I’d just walked through the door of Savon, making a drugstore pit stop after temp work for the purpose of buying razor blades and a tube of Crest. I caught the profile of a man with long stringy hair and glasses, and it struck me as vaguely familiar. He was standing beside the pharmacy counter, though he was turned away from it, seemingly staring into space. I stopped at the end of the aisle I was heading into and got a closer look. It was Bob.
I approached my old buddy and landlord and tapped him on the shoulder before I greeted him.
“Bob?”
He didn’t recognize me for thirty or forty seconds, which was par for the course.
“Donovan?”
Upon recognition he seemed extremely pleased.
“Why are you here?” he asked, smiling broadly.
“I have to be somewhere,” I told him. Then I proceeded to educate him on my whereabouts for the last ten months.
“All right, why are you here?” I wanted to know.
Creakily turning toward the pharmacy counter and smiling, he answered, “Medication. You know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“There’s more now…new.” He told me he had been diagnosed with “heart trouble” while in Arizona. “I have to take heart medicine now,” he said. “Two different kinds of pills.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“He told me, this doctor, not to smoke…to change my diet a lot.”
“Did you?”
“I need to quit…I guess…smoking.”
”He said to cut down on the meat and fat, probably.”
“Yeah, that’s what it was.”
I smiled. “Have any luck with that?”
He smiled back. “No, not really…that’s what I really like, so…”
“I know.”
“What about you Donovan? You still smoke and everything?”
“Yeah, I still smoke, and I still do everything.”
“Oh,” he laughed, “well that’s good. You’re still the same.”
“It works for me. So where are you living? Are you only visiting, or are you back?”
“I’m back...back now.”
“Where?”
“The ocean. But it’s in Ventura County.”
“That’s a pretty vast area, Bob.”
“Not too far from Santa Barbara County.”
It turned out Bob had in fact bought a house on the ocean. Among the details were that he had returned from Arizona with most of the money from the sale of the other house resting safely in the bank. It wasn’t precisely clear whether the owner of the house, or the house itself was what he’d discovered first. The owner had been a single man, and the house he’d built was a modest and a fairly small one according to Bob. He divulged he had spent less for the new house than he’d received for the other one on the Westside, which wasn’t surprising. I made the effort again to elicit specificity on the location of his new place.
“It’s between Ventura and Carpinteria,” was the most he could tell me. “I don’t drive, so I haven’t noticed, exactly. All the paperwork is Ventura County.”
“What are you doing here, in this store, in this neighborhood?” I asked.
“I have a cab…it’s outside waiting, “ and he turned his face toward the store entrance. “My lawyer’s is right around that corner. He needed me to sign a bunch of papers…that’s the reason. I was waiting and I wanted to get my refills.”
The image of a medicine cabinet so crowded and volatile that the door suddenly blasts off, the way the door of a bank vault does when it has been blown with explosives, transfixed me for an indeterminate stretch of time.
“Oh, I need to tell you something, “Bob blurted with a mixture of excitement and alarm that startled me. “Before I forget.”
“What?”
“In case you wanted a place to live.”
“Uh…what? What about a place to live?”
As Bob explained it, the previous owner, often solitary out in his house beside the sea had converted his garage into a small cottage. He had done so in order to provide his friends a place to stay when they came to fish and to socialize. He explained that it had a bath, a stove, and a refrigerator, a self-contained “little cottage, small, but nicer than the guest house at the other place.” His proposal also had the unique appeal of offering sanctuary rent-free.
“You should, “ he said, “you should do it. I’d like the company sometimes,” he said, a little less than elegantly.
“Maybe later,” he continued, “you could help out just a tiny bit…a really tiny bit, you know,” which was fair enough. And I knew the aforementioned “tiny bit” in fact would be a tiny bit, and remain so. He went on to explain what an enormous convenience it would be to have us available for hauling him on his errands, emphasizing the mighty benefit of the savings in taxi fares. He appended his pitch with long, laborious examples of what he hoped to be spared should we take him on his junkets.
“I’ll need to call Lila and run it by her. I like the idea, myself, though.”
“All right. You could move in any time, soon as you wanted.”
“Do you have a phone?”
“Uh huh.”
After ninety seconds I said, “Bob, tell me what your number is.”
