Lawyers circled everywhere since what Ray called the Mishap. (BG called it the Tragedy. He called her BG for Big Gulp.) All manner of folk held forth about the city settling with Ray for unholy amounts; listening to them, pantshit was a good thing — the docs must have ratted — adding a few zeroes to the actuarial tally of infarct infractions. Plus the shot dog. Even the police chief was upset about that and rang to express himself personally. But Ray didn’t feel like suing, anyone, anyhow. He liked cops, always had, was a Cold Case File fanatic. Didn’t want to shake nobody down. Not his style. Shit happens, ain’t that right (pantshit anyway), and it was a shock more didn’t. Sure the money’d help, always did, but he wasn’t wild about the way that felt. In his taxonomized, infarcted heart. That’s just how he was built, even though Ray Rausch didn’t have a pension. Had about $22,000 socked away — what was left from the 60 he’d got when he sold his share in the shop — and Social Security after Medicare deductions was about 780 a month. Rent 565, without utilities, went up about $35 a year but he got by. The city gave seniors a break on gas and electric. Hell, breakfast at Denny’s was $3.40 and he couldn’t even finish what was on his plate, thank God the merry old Friar liked pancakes and wet toast. Paying for Rx was a little tough (Kaiser was $50 a month but seeing the medicos still cost money and there wasn’t any dental coverage). That’s why he never did anything about his dentures and skipped the blood pressure pills, the Zetia and Lipitor most of the time (the only med he can’t do without is his Lunesta), and even the one that made him pee less, until Big Gulp got on him about it. (She kept promising to “hook” him up with a Canadian pharmacy, and blushingly joked about “scoring” Viagra off the Internet. Like her cousins, she was computer savvy.) She was a good woman and seemed to have a little nest egg, those cousins in Artesia saw she never went begging. BG pitched in with the rent and the groceries; he didn’t like that too much, I’m old school, but she got mad if Ray didn’t let her contribute. Helluva gal. So: if the city or someone wanted to drop 20 or 30 thou on him, fine, wouldn’t turn it down. They’d play poker at Morongo, he’d show his old lady how the real Injuns do it, Native American style. He always had pretty good luck at the tables but it was a long time since he’d been. Oh it would be great fun to “pick the pockets” of those turquoise-jeweled reservation drunks, brown trash he called them, Geronimos with Jet Skis, ponytails, and Lexus SUVs. If the City of Industry wanted to give him a little stake to play 21, well, happy days.
The legal beagles (Ray’s quaint sobriquet) said he could get millions but it still didn’t set right, not his idea of the American Dream — that would be someone else’s. Why on Earth should he loot the City of Industry? (He always called it that, like the song: I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans.) The stalwartly named senior-friendly municipality had a program to replace old kitchen appliances and once even fixed a broken window in the rent-controlled dining room: why would he want to gouge them? As long as he had tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit he’d be fine. At least I got the shoes and the shitter. Heh heh. Long as they paid Friar Tuck’s medical bills — which were gonna be hefty—and there was enough to buy the Gulper a dress or 2, long as he had his trusty Circuit City Trinitron to watch Cold Cases and old Twilight Zones, he’d be just fine. Hated the whole notion of needy sadsack dementia trainees. Like the woman downstairs who took the bus to the airport on Sundays, to watch the planes. Called it her “holiday.”
No, he didn’t need that. Raymond Rausch could look after himself and his own. Skip the fantasies.
III.Chester
LOCATION scout, turned 41 in May. A Taurus who drives a Taurus. 283,000 miles on them both.
Wants to be a producer, all he needs is a stake, like the men who put together a mill for the Saw movies. Did it all on their own and now they’re gazillionaires except for the guy who dropped dead out of the blue, 42 years old, the one who cooked up the whole torture idea in the 1st place, telling the Times in a big write-up the week before he croaked that it felt like he’d “won the lottery”—he won all right. That was hubris for you, karma, whatever the My Name Is Earl guy would call it. Sometimes a person should keep certain thoughts to himself.
Chester scours this longitudinal utilitarian Thomas Bros. dream with wondrous, hazelnut eyes, a city divided into sunshot grids, seeing things no one else could, can, did, ever would, a gypsy-seer that way, a wizardly douser. But LA, like everything else, was being digitized, devoured, and decoded, memorialized like some newfangled karma/chimera/camera chameleon, converted to numbers by a new breed of men yielding images for film and television the way high-tech farmers got the most from crops, square by square mile. Chess couldn’t quite keep up — like an old silents star trying to get a grip on the talkies. Out of breath on Sunset Blvd. Scouting used to be an art, now hardly needing the human touch let alone eye which afterall had been and still was Chester’s strength, what he was actually semiknown and respected for, his uniquely vintage prepostmodern unstereotyped timeless gaze, a quirkily monopolychromatic horizontal 6th sense. The vets of the game, middling aestheticians who went by their gut, still call (enough were around because of the union, guys like Chess who, before graduating to location managers, used to take those same incremental ankle-swiveling panoramic shots, painstakingly pasted into manila folders at the end of each exhausted day, flatfooted but effective Hockney montages), compensating him richly enough for the trouble, sometimes $800 a day on the proverbial Big Feature, but more often half that now. Commercials and videos his daily or weekly or sometimes monthly bread. Chess was younger than most of the managers and 20 years older than the new breed of digitizers, a generation more like paparazzi than scouts. Depending on luck and size of production, he could still draw down enough to go to Jar or the Porterhouse Bistro or whatever new steakhouse with a lady on his arm, like a proper man. Though lately indies and MTV paid pisspoor and every time he turns around he sinks 2 grand into the car, doesn’t even take it on desert or Angeles Crest scouts anymore for fear of breaking down and dying out there, so, on top of everything, he is renting cars and praying that someone steals the Taurus from his garage like they’ve done twice before in the last 10 years.