Friends on the balcony, 28 February 2019

“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”

Jimmy Hoffa, 1975¹

My friend John finally reached the punchline: “Partin’s going to find out that his grandfather fucked Castro up the ass and called him Jimmy!”

Our laughter drowned the din coming from the dining room. We were on my balcony, overlooking Balboa Park to our east: 1,200 acres of rolling hills filled with dozens of gardens, museums, rolling bike trails, lush forests, and the San Diego Zoo. Less than a mile to our west, if we were in my friends’s Carleton and Linda’s condo, you’d see downtown skyscrapers, the airport, San Diego bay, and a glimpse of the navy’s underwater submarine base and the SEAL training area of Coronado Island. It was late, and my friends were drunk.

“Dude,” I said, “That was fucking hilarious!”

Aran pushed his glasses up and wiped a tear from his eye. He popped opened a can of Tecate and asked, “What’s your plan?” he asked, making “rabbit ears” for “plan” with the can in one hand.

I shrugged. Aran, who rarely asks direct questions, had asked a fair question given the party’s occasion: I was leaving on an early morning flight to Cuba, and would be gone at least a month. I didn’t have a plan, and I hadn’t read my Lonely Planet yet. Amazon delivered it a few days before, along with a copy of “I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa.” Martin Scorcese scored $257 Million to make Frank’s memoir into a film, and my grandfather, Edward Grady Partin, had a small part in it. The Irishman wouldn’t be released until that summer, but everyone on my balcony knew the backstory, and my trip was dominating our conversation.

I leaned back in my chair precariously and schootched my feet farther out on the balcony’s wrought iron railing, grimaced a bit and arched my back. I glanced past Aran and towards the dark skies over Balboa Park, and pondered how to answer.

Four of us were in a rare old building among the constantly evolving condos circling Balboa Park. Beside us, a historic building reportedly owned by a former president’s son but too expensive to preserve, was almost completely demolished to make way for yet another high-rise; until that happened, my balcony had the best view in America’s Finest City.

My feet were perched on wrought iron that made it look more like the balconies of New Orleans than the insipid west coast modern style, and that’s what had attracted me to the place a few years ago. A young couple originally from Metairie noticed it, too, and they recently moved into one of the west facing units. They made Cajun crab stuffed mushrooms for the dining table, and contributed two six packs Abita beers. I put one of the six packs to the hard sided cooler on the balcony, the one with with a bottle opener built into the handle that sometimes doubled as a seat when the balcony filled with more people than chairs, and the other was in a beer-and-wine fridge by the dining room table at the end of my condo farthest from the balcony, where a couple of dozen friends and neighbors were chitchatting and getting to know each other.

The owner of our building recently refused a $10.7 Million cash offer from Chinese investors who wanted to tear it down and build a multi-story building that would shade the sprawling southern Magnolia tree in front of us. If that happened, the 80 year old tree would fade away and die; it was already weakened from thirst in the dry southwest, and only maintained a few scraggly flowers rather than the skillet-sized and fragrant blooms back home. The building’s owner was Cranky Ken, an old-school guy who would be around my grandfather’s age, if he were still alive, and coincidentally the same age as the Magnolia tree, which had been imported along with tons of other trees from all over America as part of some garden exposition I can’t recall.

Ken grew up working the docks of New York City. When he was probably 35 or so, already aging too much to meet the demands of a stevedore, he somehow scored enough money to move to sunny and buy a few buildings in the relatively nascent San Diego, before it boomed and became America’s 7th largest city. Our vintage red brick building was a bargain back then, and a few others Ken bough in what were then rough neighborhoods of San Diego (though nothing compared to his neighborhood NYC in the 50’s, he told me) were practically steals. Ken loved our building and the southern Magnolia tree in front of it.

“Those chinks would have to pry this place from my cold, dead fingers,” he told me early one morning, when he stopped by my balcony to collect quarters from our building’s laundermat. His accent was like you’d expect from an old dock worker from New York, nasally and harsh, and full of colorful words.

“This place will look like Central Park one day,” he cranked out another morning, waving his log of an arm towards the park’s lush forests, a rarity in Southern California’s arid desert. Had it not been for decades of irrigation and care, Balboa Park would like more like the rolling rocky hills of Afghanistan than Central Park; recent water restrictions were choking the Magnolia we both loved.

“People here don’t know how fucking lucky they are to have a tree like that. Look at those kids climbing it,” he said with a dismissive gesture of his sausage fingers. “Chinks, spics, negros, and wops, fags and queers: they all climb that tree now. A lot of Mexicans bring their kids here, too. It’s fucking beautiful. They don’t know how lucky they got it.”

His eyesight wasn’t good as it used to be, and I didn’t feel like telling Ken the hispanics and Asians were probably nannies of the mostly caucasian kids who climbed the tree; Banker’s Hill was named Banker’s hill for a reason. And the dark complected kids weren’t the immigrants of Ken’s immagination, people just off the boat who shared stevedoring work with people who grew up in old-school New York, like Ken had. Many were Indian software engineers, brought over by Qualcomm on work visas that made them wealthy by India’s standards but at around half the salary of local engineers from the UCSD Jacob Irvin School of Engineering, ironically created by the founder of Qualcomm (almost every cell phone in the world used a Qualcomm chip). We did have immigrants and refugees of Ken’s imagination a few miles away in City Heights, where the median income for a family of four was only $24,000, less than the monthly interest rates on my neighbor’s high-rise condo. Ken owned another building there, too, filled mostly with multiple Section 8 families cramming into single bedrooms against Section 8 codes, though Ken didn’t care much about codes as long as they paid their rent on time and didn’t call him to complain about anything.

