Angie’s platform shoes clomped across her bedroom floor above his head, and Stein realized he hadn’t started her breakfast yet. He poured a teaspoon of olive oil into a cast-iron frying pan and diced an onion to brown. Then he cut up the leftover baked potato from last night’s dinner into little squares and threw them in with the onions to make home fries. Getting into a good rhythm, he heated the griddle and whisked the egg white into a bowl of pancake batter then added his secret ingredient, vanilla extract, and ladled the first batch onto the skillet.
“Hey, Dad.”
Angie tromped into the kitchen and splayed her books out across the table. Her hair was reddish-orange today. Stein became agitated when he saw her doing homework. “You told me you finished everything last night before I let you watch TV.”
“I forgot we had a history paper.”
“You forgot?”
“Comparing Woodstock and Woodstock II.”
“Your school legitimizes Woodstock II? Woodstock II was a completely bogus event staged by people who were too busy making money to be at the real Woodstock.”
“Chill, Dad. It’s only school.”
“It’s not only school. Philosophically, there can’t be anything ‘II.’ Every moment is its own discrete event. Would you call ten minutes from now NOW II?”
“What about Home Alone II? Or Shrek II?”
“That’s just my point.”
“What about World War II?”
“What about telling the truth when I ask you about school work?”
“Something’s burning.”
Stein whirled around into the kitchen as the pancakes became galvanized into hockey pucks. “Have your juice, I’ll make another batch.” A car horn tooted outside. Angie swept her books up into her backpack and clambered to the door. “Bye Watsie,” she said, in that sweet voice that Stein remembered was once, long ago, also for him.
“Angie. You can’t go to school without breakfast.”
She glanced back at him, standing in the doorway with a spatula and a worried look. “You’re becoming your mother,” she said. Her friends honked again.
“Who’s driving?”
“That underage kid who lost his license for driving drunk.”
“Angie!”
“Pick me up at three-thirty.”
She bounded down the four steps into the courtyard and disappeared through the invisible curtain into her life. Stein didn’t want to be disappointed that she had forgotten his birthday. He wanted to be forgiving and tolerant and to blame Hillary for not reminding her. One of the collateral damages of divorce is the loss of the person who explains your shortcomings in a wawas long and green and gracefuly your children can love. When he saw the envelope sticking partway out of his mail slot he got all gooey inside. Aw. She had remembered after all. Just when you think they’ve let you down, they come through. He opened the envelope without tearing the flap, preserving every part of the gift as an icon. The card was a reproduction of the cover of Stein’s famed underground book on cannabis cultivation from the seventies, Smoke This Book. That made him frown. He had tried to hide that chapter of his life from her. Taped inside the fold of the card was a professionally heat-sealed plastic bag. And inside the bag was a long, graceful, sea-green bud of sinsemilla. The card was unsigned. Ok, so this was not from Angie.
He did not find the joke amusing. Anyone who knew him knew of the Joint Custody agreement that Hillary had rigorously enforced enjoining Stein from engaging in any “actions deleterious to the well being of the child.” Under the threat of losing Angie, Stein had traded in his VW Bus for a Camry, given up old friends, old habits, a pony tail, had taken on an excruciatingly mind-numbing job with a re-insurance company, and had not smoked dope in seven years. It irked him that whoever thought this was so cute should have known better. When the phone rang yet again Stein was too preoccupied and forgot not to answer. “Thank God I caught you,” Mattingly gushed.
THREE
Culver City was depressing even on days you weren’t changing decades. Railroad tracks sprang up out of nowhere and disappeared under chain link fences that concealed small factories and warehouses, whose alphanumeric names gave no hint of what they made or did. It reminded Stin of the surly east coast towns you’d have to drive through with your parents on the way to the beach, populated by sullen teenagers who looked like they could beat up your father. Stein leaned his arm out the window. He didn’t like air conditioning. He had changed out of his faded New York Giants sweats into the uniform he wore every day, Levis and a blue work shirt. Stein used his card key to open the steel gate allowing him to enter the inner parking lot of Espe Warehouse #23, the five-story structure he had hoped never again to see.
Technically, Stein did not have a boss. Technically he was an independent contractor retained by the product liability firm of Lassiter amp; Frank, overseen by its CEO, a contemporary incarnation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. Mrs. Millicent Pope-Lassiter. Therein, through an intricate contortion of leasebacks and loan outs, Stein’s services were dealt to a succession of their clients, of which Espe Cosmetics was the most recent. Sadly, counting a warehouse full of shampoo bottles was not the worst he’d endured. In the wake of the 1994 earthquake, he had been assigned to catalogue the missing limbs of a display yard full of Plaster of Paris statues of Napoleon. He had hand-tested the comparative tensile strengths of ten different brands of dental floss. He had verified the symmetry of a shipment of staples. But he drew the line at doing the same thing twice. He had hurried but not rushed to get this job done before midnight last night. He wanted the business of the first fifty years done. He didn’t want anything hanging over.
The atmosphere inside the warehouse was thin with already-breathed air. It made Stein light-headed. From the ground floor looking up it was a gigantic beehive. The walls were honeycombed with hundreds of thousands of compartments, each holding one octagonal shaped bottle that would soon be filled with 12.6 ounces of Espe “New Millennium” Shampoo, the most highly publicized, gigantically hyped liquid since Classic Coke.
Stein took the elevator up to the third floor where the executive offices were housed. “Thank God you’re here,” Mattingly gushed. “I have such a headache I’m giving birth to my brains.” He herded Stein into his office and sat him in the good chair alongside his Lucite kidney slab desk. A cluster of uniformly sharpened pencils stood at attention inside a silver cup alongside his telephone. If there were any justice, Mattingly should look wasted and decrepit for all his fretting. But his skin was smooth and his sandy brown hair was combed into a high school pompadour. He looked easily fifteen years younger than Stein, though they had to be roughly the same age. Their daughters were classmates at The Academy, the annoyingly smug private school that Hillary had insisted upon Angie attending.
Mattingly had struck gold as the result of two blind acts of luck. The first was the arrest and conviction of his erstwhile employer, Mister Rudy Esposito, founder of the Esposito Home Cleaning and Laundering Service. Mattingly had been so naive, he believed that when he had made the rounds “picking up laundry” he had actually been picking up laundry. When Esposito fell prey to a rare form of pancreatic cancer, ironically induced by the vats of cleaning solvents that were kept on the premises for show, Mattingly, who was the only unindicted employee, was left in charge of a factory that produced no goods and a distribution system with neither outlets nor customers. In this rare moment of karmic equilibrium his abilities were perfectly matched to their responsibilities
The second chime tolled for him in the person of a flamboyant, twenty-three-year-old hairdresser named Michael Esposito. Michael was the distant cousin of the self same Rudy Esposito. He had quit his most recent job as a stylist at Pavane, the trendy Palm Springs beauty salon, after a nasty breakup with his older lover-mentor, Paul Vane, who was also the shop’s proprietor. Michael Esposito had brought with him the secret formula for the hair and skin products that had made Pavane famous, and which Paul Vane, either out of generosity or desperation, had conferred upon him as his divorce settlement.