Author’s Notes

THE RAIN HAS STOPPED for the time being today, and it’s a good morning for a stroll on the marina boardwalk. We see the damage wrought by the winds, but now it’s calm; the air is crisp and fresh. Others have the same idea, and we nod as we pass each other skirting the bay. We can’t really see each other, though, because our smiles are masked by an assortment of patterned cloth or pastel paper coverings in acknowledgment of the scourge still reaping thousands from our population. The masks also mute the hint of saltwater that normally hangs like the scent of some exotic fragrance; but it’s still there, adding pleasure to our walk.

Not all are respectful of the pestilence or the health rules. This is the beach, where vast numbers of our society go to do as they please. It’s worse in the summer when thousands more tourists inundate beach towns, have their way, and leave a chaotic mess in their wake. Today, in the middle of winter, still in the throes of the worst of the outbreak,  people continue to sit unmasked in groups large and small, laughing and talking; others cluster together under outdoor heaters at sidewalk cafés in defiance of health orders, deeming their rights more important than the greater good. And people wonder why the lockdown orders persist—they don’t work, many of these brats have been saying for months as they blow it off. Of course not, and the reasons are obvious.

As we walk, I try to put the negativity out of my mind, a difficult thing these days with seemingly little else to do but ponder the tidal wave of events. After all, it’s nearly been a year of being shut in, one of lost friends and family, and some near misses too. It’s been a year we can’t get back as we vintage folks near the end of our run. For the younger set, some day in the future, it’ll just be a thing that happened a long time back.

Shifting my focus as we walk, I think of Henry Aaron, the great baseball player I admired in my younger days. He passed a few days ago, and the old timers that knew him have been filling the sports airways with his memory. It’s good to be reminded of a truly good human being and how he rose above the hatred that is the hallmark of racialization in our society. As much as I want to think about Henry Aaron and the joys of baseball, my thoughts slide back into a negative vein when I think of what he and his family and millions of others have endured here in the land of the free. So I try once again for some other train of thought: something a little happier must be in the folds of my memory somewhere. The beach air does help, as do the antics of the little kids along the way. And my mind is good at escaping its own traps.

We continue our walk, and now reminders of the old days at the beach pop out of the recesses of my memory. Given that I’ve spent most of my life living in or near beach towns, the scenes come easily and swirl to amuse me. It wasn’t all amusing back then though.

Near the end of the seventies, cocaine was big news in places like Miami, big news in politics, and in sports. An epidemic, ‘they’ said, whoever ‘they’ were. Little by little, we recognized it in our beach town. Then suddenly it seemed coke was everywhere. Proponents were many, motivated by the behavior of the glamorous, the rich and famous, and by TV. Even more acolytes rose amongst the common folk and they raved about it. Not addictive, was the cry. Victimless crime, was another. These slogans became the basis for an emotional movement to legalize the stuff, along with weed, in a mass movement to let people do as they pleased. Even the President suggested that perhaps weed should be legalized, but that went nowhere in the halls of Congress. It’s taken forty years for weed to come around to that point again, trying to get it delisted from scheduled narcotics. But for the illegal chemicals—opioids, meth, coke—it’s probably best in many ways that they stay regulated somehow, given the current epidemic with the tragic toll of legal meds like prescription opioids. Legality isn’t the underlying issue of abuse and addiction anyway.

The lie about cocaine should have been obvious to many more of us when it permeated the sports world and addiction wrecked the careers and lives of some very talented players. Baseball was hit particularly hard. But then, it is unlikely that the fanatics of baseball and the acolytes of cocaine paid attention to the same news cycles. In our beach town, though, the change in partying, the increase in crime, and the change in the people that hung out year-round were all obvious to those of us who were long-time residents.

In reflection, I don’t remember when coke changed from being a party powder that people talked about snorting on Saturday night, to something that people smoked habitually, when it became a culture unto itself. History tells us that crack cocaine and widespread addiction came early in the eighties, but frankly, I wasn’t paying attention to it, nor was anybody I knew back then. Partying had changed, though, especially in our beach town. More frenetic, louder, crazier, the parties went until dawn all over town. They were ruder, cruder, and not amusing in any way from my perspective. And I watched a few acquaintances fade away under the influence.

It’s impossible to live in or near coastal towns for two or three decades and not run across some very interesting characters, and their stories abounded. Some were outrageous, some merely foolish, and others were outright criminal. You could see people rescued from the ocean and others run down by drunks in the crosswalks; I saw a killer captured in my driveway, and we witnessed real estate scams galore.

If you live at the beach for very long, it’s bound to happen—the craziness brushes right up against you. A person that you just saw in a restaurant may get murdered a day later. Your car may be totaled by a drunk driver, inflicting persistent injuries; yet the drunk driver walks away freely. I remember hearing my neighbor beating his drug-addled son with a plastic pipe one night, not for the first time. I realized that the beatings apparently didn’t take when the newspaper ran the story about the kid stealing a million-dollar yacht and making a run for Mexico. He was nabbed of course, and I thought, callously, that the kid’s cellmate would treat him with more tenderness than his father.