I was unsure how Ken differentiated between spics and Mexicans, but San Diego’s population was around 42% hispanic and overwhelmingly from Mexico, especially with the border only a flat 16 mile bike ride away, or a quick trip from downtown via the Red Line. Downtown was down the hill from our building, a steep hill lined with more and more high-rises every year. As for queers, at the other end of Banker’s Hill was Hillcrest, America’s second largest gay and transgender community and home of the world’s largest rainbow flag, perched above a brewery with beers named “Thick and Stout,” “Pearl Necklace Pale Ale,” and a Sunday brunch with bottomless mimosas that took on a whole new meaning when bartenders wore ass-less leather chaps. But I knew what Ken meant. He was a product of his generation; in his first autobiography, Hoffa told America that my grandfather raped a Negro girl, and in Hoffa’s trial, even Chief Justice Earl Warren called the man my grandfather was supposed to bribe on behalf of Hoffa a Negro man. Adjectives meant a lot to Ken’s generation, which many people his age dubbed the greatest generation. For fun, just to watch him explode, I sometimes reminded Cranky Ken that Hoover was a closet homesexual, transexual, pillow-biter, or whatever word would ignite Ken’s fuse.

Cranky Ken was the type of person most people didn’t want to start a long conversation with, and you definitely never corrected his view of the world, unless you wanted to hear what a 15,000 pound bomb sounds like. His pitbull eyes were focused and beady, and he had a permanent frown framed by disproportionately large jowls. Coincidentally, he looked like Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s adopted son (of sorts). In 2019, Ken and Chuckie were the same age and products of similar upbringings. Like Chuckie, Ken had muscles under layers his age that hinted to growing up boxing in rough neighborhoods. I never met Chuckie, but if he was anything like Ken, I think I’d trust him. And if I were in a tough situation and had to choose, I’d choose Ken or Chuckie to be in my corner over any one of the twats on SEAL Team 6.

Chuckie proved his tenacity in Hoffa’s 1964 jury tampering trial in Nashville, the one where Big Daddy was the surprise witness who sent Hoffa to prison. At the trial, Chuckie was sitting near Big Daddy when a gunman walked in the courtroom and pointed a pistol at Hoffa. Before courtroom security officers, Hoffa’s bodyguards, or the federal marshals hidden in the rows of seats could react, Chuckie leaped across his bench and tackled the gunman. He landed a fury of punches, ripped the gun from the larger man’s hand, and pistol-whipped him with his own gun. It happened so quickly that the would-be assassin was bloody and senseless by the time security guards could pry Chuckie off of him. (It turned out that the pistol was a pellet gun, but no one knew that at the time). After seeing the government-trained twats fail to do their jobs, or even the big brutes in Hoffa’s inner circle like my grandfather, Chuckie began patrolling the hallways with a .410 shotgun, staying awake and focused on protecting his idol and father-figure.

I can only imagine what Chuckie thought when, without his gun, Big Daddy stood up and sent Hoffa to prison; but I have an idea, because almost 60 years later Chuckie was still telling people: “Fucking Partin. I should have killed him when I had the chance.” To put that into perspective, Chuckie stood below Big Daddy’s nipples, yet he was unintimidated by a man who terrified everyone else in Hoffa’s circle.

Chuckie would have done anything for Hoffa. Sure, SEAL Team 6 can take out Osama Bin Laden in a midnight raid, but they had the support of President Obama and a few hundred thousand soldiers and spies. Chuckie had only a .410 shotgun, a bird gun the same shot strength as the 28 gage that years later Vice-President Dick Cheney shot his 78-year-old friend in the face with while they were duck hunting, doing no more harm than making Dick the Duck Hunter an internet meme for a while. And Chuckie didn’t have any type of weapon when he hurled himself past Big Daddy and between himself and his boss to tackle an armed man twice his size. Instead of a team of SEALs, I’d gladly ask Chuckie or Ken to be the pitbull in my corner.

John exhaled smoke from his Marlboro and pointed to my shoes dangling over the railing and said, “Dude, you have huge feet.”

I looked at John and held up my big hands and said, “You know what they say about people with big hands and big feet…”

I waited until a couple of the guys smiled, then I softened my voice and said, “It’s hard to find gloves and shoes that fit.”

Our laughter dimmed the dining rom din for a few brief moments, but was silenced by a siren sounding and blue and red lights dancing across the maroon brick balcony. An ambulance rushed past us on the way up from the way downtown, illuminating the otherwise dark view across Balboa Park. The doppler effect warbled as it passed us, and the the ambulance disappeared up 6th Avenue, probably on its way up the road to Scripps Memorial Hospital. In the relative silence and darkness from loosing our night vision, someone popped open the cooler. Ice rumbled and they fished out a round of fresh Tecates and Abita Ambers. I reluctantly declined. Carleton crunched his empty Tecate can under the sole of his loafers (they had a metal bottle opener under them) and accepted an Abita.

