Moorpark Palms - 21. Chapter 21

One Sunday morning, as I was pulling weeds in the courtyard, Claire came down her steps. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“The yard’s a mess. Denny and Pete do nothing.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “But they have other assets.”
I lived in a community of stalkers. Still, whatever Denny and Pete’s strengths, they didn’t get the grass mowed. When the building owners replaced the old gardeners with a sprinkler system, the manager became responsible for the two small lawns. Mack cut them grudgingly. Denny, never.
“Where’s the mower?” I asked him one night.
“Mower?”
I asked Pete.
“We sold it.”
“Short on cash?”
“Nah, we didn’t need it. The guys who do our office will take care of the place. When they can.”
That also became almost never, and – when they did appear – their quick work didn’t include anything more than chopping the grass. I began to thin the ankle-grabbing spider plants that had started to rule the flowerbeds. They’d long since trashed the lilies. And though the building had survived the quake, repairs were slow in coming. After a week, I tried to speed things up.
“Is there a plan?” I asked Denny.
“Well... yeah... We’re thinking about it.”
Thinking didn’t build Rome.
“If they’d pay me, I’d fix stuff,” Vic volunteered. “I’ve got the experience.”
“We’ll get everything done,” Pete assured me.
Everyone in the building quickly learned to talk with him first. Denny was useless unless you offered a beer. And even then, he forgot.
“We still have broken windows,” Mack pointed out. “Dangerous for the kids.”
Annie concurred, rare on their parts.
“What’s that guy do?” Mack carped about Denny one night. “He’s never here.”
The big surprise was that anyone was listening to Mack.
“Call the office,” Pete tried to sooth him. “Any time.”
“And talk to your machine!”
“I pick up when I’m free.”
“Well, you’re always damned busy!”
“It’s an office!”
I would have felt better if the first big complaint hadn’t started with something I’d done. On the morning of the quake, I’d been the one who turned off the gas. After ten days, it was still off. And though we all knew the gas company had bigger problems, no one liked cold showers.
“How long can it take to turn back on?” I asked. “It took two seconds to shut off.”
“Well, if you do it wrong,” Vic advised, “it can blows the place up.”
Oh.
Still, we needed heat. And hot water. And most people wanted to cook. When it seemed nothing would ever happen, I picked up one of those Fix Everything books, then followed Denny, apartment-by-apartment, cranking off stubborn, often almost hidden valves on our stoves and heaters. I took Denny because I couldn’t find Pete. And if we were gonna blow up, I wasn’t going to be liable.
After turning off every control as diligently as we could, we respectfully approached the main gas line. Denny thumbed the corroded municipal tag.
“It says we’re not supposed to do this,” he warned.
“You have a better idea?”
He didn’t, but he thought for a very long time. Finally, I tightened the wrench on the rusted valve, Denny took an exceptionally deep breath, then he whacked the wrench with a sledge.
We lived. In fact, absolutely nothing happened. Except the gas came on,
Still, we had to separately re-light every pilot light in each apartment, something made harder by forty years of accumulated grease. And every stove had seven pilots – one each for the four burners, a griddle, the oven, and a separate broiler – which used to have its own rotisserie. No wonder our bills were so high.
“These were Cadillacs in 1957,” Mack commented when we were in his and Joni’s apartment. When almost no one in the building had been born.
“Think we can carbon-date the grease?” Denny joked.
After finishing the apartments, we tackled the water heater, a huge unit built into its own closet on the balcony. Because of that, I’d once passed on renting Apartment 6. I’d been thinking about it for the extra space. It was double the size of mine, but only a hundred bucks more. The problem was that the logical place to put a bed – away from possibly shattering windows – backed right against the water heater. And I wasn’t going to survive a quake, only to be scalded to death.
That day, the heater wouldn’t light. It just wouldn’t. The process involved reaching halfway under the 2-foot round tank, which was mounted only an inch off the floor. We lay on our stomachs and flattened our hands to get under. We tried the barbecue starter and any number of candles. I tried. Denny tried. Vic did., too. Mack looked on, smug-but-silent.
