Arroyo Read online

  Praise for Chip Jacobs

  Smogtown

  “[A] remarkably entertaining and informative chronicle of the birth and—so far—inexorable evolution of smog.…This book is just amazing, a gripping story well told.”

  —Booklist (starred review and one of the top

  environmental books of the year)

  “Style delivers substance in true Hollywood fashion, with character-driven plots draped in glamour and sensation…the history of smog has never been so sexy.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[An] environmental page-turner.”—Kirkus Reviews

  The People’s Republic of Chemicals

  “[The authors] do an outstanding job of showing the causes and effects of the interdependency between American consumers and Chinese manufacturers. The result is a well-rounded portrait.”

  —Foreword Reviews (five-star review and among best

  climate change solution books)

  “The Smogtown authors return with a look at China’s air pollution problem, and it is a doozy.…The prose is sharp, vivid, and direct, leading readers through hard-hitting chapters…a surprisingly enjoyable read.”

  —Booklist (starred review and one of the top

  sustainability books of the year)

  Strange As It Seems

  “Jacobs…is an exceptional storyteller, and his lively look at the extraordinary career of Gordon Zahler…is a peculiar page-turner. Zahler…achieved success on the margins of show business despite a spinal injury…Jacobs…craft[s] an imaginative biography about this unusual figure, who carved out a distinct place in post–WWII Hollywood.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “This amazing book is all heart.…Chip Jacobs blends the skills of an investigative journalist, the glitz of Hollywood, and the smooth storytelling of fiction to weave a profile of his larger-than-life uncle that will leave you crying, laughing, and gasping in wonder, often on the same page. Bravo!”

  —Denise Hamilton, bestselling author of The Jasmine Trade

  The Ascension of Jerry

  “Brilliant.…A delightfully off-kilter true-crime tale.…Jacobs’ ear for a good story is pitch perfect….The Ascension of Jerry isn’t an old song in a new key, but an entirely new song about crime, fear, and a weird kind of redemption that could only happen in the general vicinity of Hollywood.”

  —Ron Franscell, bestselling author of The Darkest Night

  “This is not just another Hollywood Whodunit. In the end we find it is really about one man’s search and struggle to find his own personal truths and redemption. Well written and highly recommended.”

  —Steve Hodel, bestselling author of Black Dahlia Avenger

  “A terrific book—I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Stephen Jay Schwartz, bestselling author of

  Hollywood vs. The Author and Boulevard

  This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book

  Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Chip Jacobs

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to

  print, audio, and electronic.

  For more information, address:

  Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  Set in Warnock

  epub isbn: 9781644280980

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Jacobs, Chip, author.

  Title: Arroyo: A Novel / Chip Jacobs.

  Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Genuine Rare Bird Book |

  New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280287

  Subjects: LCSH Pasadena (Calif.)—History—20th century. | Progressivism (United States politics)—Fiction. | United States—Politics and government—1913–1921—Fiction. | Bridges—California—Pasadena—Fiction. | Pasadena (Calif.)—Buildings, structures, etc.—Fiction. | Dogs—Fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Historical / General

  Classification: LCC PS3610.A356418 A77 2019| DDC 813.6—dc23

  To the hometown that still bedazzles me, and Auggie

  (the original wonder mutt), who delivered joy that greatly

  exceeded all the worthless objects he munched.

  “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs,

  even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor

  spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live

  in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  Contents

  Note to Readers

  Prologue: Mr. Incidental

  The Birds of Pasadena

  A Certain Heaviness of Feathers

  Fireball Pals

  The Gift Shop

  The First Lady of Budweiser

  Nick’s Metal Petuninias

  The Rosiest of Histories

  Spring Street’s Graybeard

  Boot Camp for Bridge Rats

  Doris and the Writer

  White City in the Sky

  Devil’s Gate Dalliances

  Airborne Cinema

  Teddy Stumper

  Phosphorous Days

  Snap, Crackle, and Drop

  Rubble Soldiers

  Wilde Street Blues

  The Arroyo Secco’s Faulty Tower

  Auf Weidersehn

  Mysteries of the Gingerbread Hut

  A Damnable Curve

  The Downside of Pageantry

  Screwing the Pooch

  Failing Mac

  The Vroman’s Girl

  Don’t Fear the Hojack

  Tricks of the Tongue

  The Rock Star of Sunny Slope Manor

  Human Thermostats

  When a Deck Beckons

  Truth in Fakery

  Last Chance with the Concrete Dame

  Acknowledgments

  Research

  Note to Readers

  This book is a historical novel. Although the majority of characters are fictionalized, some were actual people, and I’ve created scenes and dialogue based on what I’ve discovered about their lives over the course of my research. Nearly everything written here about the Colorado Street Bridge—and Pasadena—is accurate. A portion of my book proceeds will go to my local humane society and suicide-prevention groups.

  Prologue:

  Mr. Incidental

  Narrowed it down, haven’t you, buckaroos?