“I don’t have much of a plan,” I said to Aran. “But I’m meeting a friend in the state department to catch up and talk about Guantanamo, so I’ll probably start there.”

Erin, a lady more comfortable with Tecates and Marlboros than the wine and cutcharie laid out on the dining room table, exhaled and said, “Of course you have a friend in the state department.”

I shrugged and said, “A lot of my buddies stayed in the service. The natural evolution was some type of special ops and then secret service.”

John lit another cigarette. I don’t know how he does it. He’s a big guy, around 6’2″ and 240 pounds, and he works almost 70 hours a week as a civil engineer with a desk job, but he can out-cycle me when we ride 16 miles to the Tijuana border and back for beer and tacos, and out-paddle me in any type of surf. He and his wife are empty-nesters, and her loud laughter from the dining room would pierce our balcony now and then; she hated when he smoked, which happened after a his first six-pack of Tecate was crushed for recycling and he broke out a backup 12-pack that he kept stashed in the wheelbed of his truck. We had a lot of time to surf and sip Tecates because their kids spent every other week with their dad. John adopted his wife’s kids, but viewed them as his and supported them keeping a relationship with their biologic father; when the kids went off to college, our friendship didn’t have to evolve, and the kids even joined us on the balcony now and then, asking questions like, “Who was Jimmy Hoffa?”

“After 9/11,” I said, “they bounced around all the new three-letter organizations. We’re all still friends and meet up whenever we can. I haven’t seen this guy in a few years, but we’re still tight.”

I nodded my head and glanced around and said, “It’s like hanging out with y’all.”

Aran and Carleton raised their cans as a toast; I raised an imaginary glass and caught eye contact before they sipped.

I told Aran, “My visa makes me use local businesses, nothing owned by the state, so I’ll probably just start up conversations and see what happens. And I’m meeting a few guys there to go a climbing in a small town a couple of hours from Havana. They’re on a journalism visa for what they call eco or adventure travel, but they want to get some politics through the Cuban editors about healthcare.”

Blank stares. John’s eyes were closed, and he giggled as he dragged on his cigarette. I paused to see if he’d share the joke, then continued, curious but not wanting to ask.

“We’ll climb in a tobacco growing region with old-school guys,” I added. “Vin-yal-es or something like that.” (Despite living in San Diego for a long time and in Central America for a year and a half, my Spanish is muy malo. I hoped to improve it by having my phone off and getting away from tourist zones for a few weeks.)

“Huge limestone cliffs a couple of hours from Havana,” I added.

“Fidel gave up smoking, but kept the cigar in his mouth for the image. He visited the farms for fun and photo ops. Rock climbing’s as an unnecessary risk for a national health system, so it’s illegal. That’s why the tobacco valley is still old-school. Maybe someone there will remember seeing my grandfather: he was remarkable looking.”

John’s guffawed and said, “Partin’s going to find all of the 70 year old Cubans with blue eyes who look like him, and go from there.”

John’s one of a few people know Big Daddy had sky blue eyes, or that he had wavy strawberry blonde hair. Only black and white photos of him remain, except for a few shoddy ones from the 1980’s that are so faded you can barely see his eyes. I recall him mostly in his later years, when he was released from prion in 1986 for declining health, but I grew up with every teacher remembeing him, and all of the lady teachers having a whistful look in their eyes and telling me how big and handsome he was. Life magazine showed him in the 1960’s, walking with teachers in their state strike and promissing the support of his Teamsters to help all teachers; if the state wouldn’t help the teachers, he’d call a Teamster strike that would slam the state’s economy to a halt. He, like Hoffa, had a pension fund with enough to pay his teamsters during a strike and strangle the state as companies suffered and both fatigued and buckled. To help the teachers, he’d hand out $100 here and there, mostly in front of news cameras and for Life’s journalists, but often for the young, sweet teachers who looked up to him. They became my school teachers, and after hearing the longing in their voices and the gleam in their eyes when they told me about him, I have no doubt that Big Daddy’s size, eyes, smile, and southern drawl is what led Hoffa to say, “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”

When John listened to me tell him that, he said that Hoffa didn’t have Big Daddy killed because they were fucking. They weren’t, to the best of my knowledge, but Big Daddy was legendary at keeping secrets and John’s theory is as good as anything written in the books I read. Even J. Edgar Hoover was impressed by Big Daddy’s storytelling. In that Life magazine, Hoover thought a shirtless photo of Big Daddy boxing would show Ameirca just how big and rough he was. Hoover ran the FBI for 35 years and was a suspected homosexual and cross-dresser, and John gets us laughing until Tecate shoots from our noses with his jokes involving Big Daddy, Hoover, and all night interrogation sessions using a roll of lubricated duct tape.

“I was thinking of using the climbing trip to write a memoir, sort of like Wild.” I said.

“I loved that movie!” Erin said in her high-pitched voice. She calmed down and said, “And the book. I always wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. You should do that.”

I shrugged.

Erin spent her ample vacation time traveling the world. She hosted a huge block party after every year’s Pride parade, the one that passed my balcony and followed the equally sized but much more tame St. Paddy parade, and she dreamed of retiring from her architecture firm and setting up her own shop on some Carribbean island – any one, just as long as they still had beer. Despite her diet, she was an avid hiker, and lived near Hillcrest so she could huff and puff Balboa’s five miles of single-track trails during lunch breaks. She hoped to meet a man who wanted to settle down, and I joked that she was in the wrong neighborhood and attended the wrong parties – most of my friends were happily married by then.