We walk some more, and a few more random stories enter my consciousness; none are connected with each other, but individually, they were lying in wait to ambush my thoughts once I started down this path. I remember a young woman, a model who moved in a few doors away; she soon showed up in the news about an embezzlement scandal and a yacht broker. There was no escaping notoriety in such a small town, especially one where folks thirsted for gossip. Just ask the glamorous actress who divorced her playboy baseball player and opened the antique shop down the street; she had little chance at a quiet life when the paper was finished with her story. And she hadn’t done anything but say hello to a reporter one day.

Sometimes the quirks were entertaining, others were downright amusing. Wealth exaggerates some of the enigmatic behavior. An old guy I knew married a hooker from Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and died a year later; he apparently was quite happy, because he left his entire waterfront estate to her. The family may still be in court over that one. Another acquaintance ran off to Tahiti with a waitress he just met at dinner that night, and returned six weeks later to face the divorce proceedings. He had to live on his yacht for a long time after that, the poor bastard. I listened to his story one night in the stateroom of his boat as he whined about the difficulties in keeping the family business running with his ex-wife. He still had a sense of humor and probably no actual remorse.

I have to stop reminiscing now, because I’m laughing behind my mask and it fogs my sunglasses. I’m resigned to society’s mythical moral compass that spins about wildly, hoping that most of us find our way through the noise. I hope for fewer wingnut conspirators and more people with strong character like Henry Aaron. I hope we manage to survive our own mistakes and those of others, and once again find serenity in a nice walk along the waterfront in wintertime, where the rowdiest crowds are mostly seagulls.

RBB

January 2021

The Characters

ROBERT BOBBY LOUIS—MAIN narrator, bartender and gym helper

Tamara Lynn Towns—personal trainer, former model, Bobby’s girl

Misty Allen—personal trainer, former model, Saman Turani’s mistress

Saman Sammi Turani—Owner of The Rabbit Hole bar

‘Old Man’ Turani—Saman’s father and owner of The Cotton Club nightspot

Jane—Personal trainer at The Mill health club

‘Cilla—Bartender/manager at The Rabbit Hole

Sally and Patti—Waitresses at The Rabbit Hole

Buz—Owner of The Mill health club

Mort—Owner of Blackbeard’s Beach Bar

Alvin Big Al—Patron of Blackbeard’s, DEA asset (undercover)

Miguel Águila—Owner of El Patio restaurant; partner of Saman Turani

Vicente Águila—Miguel’s brother, member of Tijuana Cartel family

Randall McAfee—Owner of Delta-R Security, associate of Turani family

Clarence Hippy Red Pissal—Associate of Saman Turani

Matt Penrose—DEA station chief, owner of Newport-Penrose Yachts, LLC

Del Ray Stuart—Colonel, USMC—DEA liaison and associate of Penrose

Marguerite Perez Stuart—The Colonel’s wife, college professor, and DEA asset

Mace Dixon—Captain of fishing vessel El Tigre, associate of Penrose

Smith and Jones—The Toms, retired Marines, black ops contractors

Part 1. Robert’s Recollections

I don’t remember the big guy’s real name, but He could hit the ball a mile and He mixed a good drink

Chapter 1

I SWORE TO MYSELF THAT I would never tell this story, but hell, it’s been so many years now, and the Iranians denied it all anyway. So I’ll risk it. If anybody has a beef, I’ll just say it was all fiction, and any coincidences...well, you know the standard disclaimers.

The fact is, I never should have been in Newport Beach in the fall of ’80. I was having a decent year at South Keokuk, and hoped to move up to Triple A by August. Whatever was bedeviling me with hitting a curve ball seemed to be resolved, and I was sure the Brewers would promote me and then, hopefully, bring me up to the show after the minor league season was over. It would be a chance to make as much money in three weeks as a journeyman minor leaguer makes all season, plus I could go to the winter instructional league in the Dominican and get paid for that too. I still had high hopes for the dream.

It wasn’t my fault that I got a fastball in the temple that muggy July night. I woke up with blurred vision and a new found sense of smell, that of burning corn. The smell lingered for a couple of weeks after the Fourth of July, a condition for which the doctor had an incomprehensible name. I still hate the smell of corn; I can’t even stand popcorn. I get nauseated every time I drive through farming country and smell a cornfield. My vision wasn’t much better either. At any rate, what I could comprehend after the beaning was that when the Brewers released me, the club really didn’t have a need for a 28-year old ballplayer with blurry vision in its minor league farm system, a league where a player is old if he’s 23. My dream was over in a split second.

I didn’t have a lot of time to decide what I would do next. With three hundred bucks to my name, destiny seemed to point towards a ticket home to Idaho on the Grey Dog, where I would dig potatoes on the family farm for my old man. As dismal of a prospect as that seemed, at least it was a prospect. Then Todd came to my rescue.