“The telephone?”
“Yes.”
I walked him to the cab, which was to take him back around the corner to the lawyer’s. It was agreed I would call as soon as I had a decision. He crouched to enter the cab, tightly clutching the plastic bag of pharmaceuticals.
I spent the trip back to the Essex mulling the pros and cons. The cons were few. The place was out there, some distance from the reliable corruptions I’d depended on, and other perquisites of metropolitan life. Of course, that same metropolis was virtually a new frontier in the advance of banal, consumerist one-upsmanship, and, as always, and to be expected littered with the intellectual deadwood it was famous for. The heart-numbing bearing witness to authentic life forms snuffed by raging waters of overbearing facileness on a daily basis was not a plus for the city, which was more the pity, since they were waters surging through streets actually paved with gold. Though my standards and expectations were accommodatingly low, even I, with my encrusted bonhomie was more and more often beset with gastrointestinal recoil. More likely though, since there was an ample fondness for the place as well, was that I was, surprising as it might seem, fed up with people altogether. That is, other than the few with whom I shared my company, and those encountered while intoxicated, admittedly an overlapping group most of the time. What had changed I wasn’t sure.
That evening I made the call to Lila. I had no idea beforehand what her opinion would be, surmising only that suitable shelter free of the burden of rent only could be viewed as an overwhelming positive. As for retreating to the wilds of coastal Ventura County and the attendant consequences of such a move on work and play, what her opinion would be I couldn’t venture. Whether solitary life would possess for her the momentary appeal it did for me, was a question as well.
“I ran into Bob,” was how I broached the subject, “our Bob.” Then I dumped more or less all of the information at my disposal all at once, getting it out before she had her chance to comment. “I kind of like the idea, but it may not be that wise a move, all in all,” I offered lastly.
“Are you kidding?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, ‘what do you mean?’ What language should I ask you in? Were you serious or were you kidding, what you said about it not being a wise move, or whatever it was?”
“So no matter the reservations you might have, you’re telling me, you think it is a good idea?”
”Uh, yes.”
“Great.”
“And what reservations are you talking about? I don’t have any reservations at all. What reservations would I have about a place at the beach absolutely free, with a chance for
peace and quiet, and a stretch of free time to do nothing whatsoever but paint? I mean, if you can think of any…”
“No. Only that it’s a ways out there…you’ll be a long ways out of the city, that’s the only potentially negative thing occurs to me.”
“I think I’ll be able to manage. Yes, I’ve thought about it, and I’m pretty sure I can manage,” she wised off before entirely breaking up.
“Yeah, yeah…yeah, yeah.”
“Maybe we can find a better deal,” she said, still afflicted with giggles.
“Hey, I never know. You’re awfully particular about a lot of things hotshot.”
“Not that particular.”
“Then great. We’re both in favor.”
“’Reunited and it feels so good’…especially when it’s at the beach.”
“It ain’t exactly Pacific Palisades up there, sugar.”
“All the better.”
“I suppose we should go up and look at the place before we let him know for sure.”
“Maybe. Not necessarily. It would be nice to avoid having to do that. You’re sure he said the appliances are fine, and everything’s in decent shape?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“No cracks in the windows or holes in the roof…you know, wind off the ocean blasting through the place or rain falling in the living room?”
“There’s no living room, it’s only a room.”
“I’m aware of that, funny man. It’s a figure of speech. I tell you what, give me the number he gave you and I’ll call him.”
“Be my guest. Here it is.”
When I called her back later in the evening she said that after an hour or more of hashing things through with Bob, she was convinced the new hacienda was going to be hunky dory. She said her questioning had been extremely thorough, and her many inquiries answered to her satisfaction. After hearing exhaustive details, she’d concluded the cottage, its furnishings, and its appliances were in tolerable, even excellent condition, and the place was ready to inhabit any time.
“I don’t think the cottage has been as much as touched, since Bob moved into the house. He found it in pristine condition he said… his word, ‘pristine.’ The worst he could say about it was, ‘it’s probably dusty.’”
“He’s the expert there.”
After further discussion between the two of us we decided we’d make the move in a week exactly.
“I’ve got a lot to do,” she said, “between now and then.”
“Yeah…I guess I don’t.”
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