She exhaled smoke and said, “Why don’t you do it? You’re The Most Interesting Man in The World.”

She dropped her cigarette into a Sierra Nevada bottle half full of luke-warm beer and cigarette butts. It sizzled and extinguished. The smell waifed out and made me slightly nauseous – it’s funny how you notice those things when you’re not drinking heavily but your friends still are. John put his out and lit another. Erin’s a finger width shorter than John, a bit heavier than average, and can out-swim me. I don’t get it.

Erin pulled a beer from the cooler and asked me, “Who was that guy playing your grandfather in the new Scorcese movie? The one who called you when they were filming?”

“Craig Vincent,” I said.

Blank stares.

“Remember Casino?” I asked. Most people nodded or grunted yes.

Carleton said: “Casio was a 1995 Martin Scorcese about Las Vegas, starring Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.” There were a couple of “oh, yeah”‘s.

Carleton was a film buff. He and his wife were DINKS, Dual Income No Kids, and he spent a lot of time in the downtown public library scouring old films. There were a few times over the years that we talked about old gangster movies with Cranky Ken on my balcony. Carleton and I joke that my rent is a song and occasional story, but there’s probably some truth to that. Ken was remarkably timid when asking me what I remembered, and when I share a story it’s the only time he refrains from offering his opinion. Big Daddy makes a lasting impact, and it’s very likely that someone in Cuba would remember seeing him.

I said: “Craig was the big dude in a cowboy hat that Joe Pesci reached up and slapped because Pacino told him to.”

John chipped in, “Did he slap him and say, ‘who’s your big daddy now!'”

When I stopped laughing enough, I wiped both eyes and said, “I have a theory.” My smile returned to its resting state, and I said, “About The Godfather. I started thinking about it after Craig and I talked.”

“I reread a book by some mafia guy,” I said. “I can’t recall his name – but he was the confidential advisor to Scorcese on The Godfather.”

“That was Francis Ford Coppula,” Carleton interjected. “Not even on the same scale.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Coppula. Anyway, the guy wrote something that stuck in my mind. It was off-hand, as if even he didn’t get it.” My hand made a gesture as if tossing out something it briefly held but didn’t need, and I shrugged.

“He was an intermediary between Coppula and the mafia. They wanted to be anonymous, but they wanted the film to show them as families more than gangsters.”

My face froze for a moment. For the first time, I heard myself say it out loud: “I think the horse head scene was a warning to Hoffa.”

I glanced around and saw blank stares on every face except Carleton’s. He misunderstood the blank stares, and said, “There was a scene where a Hollywood film producer woke up with his race horse’s bloody head on his bed.” But that set up the scene.

I said, “Hoffa used to fund Hollywood films with the Teamsters Pension fund,” I paused for effect and said, “It was around a billion dollars back then.”

“He also lent it to the families to build Vegas casinos and New Orleans hotels.” I said. “But Coppula would have known about Hollywood and seen The Teamsters logo across the final screen of credits. The logo was two horses, Thunder and Lightening, from when the Teamsters drove horse waggons. They’re behind a huge, blue, ship’s steering wheel,” – my head cocked and I paused a brief moment – “or dharma wheel. It’s impossible to miss,” I nodded towards Carleton, “if you sit through all the film credits.”

“Hoffa was in jail then,” I said too rapidly, “and negotiating with Nixon for a pardon. I think the families were telling Hoffa that his power was through with them and Hollywood, and they were warning him to keep his mouth shut around Nixon. B’…” John’s face began to crinkle with expection. I trapped the B behind my pursed lips and slowed my speech and said: “…My grandfather wasn’t changing his testimony, and Life magazine went full-coverage that, saying Marcello trying to bribe him on behalf of Hoffa.”

“People joked that the mob didn’t bribe,” I said.

“But they didn’t know Big Daddy. When they failed to change his mind, I think the families were worried Hoffa would talk when he got out, so they had Coppula add the horse head scene to send him a message.”

For the first time that evening – and in general – John had nothing to say. Aran was looking up thoughtfully, and when he smiled I knew he connected the dots and saw a bigger picture. Even Carleton looked like he had learned something. Erin’s gaze was on me, and she was smiling as she sipped her Tecate. Aran smirked and fished around the cooler for a bottle of Sierra Nevada. Everyone refilled or relit, and my mind wandered.

Beyond Aran, under the dim yellow light of a square, Spanish-tiled public restroom across the street and the size of my living room, I noticed Mr. Charles bedding down for the night beside the men’s door. The year before, after sharing some red beans and rice and a joint, I taught Mr. Charles how to pick the 1950’s-era lock and gave him one of my older pick kits. That year, downtown San Diego had an outbreak of Hepititus that slowed tourism and made national news, because it was attributed to the roughly 6,500 homeless people around downtown and Balboa Park, and every year some media outlet focuses on the homeless in San Diego and LA around elections. Giving Mr. Charles access to a bathroom after the mayor locked it was the least I could do for him and my neighbors.