  You see a wheezing old man in a tuxedo and top hat, acetylene torch in hand, and the choices seem obvious. I’m either a dapper escapee from a mental asylum, or a geriatric thespian shooting the album cover for an avant-garde band. Either way, you peg me as a pathetic dinosaur out for attention in this well-accomplished town.

  You’re all wet, but I forgive you. Wrinkles can deceive.

  My story, or rather her story is a razzle-dazzle whodunit from the cusp of the tailpipe age. If my knees weren’t so arthritic, I’d be down on them in gratitude, thanking the cosmic bread crumbs for shepherding me here. Now I can croak full of life, a disruptor with an AARP card.

  But I digress.

  Having been away so long, I’m proud to report our lady remains as enthralling as ever—lithely posed, majestic from her studded crown to her floating toes. Forget age. She’s as mysterious as a f
og bank, epitomizing classic beauty despite the predictable skid marks.

  What, you think I’m laying it on too thick? That my Sears-brand hearing aid runs on New Age crystals? Then inch closer for a peek. She won’t bite. Just don’t get too comfortable, for the old gal, on this her eightieth birthday, has depleted her tolerance for the bullshit myths garlanded around her. Whitewashed glories, forgotten heroes: she can no longer bite her tongue, assuming there’s one in there.

  Ever since that young man’s visit, my descent into miserable decrepitude has reversed into the determination to rise above self-pity. Put pep in my hobble. Why? I now appreciate that unseen forces drafted me—me, the crotchety fossil that detests bingo, Seinfeld, and sports visors giving headwear a bad name—to connect the firefly dots around our silvery empress.

  Who killed the brightest lights this side of Busch Gardens, when Pasadena was a wonderland of possibility? Permitted our thirst for pretty objects to callus us? Let me tell you: neither an illustrious reputation nor a knack for pageantry is a force field against sin.

  Appearances. It’s always about appearances in this damn place. No one wants to confront this bugaboo: that “history,” as one skeptic laid bare, “is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

  Well, I was an eyewitness, back when Orange Grove Boulevard was a macadam thoroughfare for our resident tycoons, and tamale-cart vendors made killings on blue-collars’ paydays.

  First things first: you’ll notice our lady in question has had some “work done.” Blessedly, the patrons who financed the procedures refused to allow a gauche Botox job to wind back the clock, knowing a trout pout on her would constitute criminal disfigurement. Imagine Lauren Bacall, or, for you whippersnappers, Michelle Pfeiffer, with a weeping goiter.

  Consequently, she hasn’t been so much “refreshed” as restored, jowls tightened, calves bolstered, along with more intimate intrusions best detailed once the children are asleep. Let me also stipulate that none of these nips and tucks were required to warrant her spot on the pedestal of all-time greats. Her unflagging grace, revealed when party animal Woodrow Wilson ran America and you could only find one decent brand of mayonnaise, earned her stature long ago. If a person can adore someone of her physical grandeur—no offense, Sally, my beloved—color me enchanted.

  Allow me to confide a few darker twists. For every blandishment lavished on her, for every popping flashbulb and cream-puff story, she rarely enjoyed a red-carpet existence. By her mid-twenties, in fact, some of those who exalted her as “magnificent” and “hypnotizing” clamored for her summary obliteration. They woofed that she was obsolete, a statuesque has-been replaceable by the next hot number. She’d done her duty. Now, take a dirt nap.

  You think she brooded at the conspiracies to topple her, by metal teeth no less? Never. She stood proud, shoulders back, that proverbial good sport willing to let painters brush-stroke her and middlemen over-commercialize her while selling Chryslers on television. She even refused to slap defamation suits against the rumormongers who smeared her as a pied piper for ghosts and a stoic murderer of the helpless. Brace yourselves, folks. It was her human masters who superimposed that alter ego on her.

  Trust me here: the Arroyo Seco’s queenly bridge and I go way back.

  Judging by the hippopotamus camped on my chest, I don’t have much time to convince you, either. Bribing a cabdriver to taxi me from my lasagna-Tuesday, Lysol-ed nursing home to the hardware store and then here almost did me in. With heart disease, high cholesterol, gout, anemia, and more, my blood chemistry is a biohazard.

  Miraculously, though, I persevered, with places to go at 0.5 mph. Hunched forward on my walker, I clacked toward the scene of my future defacement, the august Rose Bowl (and cosmos-probing Jet Propulsion Laboratory) to my right, asphalt subdivisions to the left. I brushed my hand up against her fluted railing in reacquaintance. Pure jazz!

  Not to gloat, but I accomplished this feat in the same fucking penguin suit that used to constitute my trademark get-up, when I owned the San Gabriel Valley’s finest haberdashery. That I collapsed backward gasping for breath upon reaching my destination, a bench inside one of the bridge’s romantic sitting areas, was, admittedly, less dignified.

  Again, feel free to decry the vandalism I’m plotting against this nationally recognized landmark afforded all manner of federal protections. Know I’m hoping to win your absolution in the end—a liver-spotted firebrand in a sundowner canyon. It was in reading about the public festivities surrounding her grand reopening that I realized I had my opening. There’d be indulgent layers of decorations you could’ve camouflaged a Marine Expeditionary Unit behind.

