My back-up shooter, Thieu, called and reminded me that we had scheduled a shoot in Reseda-Charles Conklin’s younger brother, Bartholomew. I lied and said I hadn’t forgotten, that I was on my way. I left a note for Guido and headed out the freeway to meet Bartholomew Conklin.
“Pinkie? Pinkie was always scammin’.” Bartholomew was on his lunch break from his mail delivery route in Reseda. He was a long, thin, athletically built man. He had shaved his whole head, but I could see from the relative smoothness of the dome that he was nearly bald, anyway.
Visually, it was a good scene: against a backdrop of gray smog, the many-colored streaks of passing traffic, the stationary red, white, and blue postal service Jeep parked at the curb, Bartholomew’s summer uniform of post-office-blue shorts and short-sleeved shirt, white knee socks and black sneakers. He leaned against the Jeep, long legs extended, crossed at the ankle. Casual, good-humored.
I was worried about the traffic noise, so I attached a body mike to him. The battery pack and cord were concealed inside his shirt, the mike itself was a tiny black clip on his collar. Thieu filmed him from over my shoulder so that Bartholomew would have the entire screen.
“What do you mean by scamming?” I asked.
“You know, always trying to get something for nothing,” Bartholomew said, squinting into the sun. “Pinkie is the laziest sombitch on earth. If he spent half as much time working as he spent figuring out how to make other people work for him, he could be a rich man instead of a con.”
“He had young women working the streets for him,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Could be.” He studied his feet for a moment. Even when he started to talk again, his focus was off to the side, an oblique response. He said, “One time I remember, Pinkie was short on cash, didn’t have a job, wasn’t about to go out and look for one, either. Took to hangin’ up by the 7-Eleven. Just stand there all night, panhandling some so he could buy a beer now and then. But watching-that’s all, just watching and waiting. Like a fox waits.
“Then one night he’s standing there, sees what he’s been waiting for all that time. He sees two dudes go in, hold up the place. He watches it go down, slides himself over to the dudes’ car, and waits for them to come out. They come out in a hurry with a grocery bag full of money. He pulls his gun, high-jacks them, takes the money they stole, drives away in their car. They were still standing there like fools, trying to figure what the hell happened, when the police drove up and arrested them.”
“What happened to your brother?” I asked.
“Nothing. Not one thing. Who’s going to take the word of two thieves that they were held up?” An embarrassed laugh. “Pinkie is bad, but he’s good at it. If you get my meaning.”
“Are you close to your brother?” I asked.
Bartholomew shook his head. “Nowadays, you would say we were a dysfunctional family. Back then, well, no one ever said anything. Anyway, I never spent much time with Pinkie. I was enough younger I couldn’t hang with him.
“Most of the time, Pinkie was in jail for one thing and another. And when he wasn’t in jail, he was out on the streets looking for trouble. No, we’re not close.”
“Do you talk to him?”
He shrugged. “Nothing to talk about.”
He was reflective, a nice transition to the next question. I said to him, “By all measure, you’re a successful man. You finished high school, you’ve worked at the same job for over ten years. You have a home, wife, children.”
“Pension, health plan, two-car garage.” He said this with an attractive, humorous lilt. “You make it sound boring.”
“Not as boring as prison. You have the same background as your brother. What made things so different for you?”
Again, he was thoughtful. When he had an answer, he looked straight at me. “My father was the meanest bastard on this earth. A bodacious drunk. Beat us, hurt us, called us every name in the book, and then some. Beat all us kids, beat our mother, too. Why she stayed with him, I don’t know, but she did. The thing is, Pinkie, being older, well he took the worst of it. By the time I came along, the old man was plain old worn-out. Running on empty. I had a couple of older sisters to protect me some, too. Being the baby, I guess, saved me.
“When I was about five or six, my mother died and, if it was possible for things to get worse, it got worse. Sometimes, you know, good things come out of bad, because it got so bad that people had to take some notice. The school called the police about the condition we were in when we showed up. The County came and told my father he had to give us up. Pinkie was already living on his own. My sisters went to live with my aunt in Oakland. And I was taken in by a saint, older man who lived in the neighborhood; fed my puny body, fed my undernourished soul.”
There were tears in his eyes and Thieu came in close to get them. “You said I’m a success. Well, if that is true, then all the credit belongs to Brother James Shabazz.”
I repeated the name, “James Shabazz,” because I knew it was coming.
In these stories I had collected, Charles Conklin and James Shabazz were point-counterpoint. William Blake came to mind again, speaking of the tiger: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Bartholomew gave me a lot to think about.
Bartholomew had only a forty-minute break, so the entire meeting was short. I was back at my office within two hours of the time I left.
When Guido finally arrived, he had his arms full of materials and his own ideas. During the course of the afternoon, we had some noisy clashes, but productive ones. My strength is the message, his the craft. Together we make one hell of a filmmaker. And, together, that afternoon, we did what we do best.
When I left to pick up Casey, the vision was clear. I left Guido hard at the mechanics of execution.
I had Casey excused early from her last class-dance studio-so that I could take her by the house to say good-bye to Mike and still be on the freeway by three-fifteen. In the car, she pulled on Levis over her leotard, shook out her ballet bun, and brushed her hair into a long, smooth fall. With fresh makeup and a light sweater draped over her shoulders, she was ready to travel. One-inch shy of being six feet tall, she looked much older than her fourteen years.
My first thought when we saw the South Pasadena house was, I hoped the neighbors were of a forgiving nature. There was a massive dumpster parked at the curb. All the old carpets and drapes lay in dirty heaps on the driveway. Everywhere, there were tools and building litter. And beer cans.
The work crew was a noisy, happy collection of off-duty police friends of Mike, and his dad, Oscar. Oscar was knee-deep in a ditch in the front yard with two other men, working on water pipes and a six-pack. He stopped swearing long enough for Casey and me to get out of earshot.
I hadn’t met most of Mike’s friends, though they all seemed to know who I was when I walked into the house. They were friendly toward me, and curious. But it was my daughter who caught their collective eye. I restrained myself from throwing her sweater over her head and rushing her back out to the car.
Through the chaos, the beauty of the house was beginning to emerge. The hardwood floors were being sanded down to a natural honey color, and the cabbage roses were on their way out. The smell of paint-stripper was overpowering, the scum it created was a mess. But the result was going to be exceptional.
Bowser saw us and wandered in from the backyard to say hello. He took his place beside Casey and followed us through the house.
“What do you think, Casey?” I asked.
“No ocean view,” she said, measuring the height of the ten-foot ceilings with her eye. “But it’s okay.” High praise from a fourteen-year-old.
We found Mike on a scaffolding set up in the living room, wrestling with a rented wallpaper steamer. Sweat poured down his face, plastered his shirt to his chest. There was a liter bottle of Evian at his feet, but the dropcloth on the floor under him was littered with empty beer cans. When he saw us, he turned off the steamer and climbed down.