We had more food and beer than he will see all week.Was he a friend? A neighbor? Why was he there and my friends and neighbors were here? Mr. Charles always seemed to understand it better than I did.

After some parties, the rare ones were I wasn’t drinking, I dodged cars on 6th Avenue and brought him leftovers and a joint every now and then. To not make it like charity, I told him the bag of weed was a gift from Uncle Sam. He knew that the local dispensary gave me a 25% discount because of my VA rating, so, in a way, his tax money went to my healthcare and discounts; Mr. Charles had briefly served in the reserves some time in the 1970’s, but had no disability to fall back on and was okay with that. I was lucky, he said. That was all. His body probably hurt as badly as mine from decades of landscape labor, yet he never complained and was just bidding another two years until he was eligible to start collecting Social Security, if it’s still around and lasts his lifetime.

On the other side of the building from Mr. Charles, Mary was bedding down beside the lady’s room, barking something to people who weren’t there. I don’t know her story. Behind the building, facing away from 6th avenue and towards the irrigated forests of Balboa Park, two jittery transients I didn’t recognize were collecting newspapers and cardboard for a bed. I couldn’t hear what Mary was mumbling over the laughter bubbling from my living room, but she seemed upset at whatever she saw in her mind’s eye. Like with Ken, I avoided long conversations with Mary.

I loved that building as much as Ken did. I had no doubt that his thick dock-worker arms would cling to the title of his building until someone pulled out a hacksaw; even then, it would probably take a pair of pliers to pry open his cold, dead hand. I had been there since just before the 2009 housing crash, when mortgages bottomed at 3.5%. He kept my rent ridiculously low, not because of Big Daddy, but because he noticed that after I moved in other tenants stopped calling him about trivial repairs in his aging building. (I’m handy with a multi-tool.) All 22 tenants were on a monthly lease, and anyone who called about a leaking faucet or stuck window had their rent raised the maximum legal amount each month, around 10%, until they left. Most people avoided Ken and reported to me instead. In exchange, my monthly rent was less than the weekly interest on nearby high-rise studios, even when it was only 3.5% and I had VA loans to help. If an investor could ever pry the building’s title from Ken’s hands, they’d have to drag me off that balcony kicking and screaming, and my oversized claws would still be clinging to the wrought iron railing that I’d rip from the red brick walls before going peacefully.

Aran broke my train of thoughts by asking: “Hey J, can I see your knife?”

I leaned to my left and slid the orange rescue Leatheran tool clipped inside the right pocket of my blue jeans, and handed it over with the carabinner and bottle opener side facing Aran. He took it and popped his cap and tossed the Leatherman back to me. I returned it and adjusted a thumb tip with a small red handkerchief that I had put in my pocket earlier that day (one of the simple flesh-colored ones available at all magic shops that can hide a small handkerchief inside). The patents for Tim Leatherman’s now-ubiquitous multi-tool expired probably ten years before, and like most outdoor-products with a lot of competition, multitools kept pace by adding a bottle opener; it was the most used tool on my current multi-tools. Aran liked using it; it has a nice feel in the hand. I thought about chiding him for not using his lighter or an obvious opener, then I remembered that I never fuck with Aran.

He’s a small guy. If it weren’t for him, I’d be the runt of our litter on the balcony. Aran’s a 5’4″ thin jewish guy from Santa Monica. With curly hair, thick designer glasses and an erudite demeanor, he looks like Malcom Gladwell, or like Seth Godin wearing an afro wig, the type of guy who carries a thesauruses into a dive bar. He graduated from UCSD in software engineering and has been in San Diego since. Earlier that evening, his wife, a San Diego native and the primary reason he lingered here, lost their coin toss and took their two boys home in time for bed. Aran has two double-sided quarters, and alternates using the heads and tails, though most people know it and never make bets with him. He says his oldest kid, a taller version of Aran wiht a name I can’t pronounce and a budding magician, will probably figure it out any day now.

Aran was less of a magician and more like a silent and stealthy partner, Tellar to Penn, an indispensable spotter on a sniper team. No one suspects that behind the fancy glasses and smug air lurks a master con artist, a disciplined soldier sitting miles away with a single-shot .50 cal and calculated patience. He once hacked the bluetooth stereo in a new friend’s car and made it play the theme song to Taxi when stuck in traffic by linking it to Google Maps’s traffic feature, and the Audie technicians couldn’t reproduce the error or find anything wrong in their computer diagnosis. That went on for five years, until the friend upgraded to a car with Apple play. And when we planned a magic trick for his office, Aran spent two years discretely asking for dollar bills in exchange for four quarters, ostensibly to use the dollar-only vending machine, but secretly planting quarters with pre-planned patterns of dates and states. When I arrived to meet him for lunch and had a quick chat with his team, I demonstrated Aran’s points about statistics and probability in predictive programming (machine learning, or annoyingly simplified as AI) by getting his team of around 40 people to share their birthdates: two pairs were shocked to have the same birthdate, though they quickly searched the internet and learned the birthday paradox. But we wowed by showing how subconscious biases influence our choices more than probability or statistics, evident by the remarkable difference between the states shown on quarters kept in females’s desks vs the quarters kept in males’s desks.

He has the patience and precision of a deep-cover agent, which why I never fuck with Aran.

