with cement and chicken wire.

This was the contradiction. Jimmy's future closed down the night he went out for cigarettes. Why would I even try to imagine him in an alternative reality, coming out here, half here, escaping to the Angeleno light, the Mediterranean weather?

I walked among the openwork towers, three tall, four smaller ones, and saw the delftware he'd plastered under a canopy and the molten
glass and mother-of-pearl he'd pressed into adobe surfaces. Whatever the cast-off nature of the materials, the seeming offhandedness, and whatever the dominance of pure intuition, the man was surely a master builder. There was a structural unity to the place, a sense of repeated themes and deft engineering. And his initials here and there, SR, Sabato Rodia, if this was in fact his correct name—SR carved in archways like the gang graffiti in the streets outside.

I tried to understand the force of Jimmy's presence here. I saw him shabby and muttering but also unconstrained, with nothing and no one to answer to, in a shoe-box room somewhere, slicing a pear with a penknife. Jimmy alive. And then I thought of a thing that happened when I was about eight years old and it was a memory that clarified the connections. I saw my father standing across the street watching two young men, greenhorns, trying to lay brick for a couple of gateposts in front of someone's modest house. First he watched, then he advised, gesturing, speaking a studied broken English that the young men might grasp, and then he moved decisively in, handing his jacket to someone and redirecting the length of string and taking the trowel and setting the bricks in courses and leveling the grout, working quickly, and I didn't know he could do this kind of work and I don't think my mother knew it either. I went across the street and felt a shy kind of pride, surrounded by middle-aged men and older, the fresh-air inspectors, they were called, and you've never seen happier people, watching a man in a white shirt and tie do a skillful brickwork bond.

When he finished the towers Sabato Rodia gave away the land and all the art that was on it. He left Watts and went away, he said, to die. The work he did is a kind of swirling free-souled noise, a jazz cathedral, and the power of the thing, for me, the deep disturbance, was that my own ghost father was living in the walls.

The waitress brought a chilled fork for my lifestyle salad. Big Sims was eating a cheeseburger with three kinds of cheddar, each described in detail on the menu. There was a crack in the wall from the tremor of the day before and when Sims laughed I saw his mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.

We heard the test flights shrieking out of Edwards. Sims said they had aircraft that bounced off the edge of space and came back born-again.

We were at Mojave Springs, a conference center some distance from Los Angeles. I'd recently gone to work for Waste Containment, known in the industry as Whiz Co, and I was here in the spirit of freshmen orientation, to adjust to the language and customs, and my unofficial advisor was Simeon Biggs, a landfill engineer who'd been with the firm for four or five years. There were a number of waste-handling firms represented at the Springs and we were sharing seminar space with a smaller and more committed group, forty married couples who were here to trade sexual partners and talk about their feelings. We were the waste managers, they were the swingers, and they made us feel self-conscious.

Sims said, “The ship's been out there, sailing port to port, it's almost two years now.”

“And what? They won't accept the cargo?”

“Country after country.”

“How toxic is the cargo?”

“I hear rumors,” he said. “This isn't my area of course. Happens in some back room in our New York office. It's a folk tale about a spectral ship. The Flying Liberian.”

“I thought terrible substances were dumped routinely in LDCs.”

An LDC, I'd just found out, was a less developed country in the language of banks and other global entities.

“Those little dark-skinned countries. Yes, it's a nasty business that's getting bigger all the time. A country will take a fee amounting to four times its gross national product to accept a shipment of toxic waste. What happens after that? We don't want to know.”

“All right. But what makes this cargo unacceptable? And why don't we know what the shipment actually consists of?”

“Maybe we're trying to spare ourselves a certain amount of embarrassment,” Sims said.

The tremor had hit at cocktail time when I was standing in the hospitality suite with a number of colleagues, who peered over their drinks in the slow lean of the world. The room whistled and groaned. I worked at controlling the look on my face, waiting for the situation to define
itself. It was not a mild shock. It was in the middle fives, we later learned, a five point four, and I felt justified in my sense of potential alarm, seeing the crack in the restaurant wall when we sat down to lunch.

“You think what, it's a drug shipment? Disguised as toxic waste? Because I hear rumors too.”

“Tell me about it,” Sims said.

He sat across the table, meat face and wide body, the jut underlip, the odd little unlobed ears, round and perfectly worked, the tiny mannered ears of a sprite child.

“I'm eager to hear your version,” he said, a trace of sweet condescension in his voice.

“One, it's a heroin shipment, which makes no sense. Two, it's incinerator ash from the New York area. Industrial grade mainly. Twenty million pounds. Arsenic, copper, lead, mercury.”

“Dioxins,” Sims said agreeably, biting into the middle of his mesquite-grilled beef.

Four couples took the round table nearby and Sims and I observed a pause. We wanted to be amused and slightly derisive. These were swingers, of course, dressed assertively, in the third person, and they leaned back in sequence when the boy poured water.

“They take time out for lunch. I respect that,” Sims said.

“I hear things about the ship.”