People offered other ideas, often as useful as hole-punched rubbers. Joni and Annie kept the kids – and dogs – away.
“We gotta call the gas people,” Denny finally surrendered.
“We’ve come this far,” I said.
“If we can’t reach the pilot...”
“You’re not even sure it’s there,” Mack sniped.
“The instructions say it is.”
“Do they say a moron installed the tank?” he countered.
“It’s too far underneath,” Denny insisted. “You need, like, a special tool.”
“Can we buy one?”
He waffled: “I’m not authorized.”
“I’ll pay.”
“That’s stupid,” he said. “You’ll never use it again. And you won’t get reimbursed.”
Finally, Sally came up the steps. She had trouble doing that because of her knees so had been watching from the courtyard. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought to ask her. Mainly, because she still avoided Mack.
“The way we used to do this...” she began, “is we used to roll a sheet of newspaper, really tightly, then light the tip. It gives you a bigger flame than a candle.”
Lindsay got a paper. Sally rolled a page into a long, thin cone. Seeing that, I remembered how my arthritic grandmother sometimes lit her very old oven, completely panicking my mom.
“Now, open the valve,” Sally instructed. “Light the end of the paper, and quickly slip it under there.”.
I looked at Denny. He nodded at me. So I dropped to the cement again, he held down the pilot button, Vic lit the newspaper, and I scooted the flame under the heater.
Five seconds. Fifteen. Thirty. It finally took, and everyone went modestly wild.
“Hot water!” Denny crooned. “Sex tonight!”
People ran to stake their claims.
“It’s gonna take hours to heat,” Sally reminded them.
“You should be manager,” Claire told me when I reached the courtyard.
It was foul idea, which fortunately took some months to fester. Meanwhile, the building repairs trickled on.
“What’s the problem?” I asked Pete. We were nailing the remaining steel box from our shattered mailing kiosk to the center stairwell wall. Since the quake, the box had been propped in the rubble of its stone base, and the mailman had to squat to fill it. Finally, he threatened to stop delivery.
“It’s hard to find workers,” Pete explained. “Everyone’s doing double time.”
“You’ve got Denny’s brother living with you. How much would he cost?”
“He specializes in cabinets.”
“What if we took up a collection?”
“You couldn’t. No one would donate. And the mailboxes alone will cost a couple grand to do right.”
That’s why we were nailing the box to the wall.
“Insurance will cover this,” Pete insisted. “Eventually.”
“If you can just get the junk hauled away,” I suggested.
Besides the mailbox remnants, we had smashed glass in the flower beds, yards of jumbled cinder blocks along the driveway, and the leaning gazebo by the pool.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.
His company motto. Followed by inaction.
Still, the management office had some abilities. Apartment 8 was quickly taken by another quake refugee, Meg, the woman who cut Lindsay’s hair.
“I used to live in one of those cute little 20s bungalows,” Meg told us. “You know, ten cozy cottages around a tidy green lawn. The quake was scary. The houses shook right off their bases. They weren’t even bolted.”
“Were they on slabs?” Pete asked. Then he had to explain. “You know, the cement. Was it flat? Or were the houses built up on blocks?”
Meg had to think. “I never really looked,” she confessed. “I just got out of there.
“This place has a great foundation,” Pete continued. “It’s filled concrete block, eight inches thick, reinforced with rebar. And the building’s bolted down. There’s a two-foot crawl space.”
“I’ll trust you,” Meg allowed.
After the Hungarians left, Annie’s father, Franck, immediately took their place.
“Did you lose your apartment, too?” Lindsay asked.
“No,” he said, cheerfully. “My wife.”
Lindsay went pale and Franck assured her: “Not in the quake. Just after Christmas. I don’t know how she held on so long. Just had to see another holiday.”
“As long as it wasn’t the quake,” Lindsay gasped, sounding relieved.
“Oh, no!” Franck said, laughing. “She would’ve hated that. She wouldn’t even let me buy Edan a rocking horse.”
I didn’t remember hearing that Annie’s mother had died, and I offered my best the next time I saw her.