I heard a little girl’s voice from inside say, “Uncle J?” I leaned forward and slid my feet off the balcony and onto the floor, and stepped through the double French doors into the living room where a tired looking eight year old girl stood. I took a few steps towards her, rotated my baseball cap backwards, and held on to my pockets as I kneeled down to her eye level; the larger motions covered my thumb stealing the thumb tip from the small pocket of my jeans.

I rested both hands on my left knee, smiled softly, and said: “What’s up, sweetie?”

I have a nice smile. I inherited it from Big Daddy, and in it’s resting state it’s not a genuine smile; it’s nothing more than an effect of our high round cheeks and the muscles that pull up on the corners of our mouths. When we really smile, our cheeks crawl up to the bottoms of our eyes and take the corners of our smile with them. It’s a nice, charming smile without being distracting, part of why people trusted Big Daddy. Anyone watching me smile at that moment would have thought I was in love.

“Momma said you could tuck me in,” Hope said.

In my periphery, I saw Dana watching us with a smile that was softer and kinder than anything I could muster. She held the same can of Abita that she’d probably been nursing for an hour or two, effortlessly defeating the most disciplined of soldiers pretending they didn’t want to drink faster. She’s a finger width taller than I am, but doesn’t look it for some reason – most people are surprised at how tall she is when we stand together. She’s thin and athletic looking, though her only exercise is hiking near her home in Topanga Canyon, mostly in Malibu State Park, and an ocassional backpacking or easy rock climbing trip with me around Idylwild. She used to play beach volleyball, but stopped because it wasn’t as fun after she dropped out of college to pursue art full time.

She works in movie studios most days and doesn’t get a lot of sunshine, but she looks tanned because her biologic father was, coincidentally, 1/2 New Orleans Creole; her mother met him after he performed one night in 1971 at the then-new Baked Potato jazz club up the street from the Magic Castle. He left the next morning and continued his tour, and he probably never learned that ten months later Dana was born. She’s lingered around Hollywood ever since. People just assume her complexion is from our sunshine, especially because Hope, for reasons I don’t understand, has Dana’s curly hair but a complexion as light as mine.

I kept my gaze on Hope and said of course. I stood up and pulled my jeans up and tucked the thumb tip back: it wasn’t the right moment. I lowered an open, now-empty hand, and Hope put her’s in mine and made a loose fist. Her hands were the size you’d expect for an eight year old girl, and I’m not tall, only 5’11” in the mornings (most people shrink around 1-2 cm by the end of the day because our intervertebral slowly discs compress under load and rehydrate overnight), but I inherited Partin-sized hands and feet. My loose fist swallowed her relatively tiny hand, which made her seem even more petite. I saw Dana beaming in my periphery, and my smile broadened; it really is a nice smile, and Dana said it was the first thing she noticed about me when we met. Though she never met him, she said she could see how people would trust Big Daddy based solely on our smile.

Hope and I turned right into the doorway of my office and library. The futon couch was open and made for Dana, and a plush car-camping inflatable mattress was on the floor for Hope. I had purchased it with that year’s 20% coupon from REI, just in time for her to use it (the orange Leatherman rescue tool was bought with an REI coupon from the year before). The futon and the camping mattress both had fresh sheets. Hope had put her weekend backpack beside her mattress when they arrived around lunchtime. It fit snuggly under the window that overlooked the downtown skyline and airport, thanks to the demolished condo, and was nestled between two bookshelves that framed the new view of downtown, possible in the short time between when an old, squat building would die and a new high-rise would stand in its place. I saw the lights of an airplane approaching for landing, and a moment later the dull roar of breaking jet engines subtly rumbled through our walls. I thought that it would probably the last of the night’s airplanes, fined $75,000 for every half hour they land after 11pm, thanks to the people in now-expensive homes in Point Loma who woke up surprised that their multi-million dollar homes were in the flight path. I closed the black-out curtains and dimmed the lights, tucked Hope in, and sat cross-legged beside her mattress.

She tried to talk to me as she laid down, but she was too tired. She stopped talking and her eyes remained shut, and within two minutes her breathing was slower but still irregular. I’d wait until she was fully asleep before leaving.

I straightened my posture and rested my hands on my thighs, and focused on breathing softly to help her fall asleep. Someone glancing in would have thought I was meditating; it wouldn’t be far from the truth. Another airplane rumble rippled gently through the room. I slowly moved my head as if bringing on ear to my shoulder, then back to the other side. The muscles were tight, and I had to strain a bit but still didn’t approach the flexibility I had as recently as seven years ago. It had been a long day, and everything hurt. To move my neck and steer my mind towards something else, I scanned my bookshelves.

The bottom two shelves of the right-hand bookshelf were for Hope and Dana. The bottom shelf had a short row of books Hope had outgrown one the years, mostly ones typical of her age and with a bias towards princesses and fairies, and a few drawing pads and colored pencils that were timeless. The shelf above had what I thought or hoped she’d enjoy while I was in Cuba, books like the Harry Potter series and some science fiction series about a kid a few years older than her who had multiple universe versions of himself to help solve crimes (I bought it on impulse when the cute worker at a used bookshop in North Park recommended them for an eight year old who read above her level). I added a couple of maker’s project books and a maker’s kit that I had designed for anyone from around age ten to a freshman in college engineering; it had typical nuts-and-bolts and wires-and-circuits, but I added a few Arduinos and things it could make move, beep, light up, or roll. I hoped Dana would help her with the online parts; she’s never been interested in computers, but maybe a shared project would prime her pump. For Dana, I added a couple of the new Stephen King books that had already made their way to the used book shop. She’d have access to all of my home and books, but she liked popular fiction like Stephen King and a few other authors I can never recall.