Todd was one of my teammates, a second-year guy from Irvine in California who suggested that I should go to Newport Beach for the rest of the summer and look up his cousin. He insisted, actually, but I didn’t need a lot of convincing. Hanging out at the beach for a few months seemed better than digging in the Idaho dirt, and Todd told me his cousin owed him a favor: Buz runs a gym on Thirty-Second street called ‘The Mill’. He’ll let you crash there if you clean up and help out around the joint. You’ll like it, I think...Reggie comes in during the off season, so if it’s good enough for him...

Yeah, yeah, I said, I get it.

Lotsa chicks come into the place too, so if you aren’t too much of a dweeb, you might even get lucky, Gramps.

Getting called ‘Gramps’ actually never got old—for my teammates anyway. I wasn’t going to miss it. So I said, Okay, call Buz and make sure it’s really all copacetic with him before I get on the Dog. I used big words around the younger guys to see if they had brain one, and Todd did. He was a good guy.

Now bear in mind that minor league players travel everywhere by bus unless it’s by Shank’s mare. That’s ‘walking’ in city-speak...don’t ever say ‘Shank’s mare’ to an urbanite babe unless you want to be known as Gomer from then on, in which case, I’ve found it best to just play up the country boy thing as a part of your charm. Anyway, the team buses were usually the worn-out school transport variety, discarded when they were too dilapidated for children, then painted in team colors after the old chewing gum and condom wrappers were cleaned out. And if you were lucky, a porta-potti was installed in the back where the emergency escape door had been. Otherwise, you might have to piss in a bottle. Fortunately, most trips were under six to eight hours, and there was no shame in it because all the clubs in the Iowa league had the same shitty buses. And, as the black players would often remind us, the old Negro League players traveled in far less luxury. Besides, we were living the dream—somebody was paying us to play baseball.

So, I’ve digressed: it was a three-day bus ride from Iowa to Newport Beach, but the Grey Dog was outfitted like a limousine, only better: the seats were plush with armrests, and reclined far enough to actually grab some shut-eye. The thing rode more like a limo than a short unloaded semi, and it was air-conditioned too. If you’ve ever been in the Midwest or Southwest in the summer, you understand the luxury. Actually, I think now that air conditioning on a bus is a necessity, and should be a law if it isn’t already.

Being a veteran of bus rides, I was pretty much over watching Midwest scenery from a bus window after all those years in the minors, and so I dozed off soon after we hit the road. I think it was nighttime when we went through the Texas panhandle, which was nothing in the way of a loss either. We were in New Mexico when the sun woke me up, and it was just as the bus was stopping for a layover at a travel center where the passengers could freshen up and order some eggs and bacon. Thinking back, it seems to me that it was near nightfall again when we got to Flagstaff and had to change buses. The scenery had definitely changed, but when I stepped off the Dog, I realized that the heat had not. Well, it wasn’t the hottest I’d been, and complaining about it never helped, so I collected my duffle and helped an old grandmother drag her well-traveled bag into the terminal.

There weren’t enough seats in the diner for the passengers without sitting with a stranger, and Grandma looked a bit confused, so I invited her to sit with me. We struck up a conversation, and it turned out that she lived pretty close to the bus depot in Santa Ana, which is near Newport Beach. I sat with her for the rest of the trip, and we carried on the longest conversation I’d ever had with anybody. She was a native of Orange County and so I got a brief history of Newport Beach and the surrounding area—from the viewpoint of a lady who had seen it for most of the century. When we got to the end of the line the next afternoon, she insisted that her son would drive me down to Newport Beach. It was a nice thing to do, and I’m sorry I can’t recall either of their names now.

I had already sent most of my stuff home to Idaho by Yellow Freight, and only carried a backpack with a cassette player, cassettes, batteries, and a few toiletries, and my duffle with the usual clothes, a couple of Brewers jerseys, a glove, two balls and a bat. I had purchased three new polo shirts before leaving Iowa, and was down to my last clean one when I walked into The Mill lugging my backpack and duffle. I took off my cap and asked the blonde at the desk if Buz was in. She took one look at me and nodded, Yeah, are you Bobby? Buz said you might arrive today.

Yes, I’m Robert Louis, but I answer to Bobby or Lou all the same, I said, and she pointed to the hallway.

Take the stairs up to the top landing...the office is on the right.

So Buz was expecting me; it was a good sign and so I took a deep breath and let it out and picked up my duffle that now felt much lighter  as my confidence buoyed anew. The office door was open, and I poked my head in and knocked on the doorjamb. Buz gave me the businessman’s smile and stood up to greet me. He was about six feet tall, tan, dark wavy hair, and very fit. But he had to look up at me when we shook hands, Todd told me you were a big dude, but he understated the description, he said. Then he offered me a sparkling water—one of those French ones in the green bottle—and a seat. It was refreshing, I’ll give it that, and Buz was most hospitable.

Listen, he said when we finally got around to business, I can offer you a converted store room to crash in until you get your feet on the ground and find a regular job. Meanwhile, I have part time work here in the gym—I just had to fire the dipshit that was supposed to be helping out around here...

He went on to explain the grievances against the dipshit, which I was sure was his way of telling me what not to do. My chores were not all that taxing. I was to open up at 6:30