“She wasn’t mine,” Annie rejected. “Dad’s been married five times.”
“Can’t keep ‘em alive,” Franck confided. “I was sure I’d outlast this one.”
He was only seventy-three and still worked.
“Why not?” he asked.
“My husband’s name was ‘Frank,’” Sally told him when they met. “Only you pronounce it differently.”
“Yes, European – Swedish – with a long A. It rhymes with ‘honk.’”
Into Apartment 11, moved Holly and Kaz – also Kelso, a large Golden Retriever. Holly was travel agent. Kaz painted houses. Kelso barked.
Like Meg, they also knew Lindsay. “Between you and Mack, we don’t have to advertise,” I joked.
“Don’t go confusing me with those Flintstones,” she shot.
Apartment 6 rented to another pair of college guys, Rob and Bobby.
“Who knows them?” Claire asked, as if I were an oracle.
I shook my head.
“We’re filling up fast!” she observed.
“Any place standing is,” claimed Pete. “It took about a week for everything to get red tagged. Now, we get like a dozen calls a day.”
When I introduced myself to Bobby, he smiled and advised, “Just don’t call ‘Rob’ ‘Bobby.’ He gets pissed.”
“Why?”
“You don’t want to ask.”
So I didn’t. But Rob was the good-looking one, and he brought a live-in girlfriend, Birgit, a Scandinavian beauty who lit up Vic like a laser.
“She makes up for all the Macks in the world!”.
Rob was studying architecture but worked with computers. Besides taking classes, Bobby was a part-time teacher’s aide, though he wanted to be a fireman.
“I don’t know why,” he admitted. “Everyone says ‘Be a teacher,’ ‘cause I’m great with kids. Little ones, too. I’m a real role model. But I can’t imagine doing it when I get older.”
With Rob and Bobby also came Mr. B – the obligatory boa. He lived in Rob’s walk-in closet, sharing it with Butch, a tolerant cat.
“Rob and I use the closets in the hallway,” Birgit told me. “Fortunately, there are lots of them.”
“Why does the snake live in a closet?” I asked.
“Who knows? Rob’s always had it – since he was a kid. And he’s always lived in a closet.”
Birgit hadn’t known Rob for that long. They’d met at CSUN, where she was studying marketing. “I wanted to go to school in the US, and I hoped for California. It’s so warm.”
She’d left Sweden three years earlier and had mixed feelings about going back.
“I’ll just have to see.”
In Apartment 14 were the kids, Tim and Cyndi. Pete was half-right: Cyndi was only nineteen. But Tim was thirty-two. He was small and boyish so looked younger. She worked as a receptionist. He assisted a well-known film composer.
“Do you write music, too?” Vic asked him. It seemed a reoccurring theme, from when I moved in.
“I don’t even play,” Tim admitted.
“He Xeroxes,” Cyndi informed us. “And runs errands and drives and fixes things. There’s lots to do in an office.”
“But it’s different from insurance,” Tim clarified. “That’s where she works. My hours are all over the place.
With them came three cats, two VCRs, and several TVs. One of Tim’s perks was a constant stream of For Your Consideration tapes from the film academy.
“My boss never watches ‘em. He’s too busy to even go to screenings. Cyndi ‘n’ I go and then tell him how to vote.”
“For what?”
“The Oscars.”
So much for industry know how.
Though to be fair, Tim seemed to spend much of his free time studying films. “What’s good?” I asked him gamely, and he quickly hit me with a string of respectable titles. He wasn’t stupid.
“Anything you wanna borrow, just ask,” he offered.
I thanked him.
“Looks like we’re full up,” I told Denny that weekend. He was compressing empty Bud cans while sitting on the courtyard steps.
“Yep. Pete saved my ass.”
“What’s that mean?”
“He did all the rentals.”
“That doesn’t seem hard, considering the market.”
“Maybe. But he makes better choices. And he did all the paperwork. That’s the ballbuster.”
Denny flipped the latest flattened can across the courtyard like a Frisbee then grinned when it missed the trash.
“If I had my way,” he went on, “I’d fill the place with chicks.”
No question there.