The upper three shelves of that bookshelf were mine. The top shelf was mostly memorabilia, a small display of medals from the first Gulf war and my time as a peacekeeper in the Middle East (we didn’t succeed). A stand meant for photos displayed the Vietnam-era bayonet I used in the battle for Khamisiya, a relic when it was issued to me in 1990, but the only one available in the 82nd Airborne Division’s diminished armory as Desert Shield transitioned closer to Desert Strom. Next to the bayonet was a blurry photo of my platoon, taken from a disposable film camera and blown up to 8×10 and in a brown oak frame that matched the medal case.

My gaze settled on the faces in the photo. Almost half of the 21 of us were gone. Several perished in Afghanistan, a couple were suicides (vets have four times the rate as civilians), a few were disease (Gulf War syndrome), and some were accidents (paratroopers tend to have risky hobbies outside of work). Our network had lost contact with a two. One recently put the barrel of a Glock 19 in his mouth – standard issue for police, Rangers, and secret service back then – and he had been on my mind all month.

I shook my head and took a breath. Hope wasn’t deep asleep yet. My mind went back to the bookshelf.

Tucked into the display’s frame was a ratty business card that was once white, but was now the color of Dana’s skin and stained with blood, 3-way gun oil, and six months of MRE lunches. It had a black skull wearing a black beret as the face of black Ace of Spades, and it was framed with Airborne wings; Times New Roman font said: “I’m an American Paratrooper. If you’re recovering my body, kiss my cold, dead ass.” (Ken liked that card so much he adopted the phrase to describe what Chinese investors could do with their $10.7 Million.)

The shelf below my row of nostalgia was full of dusty fiction and nonfiction I planned to read one day, a combination of books like Sapiens and Blink mixed with classical literature and memoirs by a few presidents and average, ordinary people like you and me who somehow made art from their history in work like Angela’s Ashes, The Liar’s Club, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (no relation).

The third shelf was mostly related to work. It had a collection of text books on engineering and physics, anatomy and physiology, differential equations and mathematical modeling; and a few pop culture physics books by Stephen Hawking, Carlo Rovelli, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I had signed copies of Panjabi and White’s classic Clinical Biomechanics of the Spine, and Vijay Goel’s Spine Biomechanics. (Vijay earned his PhD under Panjabi and was tenured faculty at Iowa, but Panjabi was O.G.). In my 1997 thesis on the effects of single-level fusion on multi-level cadaver spine biomechanics, I referenced Panjabi and chatted with Vijay about how then-senator John F. Kennedy had Harrington Rods implanted to fuse his L4/L5 without success, but he had a small army of physicians, physical therapists, and mental coaches to help him overcome his pain and focus on his presidential bid; sixty years later, we still use Harrington rods, and though the spine market ballooned to more than $4 Billion a year after a 1996 FDA ruling that changed fusion cages from Class III (hard to get) to Class II (easier), the long-term results for people without Kennedy’s resources and will power remained, statistically speaking, unchanged; that’s why I was postponing surgery until I had no other options, and why I kept my neck in motion by scanning the bookshelf.

The top shelf of the left hand bookshelf was dedicated to Lonely Planet and Let’s Go travel guides, and a few trinkets picked up here and there, like a flute from the Andes mountains where I bought the alpaca blankets a decade earlier and a vajra given to me in India the year before. I kept a copy of all five books in the jokingly called Hitchiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, because laughter’s good medicine. I even smiled that night, telling myself that despite the Hitchikers’s Guide and a bunch of books by astrophysicists, I had yet to discover the question to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

The next two shelves were dedicated to well used copies of sometimes redundant and sometimes conflicting translations of ancient texts like the Bhagavita, Upanishids, Pali Canon, Bible (old and new testaments), Q’ran, Tao Te Ching, etc. I had a few copies of Native American stories I hadn’t red yet, and worn copies of Greek Myth collections that contradicted each other and were Hope’s namesake.

In one version of Greek mythology, hope remained in Pandoras box – or jar, depending on the translation – as a gift from the god’s to help us persevere after Pandora inadvertently unleashed the god’s plagues upon mankind. In the other, Hope was personified as the most evil of goddesses, the ultimate cruelty from the gods, because Hope is what keeps a boxer who will inevitably loose in a ring, being beaten again and again for their amusement of the gods, as if they knew a wiser creature would throw in the towel and go have a beer with friends. When I was Hope’s age, living in Baton Rouge and reading at around her level, my grandmother on my mom’s side reached into her bookshelf and showed me two versions of Greek myths – one was Bullfinch’s but I don’t recall the other – and pointed out to me that so-called experts were full of shit: no one knows the truth, so learn to think for yourself. Granny also had first editions of both versions of Hoffa’s autobiography, two cookbooks (The Joy of Cooking and River Road Recipes, and after 1986 she included Paul Prudhome’s Louisiana Kitchen), two competing dictionaries, an entire Encyclopedia Britanica with the annual subscription for updates and corrections, and a few shelves dedicated to her monthly Reader’s Digest subscription and my copies of The Hardy Boys and a few Dover magic books by Karl Fueves. When Dana visited me during my final days at LSU, I told her that story, and it made such an impression that she named her daughter Hope, saying that with the knowledge that most so-called experts are full of shit, Hope could be free to make her own choices.