  Personally, the trimmings harken childhood memories of the sycophantic extravaganza staged for presidential visits: the overkill floral arrangements and congratulatory banners; the ritzy, color-coordinated table settings and special refreshments. Thank you, city fathers, nonetheless. Your bridge party is allowing me to be the asshole I need to be.

  Now, excuse me while I try not to die.

  Phew. That was a pain. Not that I was ever agile with power tools, but I have a suggestion for whoever manufactured the acetylene device I just lit to slice through a section of the iron, suicide-prevention fence: you might mull lightening future canisters for us elderly deviants.

  No such gripe with my leather, side-shield sunglasses, which I recently fished out of my keepsake trunk to recycle into welder’s goggles. Like history, fashion is circular. Shades popular with biplane pilots and Progressive Age motorists are de rigueur again as “steampunk aesthetic.”

  The person at the epicenter of this gave them to me as a child, along with the surprise in my bag. My hope is that they’ll persuade him to speak truth to concrete; that he’ll remind Pasadena that for all its old-money probity and cultural firepower, it’s the light in our collective eyes that counts more than our rosewater vanity. Last time he saw me he called me cuckoo, so I have my work cut out for me.

  Another absurd truth dawns on—oh, crap, here comes the fuzz. It’s go time.

  —

  He’s gangly and balding, this fifty-ish cop, with an aura of resigned diminishment in his drooping shoulders and scrunched-together features. Roughly thirty feet away, he’s approaching from the east, visibly annoyed at his day-wrecking development: me.

  “Excuse me, sir, but mind telling me what you think you’re doing? That fence you just destroyed is public property.” He’s speaking in a loud husk, assuming my waxy face also confers deafness.

  “Yes, officer, I’m quite aware of that. There’s no need to yell.”

  “Good. Then stop.”

  “Not to split hairs, but stop what? Cutting the fence or not revealing my thinking?”

  My glibness is poorly received. I know this because the cops’ nostrils flare and his palms stiffen in double-halt formation above his night-blue uniform. He must be working morning security for the rededication bash following the queen’s $27 million structural/seismic rehab. Poor sap’s probably visualizing telling his captain that this geezer outflanked him.

  “I’ll clarify,” he says. “Lay down the torch. That’s an order. You could hurt yourself, or someone below. You wouldn’t want that on your, uh, conscience.” Under his breath he mumbles, “Jesus, of all days for a 5150.” That’s police code for nutjob unloosed; he’s confused me for a jumper. “Whatever is eating at you, there’s help available.”

  He’s roughly fifteen feet from the bench now, with the forecast calling for a high chance of another life-is-precious cliché. Soon he’ll have the bead on me.

  “Officer, I can assure you I pose no threat to public safety or myself. I’m here to set some records straight. Nonviolently.”

  “Aha. I knew you were educated. And I’ll tell you what. Since you’re dressed like Alfred from Batman, I’ll be your Commissioner Gordon. First thing I did when I was assigned here w
as drive past the mansion behind you they used as Wayne Manor. Sergeant Daniel Grubb requesting permission to approach. And you are?”

  “Name’s Mr. Incidental.”

  My curveball annoys him. He scratches the tip of an ear the size of a soap dish, still plotting to charm me into surrender. “Is there someone we can contact? Someone looking for you?”

  Officer Sneaky has further narrowed the gulf between us. “Why, yes,” I respond. “There is one particular individual you can track down. But I’ll need time to explain it all first so you don’t think I’m certifiable.”

  When I dip my head and wink rakishly to accentuate that point, my top hat tumbles onto the sidewalk in front of where I sit. Embarrassing. “Leave that where it is,” I add.

  “Let me propose a bargain?” he says slyly. “You desist from further tampering with the fence, and I’ll agree to your terms. This doesn’t have to escalate. Big event starting here later today: the mayor, speeches, giant scissors. The works. Fair?”

  Fair? Really? Fair would be sparing the Branch Davidians from burning to death in Waco, Texas, or those innocent kids from being gunned down here on Halloween night. Fair certainly isn’t blaming yours truly for defending himself after a pimple-faced shoplifter punched him years earlier. “Exhausted as I am, sergeant, I can’t. If, out of principle, I have to sever a hole in this fence and drop a few things on the vulgar condo below I will.”

  “No, you won’t. I’m going to counter-offer you, one gentleman to another.”

  As a retired businessman, I’ve seen this move. Compliment, disarm, and then blitz. “Don’t test me,” I say, though I bet he will. “I still have my reflexes.”

  With a flick, I reignite my Orchard Supply torch in my white-gloved hand and tug down my side-shade sunglasses. The nozzle hisses a burnt-orange stream of fire, which I briefly aim at him. Then I run the flame over the lower part of half a dozen fence posts, whose upper ends I previously sliced. After a little more melting, one good whack will probably detach it, sending a roughly three-foot-by-three-foot section crashing downward.

  Grubb’s mouth plops so wide I count three fillings. “That’s a fucked-up move,” he snarls. “I thought we established a dialogue.”