“The ship keeps changing names. You hear that?”

“No, I don't.”

“The ship left a pier on the Hudson River with one name, I don't know what it was but it got changed three months later off the West African coast. Then they changed it again. This was somewhere in the Philippines.”

“Enormous quantities of heroin, I hear. But why would heroin get shipped from the U.S. to the Far East? Makes no sense.”

“Makes no sense,” Sims said. “Except it ties in with another rumor. You know this rumor?”

“I don't think so.”

“Mob-owned.”

He liked saying this, he rounded out the words, popped his eyes a little.

“What's mob-owned?”

“The company that owns the ships we lease. The mob has a lot of involvement in waste carting. So why not waste handling, waste shipment, waste everything?”

“There's a word in Italian,” I said.

“Maybe it's not just the shipping company. Maybe it's our company. We're mob-owned. They're a silent partner. Or they own us outright.”

He liked saying this even more. Not that he believed it. He didn't believe it for half a second but he wanted me to believe it, or entertain the thought, so he could ridicule me. He had a hard grin that mocked whatever facile sentiments you might be tempted to shelter in the name of your personal conspiracy credo.

“There's a word in Italian.
Dietrologia
. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event.”

“They need this science. I don't need it.”

“I don't need it either. I'm just telling you.”

“I'm an American. I go to ball games,” he said.

“The science of dark forces. Evidently they feel this science is legitimate enough to require a name.”

“People who need this science, I would make an effort to tell them we have real sciences, hard sciences, we don't need imaginary ones.”

“I'm just telling you the word. I agree with you, Sims. But the word exists.”

“There's always a word. There's probably a museum too. The Museum of Dark Forces. They have ten thousand blurry photographs. Or did the Mafia blow it up?”

This is where Sims laughed, showing a mouth crisscrossed with cheddar.

I checked the round table. Two of the women smoked. Two of the women wore studded western vests. One was nearsighted, sticking her head in the menu, and one had an accent I couldn't place. All the women were ornamented, decked in chains, bracelets and breastpins, in hoop earrings with bead pendants, jewelry with a hammered look, a pounded look, and one chewed a carrot stick and talked about her kids.

“You know Italian?” he said.

“I studied Latin for a while. In school, then on my own, pretty intensively. And dabbled in German and Italian.”

“My wife is German,” he said. “Met her when I was stationed there.”

“A GI with a swagger.”

“That pretty much says it. Except I was Air Force.”

“She speaks German around the house?”

“A little bit. Yeah. Quite a lot.”

“You understand?”

“I better understand,” he said.

The men wore broad-collared print shirts unbuttoned to the thorax. The men were all hair. Not the protest hair of the sixties of course. Chest hair, mustaches, brushy sideburns, great heads of Hollywood hair—real hair that resembled toupees in bad taste, wish-fulfilling rugtops, sort of spit-curled and heavily surfed.

Big Sims called for the check.

“But we like our jobs, don't we, Nick? Whoever owns the ships we use.”

“I like my job.”

“I like my job.”

His sport coat was draped over the back of his chair, too broad to fit snugly over the palmettes that adorned the top rail. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with a dark tie and a tie clip shaped like a scimitar.

He gave me a tight-eyed look.

“Want to go to a Dodger game?”

“No,” I said.

It did not seem surprising, all these ghost-ship stories, even if they were only elusive hearsay, because we'd been told the night before that waste is the best-kept secret in the world. This is what Jesse Detwiler said, the garbage archaeologist who'd addressed the massed members about an hour after the tremor—an address that did not go down well with the grilled squab and baby Zen vegetables.

Our faces showed a pristine alertness, back there at cocktail time, when the room shook around us. It was a look that trailed a self-awareness in its wake, a sheepish sense of our own glimpsed fear, of being caught unaware, just before we gained control, and this is the face that traveled through the suite, above the vodka tonics, creating an ironic bond among the managers, in the indoor wind.

We saw Detwiler in the lobby after we paid the bill. Sims went over and collared him, literally, got him in a headlock and mock-pummeled his shaved dome. They were acquaintances, it seemed, and the three of us made a date to drive out to a landfill that Sims had designed, a massive project still in development.

A man and woman walked across the lobby and I watched her carefully. Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin. I went over and checked the schedule of events on the easeled board near the revolving doors, registration and coffee, licensing laws, spent fuel storage, all the topics and speakers in movable white type, ten to twelve and two to five and on into the night, and I thought about the swingers and their arrangements.

Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste. This was the name we gave our conference in the desert. The meeting was industry-wide but we were the firm that provided the motive force, we were the front-runners, the go-getters, the guys who were ready to understand the true dimensions of the subject.

I was in my early forties, hired away from a thin-blooded job as a corporate speechwriter and public relations aide, and I was ready for something new, for a faith to embrace.

Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice. You stand at the head of a corridor and by the time you walk to the far end you have adopted the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the
Weltanschauung
. I use this grave and layered word because somewhere in its depths there is a whisper of mystical contemplation that seems totally appropriate to the subject of waste.