Sandy goes out to the game room. Jim is absorbed in the hanging video screens, and Sandy checks them out. Collage city. “What’s on, Jim Dandy?”
Jim gestures at one flickering black-and-white square. “Best Hamlet ever filmed. Christopher Plummer as the Dane, shot by the BBC at Elsinore years ago.”
“I like the old Russian one, myself. His father’s ghost, ten stories tall—how could you beat it?”
“That’s a nice touch, all right.” Jim seems a bit down. He and Virginia looked to be in a heated discussion when Sandy walked in, and Sandy guesses they have been arguing again. Those two are not exactly the greatest alliance ever made; in fact they both keep saying it’s over, although it seems to be having a long ending. “Do you think you can drag yourself away from the Bard for a jaunt to La Jolla? My big-time friends have invited us to a party at their place.”
“Sure, I’ve got this at home.”
Sandy collects Arthur, Abe, Tashi. “Let’s see if we can get Humphrey to drive,” he says with his wicked grin.
They laugh; Humphrey keeps his electric bill down by driving as little as possible. He’s an almanac of all the shortest distances, he can give you the least expensive route between any two points in OC faster than the carbrains can. They approach him in a gang, Sandy says, “Humphrey, you’ve got a nice big car, give us a ride down to La Jolla and I’ll get you into a party there you won’t forget.”
“Ah, gee, what’s wrong with this one? Can’t ask for more, can you?”
“Of course you can! Come on, Humphrey.…” Sandy waves a fresh eyedropper of the Buzz, Humphrey’s favorite, in front of his eyes.
“Can’t leave your own party,” Humphrey starts to say, but founders in the face of the statement’s absurdity. Sandy steers him to the door, stopping for a quick kiss and an explanation for Angela. Remembering Jim and Virginia, he runs back in and kisses her again. “I love you.” Then they’re out, followed by Arthur, Abe, Tashi and Jim, who elbow each other and snicker as they all clump down the rarely used stairwell. “Think Humph’s got the coin slots installed on his car doors yet?” Abe asks under his breath, and they giggle. “Taxi meter,” Tashi suggests. “Better profit potential.”
“Subtler,” Arthur adds.
Humphrey, next flight down, says to Sandy, “Maybe we can all go shares on the mileage, huh?” The four above them nearly explode holding the laughs in, and when Sandy says, “Sure thing, Humphrey, and maybe we should figure out the wear on the tires, too,” they experience catastrophic failure and burst like balloons. The stairwell echoes with howls. Tashi collapses on the banister, Abe and Arthur and Jim crumple to the landing and take the next flight down on hands and knees. Humphrey and Sandy observe this descent, Humphrey perplexed, Sandy grinning the maniac’s grin. “You men are stoned.” Which lays them out flat. Maybe they are.
They scrape themselves off the floor in the parking lot and get in Humphrey’s car, carefully inspecting the door handles and the car’s interior. “What are you guys looking for?” Humphrey asks.
“Nothing, nothing. Can we go now? Are we gone yet?”
They’re gone. Off to San Diego.
25
On the track down 405 they sit in the three rows of seats in Humphrey’s car and talk. Sandy, slumped in the front passenger seat, just smiles; he looks zoned, as if he’s catching some rest before he dives back into it in La Jolla.
Humphrey tells them about a trip he and Sandy and some others took to Disneyland. “We had been in the line for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride for about forty-five minutes when Chapman went nuts. You could see it happen—we were all standing there just waiting, you know, hanging out and moving with the line, and suddenly his eyes bug out past his nose and he gets that happy look he gets when he’s got an idea.” The others laugh, “Yeah, yeah, show us the look, Sandy,” and half-asleep Sandy shows them a perfect simulacrum of it. “So he says real slow, ‘You know, guys, this ride only lasts about two minutes. Two minutes at the most. And we’ll have been in line for it an hour. That’s a thirty-to-one ratio of wait to ride. And the ride is just a fast trackcar going through holograms in the dark. I wonder… do you think… could it be… that this is the worst ratio in Disneyland?’ And he gets the insanity look again and says, ‘I wonder, I just wonder… which one of us can rack up the worst ratio for the whole day?’ And we all see instantly we’ve got a new game, a contest, you know, and the whole day is transformed, because it’s a miserable day at Disneyland, totally densepacked, and there’s some real potential here for racking up some fantastic scores! So we call it Negative Disneyland and agree to add points for stupidest rides combined with the worst ratios.”
The four in back can’t believe it. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, no! It’s the only way to go there! Because with Sandy’s idea we weren’t fighting the situation anymore, you know? We were running around finding the longest lines we could, stepping through our paces like we were on the ride itself, and timing everything on our watches, and every time we turned another corner in the line we’d see Sandy standing there up ahead of us towering over the kids, eyes bugged out and grinning his grin, just digging these monster delays to get on Dumbo the Elephant, Storybook Canal, Casey Junior, the Submarine…”
Sandy’s smile turns blissful. “It was a stroke of genius,” he mutters. “I’ll never do it any other way, ever again.”
“So who won?” Jim asks.
“Oh Sandy, of course. He totaled five and a half hours of waiting for eighteen minutes of ride!”
“I can beat that,” Tashi says promptly. “Hell, I’ve beaten that trying positive Disneyland!” Sandy denies it and they make a bet for next time.
They leave OC and track through the immense nuclear facility at San Onofre, eighteen concrete spheres crowding the narrow valley like buboes bumping out of an armpit, powerlines extending off on ranked towers to every point of the compass, glary halogen and xenon and mercury vapor lamps peppering spheres, towers, support buildings. “Camp Pendleton,” Jim announces, and they all pitch in together: “Protecting California’s Precious Resources!” Or so the neon sign says. The motto is a joke; aside from the nuclear plant, the Marines have contracted with the towns of south OC to take all their sewage into a gigantic treatment facility, which covers the hills south of San Onofre. Concrete tanks and bunkers resemble an oil refinery, and altogether it’s as extensive as the power plant north of it. Then comes the land they’ve leased for the desalination plant that provides OC with much of its water; that means another immense complex of bunkers and tubes, nearly indistinguishable from the nuclear facility, and a whole stretch of the coast blasted by salt mounds and various processing tanks.
After that they’re into the supercamp for Marine recruits, then into Oceanside, and the precious resource is passed. Past Oceanside it’s like OC on a rollercoaster, same condomundo and mallsprawl and autopia, broken up only by some small dead marshes in the low parts of the rollercoaster ride. Yes, San Diego, along with Riverside and Los Angeles and Ventura and Santa Barbara, is nothing more than an extension of OC.…
They get off on La Jolla Village Drive and track west, around the megaversity to La Jolla Farms Road. Here they are stopped at the security gate, Sandy calls his friends, and they’re in. La Jolla Mansion Road, it should be called; they track slowly by a long series of multimillion-dollar homes, all single-family dwellings. Abe, who lives in an annex of his parents’ house on Saddleback Mountain, isn’t impressed, but the rest of them stare. Humphrey goes into his real estate mode and estimates values and mortgage payments and the like in religious tones.