His favorite bum, not that he’d ever actually give him anything and would be more than happy to see him put on a bus back to Echo Park or San Jose or whatever hole he dragged himself up out of, is a guy who must weigh three hundred pounds, always in a pair of shorts and workboots and a dirty white T-shirt the size of the sail on a Hobie Cat. He’s got concrete pillars for legs and a gut that climbs up out of the shirt like a separate living thing all ready to set up on its own. His modus operandi is to stand outside whatever restaurant he’s in the mood for, begging doggy bags off the pouchy sated half-looped tourists coming out the door. And don’t try to hand him sushi when he wants Italian, uh-uh. Not this guy. He knows what he wants. He’s discerning. He’s a gourmet.
But this bum, the philosopher, has just become alerted to his presence as if he’s awakened from a dream, eyes grappling toward him like fingers reaching for a ledge in the dark, and as Dave eases around the car to the driver’s side, the bum, in a voice of carbon and phlegm, says, “You got a dollar?”
Key in the lock, rain on his dreads, collar turned up, and there is no anger here because he’s got things to do, an appointment to keep, and no bum who isn’t worth the time it takes to look at him, at his stunted eyes and deflected wrists and salvaged rain-wet black-and-red-plaid flannel shirt that droops away from him like shucked skin, is ever going to get a nickel from him, let alone piss him off enough—You got a dollar? — to tell him what he really thinks about the moral valence of this little interlude. He just holds up his hand like a stop sign, ducks into the driver’s seat and lets the scene shift to leather and the glow of the dash and the sweet German-calibrated tune of the engine that sings the bum and the rotting newspapers and dead worms and all the rest to oblivion.
The traffic is backed up on State, but he turns onto it anyway, because he’s in no hurry and he wants a look at all the stores with their newly erected Christmas displays — just, he tells himself, to get in the Christmas spirit and not at all to focus a trained eye on the hordes of shoppers and calculate who’s doing what kind of business. His own stores — specialty shops for people with money who want the sixty-inch Sony LCD flat-screen wall-mounted TV and the top-of-the-line Linn electronics imported from England with the five mini-speakers and the big subwoofer all set up for them in their media room so all they have to do is tap the remote to be engulfed in a truly theatrical experience — are never crowded, no matter the season. It’s always been that way, even as he transitioned from the audiophiles of the eighties to the big-screen TV and surround-sound aficionados of the nineties and now the zeroes. No, his business is high-end, appealing to a need rather than a want, the society closing down day by day, people investing in home entertainment because they’re increasingly reluctant even to go out into the backyard, let alone to the movie theater or anyplace else. His clientele is ready-made — they practically come to him — and he’s always had the luxury of forgoing advertising and of locating in the more modest retail spaces off the main drag, where the rent’s lower and you don’t need all the bells and whistles.
Still — and he’s looking at Macy’s now, women parading in and out with their shopping bags strung from both arms, striding along the sidewalk with real satisfaction radiating from the play of their haunches and the no-nonsense strut of their heels — he has to admit the big displays are something, all that color and glitz, all that slick retail über-perfection that makes the shoppers want to attain über-perfection themselves, and in the easiest way possible, by spending money. Make me over. Make me well. Make my eyes bigger and my gut smaller, my calves harder and my hair fuller. Make me beautiful and successful and above all longed for, admired, loved. Sure, and how about a home entertainment center while we’re at it?
It’s just past ten but the colored lights girdling the palms are lit and softly shining against the long descending backdrop of the rain-misted street, which sinks through the center of the shopping district and down through a maze of surf shops and eateries to the pier, where it intersects with Cabrillo, the Ocean Boulevard of Santa Barbara, famous as a tourist attractant and the earthly paradise of the peripatetic bum, broad, spacious, palm-lined, and stretching along the ocean from the cliffs at East Beach to the marina at its western verge, which is where he’s headed. He stops for the red at the intersection, wipers intermittently snatching away the misting rain. Directly across from him is the fountain at the base of the pier, and for a moment he’s distracted, thinking of the twenty-something bum in the top hat and scarlet jacket — and what is it with bums today? — who used to work the fountain with a generic Disney dog he’d dressed up in a crinoline tutu and taught to dance on its hind legs while the water leapt and flared in the background. King of the bums, that kid, the tourists lining up to empty their pockets for him. Of course, he’s gone now, probably pushing a shopping cart down an alley someplace, the hat crushed, the dog dead, the rest of his life one long continuous road to nowhere.
And then he’s thinking of the guy who could have passed for a board member of AT&T if you gave him a suit and a haircut, an industrious type who worked the sand just below the railing where beach and pier conjoin, fashioning boats out of discarded cardboard and handing them up to the tourists as they breezed past chattering in Korean, German, Swedish and New Yorkese. Nowadays the bums just spread a blanket in the sand with a cup located like a bull’s-eye in the middle of it, then sit in the shade of the big pilings, passing a pint bottle of whatever it is they drink, till the tourists sink cup and blanket under a rising tide of quarters, dimes and nickels. Jesus. It’s like crabbing or something. Like a sport.
A horn sounds sharply behind him. The light has changed. He looks to the rearview mirror — some asshole with his hat turned backward and his girlfriend and big yellow panting dog crowded in beside him in the front seat of an SUV — and then guns the car, shearing to one side before he rights it and rockets off down the street, not even angry, just. . expeditious. There are two more lights to the marina, both in his favor, and at the first he slows just enough so that it goes red as he passes beneath it, trapping the asshole, who was trying to come up on him, trying to provoke him, and Goodbye, friend. Suck on this. A moment later he’s out of the car and striding along the concrete pathway that runs along the waterfront, already digging out his card key. When he comes within sight of the wire-mesh gate erected at the entrance to the catwalk specifically to keep out unauthorized persons (read bums, and what was that story a couple years back where a seafaring bum had got out to one of the yachts and took it for a joyride down to Ventura, where he wrecked it on the rocks?), Wilson is there waiting for him.
Wilson Gutierrez is twenty-seven, a first-rate carpenter whose mother came over from Copenhagen in the sixties and never left, and whose father, according to the check-one-or-more-boxes feature on the census form, is a white Hispanic from the west side of Santa Barbara via Culiacán, and he pronounces his name Weel-soan, something he’s very particular about, edgy even. His eyes are blue, he wears a black silken goatee and a gold pin thrust through the auricle of his left ear that makes him look as if somebody’s nailed him with a blowgun, he burns under the sun like anybody else, he’s lithe as a weed but built in the shoulders, upper arms and especially forearms—“Like Popeye,” he likes to say, “and it ain’t from no spinach, man, but swinging a hammer all day long because I am am-bi-dextrous and you better believe it”—and Wilson is one of the three charter members of FPA, along with himself and Anise, going all the way back to its founding six months ago in direct response to what was happening out on the islands. At his feet are three visibly swollen black plastic trash bags. “What up, Dave?” he says, swinging round on him with an ear-to-ear smile that lights his face like the screen of an LCD in a darkened store window.