The next two shelves had a curated collections of magic books, including several original and signed copies from Tommy Wonder, Chris Kenner, Troy Hooser, Brother John Hamman, John Rocherbaumer, David Roth, Paul Gertner, and a few others who made their way in and out of Baton Rouge and New Orleans on their lecture circuits in the 1980’s. There was a Harry Anderson book, too, but it was less magic and more bar bets and friendly con games similar to the birthday paradox. The only newer books were the six volumes of Robert Giobi’s Card College and some reissued books on performance theory by Juan Tammariz, and two booklets with dozens of authors contributing and published by the owner of The Magic Apple, a magic shop located up the road from Hollywood’s Magic Castle. Because my bookshelves were stuffed full like a Thanksgiving Turkey, I added a few cookbooks beside the magic books, including Granny’s roux-stained copy of Louisiana Kitchen: I quipped that turning raw ingredients into dinner was like magic – a play on Paul Prudhome’s “Louisiana Magic” seasoning products.

The bottom shelf was bulging with worn and marked up books about Jimmy Hoffa, the Mafia, and the Kennedy’s, curated from used bookshops over the years and more than 2,000 available on Amazon. Most were crap.

My gaze slid from the bookshelf and fell back on Hope. Her breathing was soft and regular. A siren sounded again, but her breathing remained unchanged. I turned off the light, crept into the hallway, and gently shut her door and pressed my ear against the thin wood panels.

The living room din was loud and mumbled into white noise, and I heard John and Erin’s laugher above everyone else’s on the balcony. I held my breath, but couldn’t hear Hope. My smile softened, knowing she’d sleep well and we could continue our evening. I stood there a few more moments, breathing softly so I could hear her silence. A faint lion’s roar rippled across Balboa, through the forest of withering Redwoods, and into our building: it was faint, but I could hear it reverberating in the hollow wooden door. In the jungle, the long wavelengths of a lion’s deep roar travel across plains and through forests and marks their territory.

I wondered what life would be like if I hand’t gotten vasectomy ten years ago. Dana had already hit snooze on her biologic clock three or four times by then, and I made a choice. The Veterans Administration did the procedure with multiple levels of redundancy: tieing, cauterizing, and crimping gold rings around my tied and cauterized vas deferens tubes, a practical way to stop the surprising number of healed vasectomies that led to surprise bullets popping out of a magazine you thought was filled with blanks. You – or I, preferably – can still feel the rings if you know what you’re looking for and are gentle. Dana says it’s like the pea under a princess’s mattress. I rarely revisit the past, but it didn’t stop me from wondering now and then after a few beers and friends left to go home to their families. It wasn’t negative nostalgia; as a comedian said, just because you become a vegetarian doesn’t mean you don’t like the smell of bacon. I listened to Hope’s silence, and breathed deeply

I realized I was slouching. I stood upright and pulled my shoulders back and took another deep breath. I exhaled slowly, and glanced at the illuminated hands on my almost archaic scuba watch – it was older than my new neighbors from Metairie. I could see the hands without my glasses, and it was around 11:30, plus or minus a bit of blur. I walked back outside and joined my friends on the balcony.

It was a good party, and I’m glad I hosted it. Who knows when you’ll get another chance to be with the people you love most on Earth, whatever they are and from wherever they come. Mr. Charles was motionless in his sleeping bag, and Mary was fretting with hers, but slowly and silently as she and her demons drifted off to sleep. I didn’t see the transients, but they were probably behind the building and out of sight, or selling what they have to offer to one of the men who prowl Balboa Park after their kids go to sleep.

The lion roared from its cage again around midnight, and an owl that lives in the Magnolia tree swooped silently past the balcony. I didn’t look at my watch again until the trees over Balboa began to take form from the pre-dawn light, and the last of my friends on the balcony took a Lyft home. I stretched and sighed, and gently collected my things for a Lyft ride to the airport without waking anyone up.

Go to The Table of Contents

1. Chief Justice Earl Warren concludes his three page missive about Big Daddy with these three sentences:
   
   ‘This is a federal criminal case, and this Court has supervisory jurisdiction over the proceedings of the federal courts. If it has any duty to perform in this regard, it is to see that the waters of justice are not polluted. Pollution having taken place here, the condition should be remedied at the earliest opportunity.‘”
   
   When I shared that quote with John, he burst into laugher and blurted out: “I wonder what Warren would say about the turd still floating in the swimming pool of justice!”
   
   That turd is my grandfather’s word, for all it’s worth.
   
   John, when serious for a moment (you never are sure, though) thinks only Warren was immune to my grandfather’s charms, possibly because he was the only straight male in America’s greatest generation. John’s skit about the cross-dressing closet queer J. Edgar Hoover begging to integrate Big Daddy with a roll of lubricated duct tape makes me laugh every time we open our second six pack. As for Marcello’s roll, you’d have to ask John to tell that story from the beginning, which takes at least one backup case of Tecate ↩︎