Jeffrey turned to the stenographer. “Will you please read back to us what Carl said after I asked him if following young women ‘out of boredom’ was part of his job description?”
“There’s no need for that,” I interjected.
The stenographer looked from me to Jeffrey, awaiting direction.
At last Jeffrey indicated to the stenographer to remain silent.
I’d had enough. “Okay, fine. I won’t follow any women around the park, ever again. Okay?”
Jeffrey was not satisfied. “Why don’t you tell us why you left teaching?”
“That’s irrelevant... it was in the late ’80s, for God’s sake.”
Jeffrey pulled a paper from a file. “On your application here you indicated that you resigned from your teaching position.”
“I did.”
“We dug a little deeper, contacting the school district, and discovered that you were pressured to go. Why don’t you explain?”
“Look, I never touched anybody.”
“No one said you did. Please answer the question.”
“One of the girls needed a little watching over. She was just a freshman, a lonely kid. My concern was only for her safety. Would I be in this uniform if I didn’t take an interest in the welfare of others?”
“You ‘maintained surveillance’ on this girl after school hours?”
“Well, that’s generally when the bad things happen...”
He nodded. “Bad things, indeed.”
“Look, I’m not some kind of stalker, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
Jeffrey shrugged. “It’s not me who suggests it. It’s you, Carl. It’s your behavior.”
The silence and averted eyes among those gathered around the table suggested they concurred.
In this manner, the security department had its way with me.
Over the next half hour we arrived at a settlement that reduced my retirement benefits by 50 percent. The lawyer had all the paperwork ready. He was very friendly. I merely had to sign at the places he’d marked with colorful, sticky arrows. A child could have done it.
“Why now?” I asked as the inquisition came to its inglorious end. “After all these years?”
Jeffrey nodded. “You’re right, it’s our oversight. We should never have hired you. But at least we identified the problem before any serious harm was done.”
Harm? I never touched anybody — not in all these years.
Happiest place on the planet, my ass...
So you can imagine my surprise when five weeks later I got a call at home from none other than supercop Jeffrey.
“How’ve you been?” he asked, exuding his weatherman charm.
“Fine,” I said, though I’d actually not been so good. It’s funny, but that overpriced, overcrowded, oversanitized amusement park, known the world over for its fairy-tale castle, which is actually made of plaster so thin that on that last day, as my former colleagues marched me across the park on my way out forever, I was almost able to punch my fist right through it... well, despite all that, the place gets into your blood. The truth is, I missed the park as one misses a lover. Hell, more than one misses a lover. It’s been three years now since Mandy went back to her old job in Bangkok, where I’d met her on a humid night, paid her bar fee, and then won her heart with my tales of foiling the amorous antics, petty thievery, and juvenile pranks of park guests (everybody the world over has heard of the park, and being in its employ is almost like being a celebrity). The first gift I ever gave Mandy, the first acknowledgment of my deeper-than-mere-business feelings for her, was my spare name tag from the park, which I’d brought along on vacation in hopes I might indeed meet a young woman worthy of wearing it. So, sure, I suffered sleepless nights after Mandy left me. We’d had a good eighteen months and I really thought she loved her new country and our little apartment. Nobody likes losing a lover or wife or whatever. But losing the park proved harder yet, almost enough to make me start drinking again. There’s no place like it, unless you count its iterations in Florida and overseas.
“I want you to know I didn’t enjoy doing what I had to do, Carl,” Jeffrey said over the phone.
What did he want from me, sympathy?
“It’s the bitch end of the job, let me tell you,” he continued.
I’d be damned if I’d let him know how bad I’d been feeling. “Well, I’ve been great, Jeffrey. How’re things at the park?”
He laughed. “As if you care anymore, right?”
I pretended to laugh too. “Right you are, Jeffrey.”
It didn’t make matters easier for me that my garden apartment, which I’d only recently cleared of the last signs that Mandy had ever inhabited it with me, was barely a mile from the park’s front gate. Every night at 9:30, when the fireworks display started, the sounds of explosions would jerk me away from whatever TV show I’d been employing as distraction. Boom, boom, boom! I felt every sonic reverberation in the deepest part of my chest. I’ve always loved fireworks. Most nights I’d still walk onto my tiny patio to watch them — gunpowder flowers blossoming over the park, red, white, and blue. Boom, boom, boom! When that became too painful, I’d close my eyes. But even then I couldn’t help picturing the thousands of guests lined along the park’s main avenue or along the banks of its circular river, their eyes turned heavenward, a scene I helped supervise for years. Afterward, the quiet on my patio was even more painful than the display itself — silence and the drifting away of the smoke clouds into the night sky. Who wouldn’t miss a place like the park, a place that offers to all (except me, now) a simulation of life designed to surpass the real thing. Losing it had made me almost angry enough to want to hurt somebody. But I’d be damned if I’d let Jeffrey know how I felt about these things.
“Carl, can you meet me tomorrow morning for breakfast?”
The head of park security, former FBI, wanted to eat with me?
“Carl, are you still there?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Yeah you’re still there, or yeah you’ll meet me?” he asked.
“Why do you want to have breakfast with me, Jeffrey?”
“Look, I know you were good at your job, Carl.”
I did my job but I don’t know that I was actually good at it. I only know that I showed up every day.
“Have you found employment yet?” Jeffrey asked.
“I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire,” I said, a lie.
“I may have a job for you, Carl.”
“Me? Why?”
After a moment of silence: “Maybe I feel a little guilty about the way it went down with you, Carl.”
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.
What the hell did I have to lose?
We met the next morning at a Carl’s Jr. across the street from the main library on Harbor Boulevard and Broadway, three miles north and a world away from the park. He chose the place. Fast food didn’t seem like much of a gesture toward reconciliation. Was the Carl’s Jr. a play on my name? There were plenty of tourist joints around the park that served better breakfasts. And there were restaurants near the stadium and diners and cafés farther east in Orange or Tustin where park employees often went to escape the crowds and to enjoy food that was less generic than tourist fare. I asked myself what Sherlock Holmes would have made of Jeffrey’s wanting to meet here and I arrived at this: the Carl’s Jr. at Harbor and Broadway was a place we’d likely not be seen by anybody who knew either of us (most of the patrons and some of the employees didn’t even speak English). Only three miles from the park, we were virtually guaranteed of being strangers to anyone we might meet.