|
WHEREIN HANK TRIES TO GET LOST IN THE FESTIVAL. |
Listen to voice
over artist Tim George
read the
part of Hank Peabody
Visit Tim George's
website to learn more
about his work
www.timgeorgevo.com
ii.
“Hank!”
Somebody was calling me.
I had barely made my way down the street, into the crowd, when my name came through the din. I pretended not to hear.
“Hank!” the voice approached.
I was on a simple Jones to wander into the clamor, see parade and costume, skyrockets shooting above, meat-on-a-stick below, beer and lemonade in plastic cups. To be honest, I had coped all week and was on a nice little vision quest to be left alone.
My name came again with a hand on my shoulder.
“Hank.”
I gave in and turned. It was Janet, my “cousin.” Probably the only person I didn’t mind seeing. She hugged me.
“I know you’re trying to be by yourself,” she gave, “But I haven’t seen you in a couple of weeks. Have you been alright?”
“I’m in the festival mood?” I told her.
“I can see that.”
“You?” I asked
“Sure. Where to?”
“The Rusty.”
She laughed because she knew the answer. “Alright.”
Janet Librado, daughter of the now-deceased mayor and chief of the Fornay, Abraham Librado, was as big a personality in town as you could be without being a total asshole. She was the woman by whom I measured all feminine beauty. Just standing next to Janet I felt more handsome, more likely.
I felt like I had more hair.
And I was as close to Janet as I was to anyone in the world. We should have been married with kids a long time ago by my estimation, but it didn’t work that way. I like to say that through the years, she became beautiful and I became not. Although there was some suggestion in high school that she was categorized as Fat of Ass—putting her under the beauty radar to most guys of that age—I can say that I saw it all right away: the feet, the hands, the skin, the memorizor of phone numbers and birthdays. Janet came back from her first year of college at Stanford and you got the inkling that, although she didn’t quite know it herself yet, she was preparing to own the town.
I didn’t stand a chance.
At the suggestion of the Rusty, I grabbed her hand—in a brotherly way—and set out, passing a set of parade horses blocking the street. There we jumped on to the sidewalk.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“The usual,” she confided.
“The evil White Zin?” I knew. “Not even man enough to be rosé.”
“I’m ethnic, Hank.”
“At least you tip. Like a canoe.”
Half Chinese and half Indian, Janet really wasn’t much of drinker, which was fine. She was good at so many other things, why spoil it.
At one time, I thought we were actually related. It came on to me like a revelation, about ten years ago, while I sitting at the Rusty, drinking. Sure I had smoked a little dope with a pal on a walk about an hour before, but the impression I got seemed pure. At least it seemed so.
What was really true about Janet and me was that I had been abruptly thrown into the midst of her family by becoming an orphan at the age of seven. I played ball with her brothers, learned word games with her, went shooting and hunting with the lot of them. I shot my first deer with her oldest brother, Peter—who was now the leader of the Fornay—and murdered dozens of wild boar, rabbit and squirrel with her younger brother Bartholomew and their “real” cousins all before the time I had graduated high school. When Janet and other members of the Librado family weren’t up on the reservation in the Pass, I could usually be found having dinner at their house in town or goofing off with the boys down at the tide pools. The Librados had taken me in.
Almost.
I learned slowly that I could never really be part of the Lbrados family. While I had learned aspects of their language—of which there are a couple of internal dialects—I found that I was never going to be able to speak it fluently. They weren’t going to let me. That was part of their identity deal. To the Librados I would become a Tom Hagen, the adopted consigliere son of the Corleone family inhabited by Robert Duvall in “The Godfather” films. But like Tom Hagen, I would never be a real Corleone. They were Sicilian and he was Irish. The Librados were Fornay and I was not. My status as a family member was merely allegorical..
What made Janet and I close was the fact that we had both lost a parent, and lost a parent in the same calamity. You see, my mother and Janet’s mother were killed in the same car accident. That was what made Janet and me cousins, like Orestes and Electra, halves in a karmic whole.
“Let me tell you about the case,” Janet hit as we bopped up the sidewalk.
“What case?” we turned to see a Chihuahua jump out of a woman’s arms.
“Baykeeper versus the Fornay—have you completely stopped paying attention to my career?”
I looked at her but it was hard not to follow the darting Chihuahua through everyone’s legs. Suddenly, it went under one of the parade horses which did a quick shuffle but one stepped on the dog’s leg. There was a yelp.
Janet winced. “Maybe I'll move on from the White Zinfandel.”
We went away from the mini calamity of the Chihuahua and horses, where the voices of both owners competed for responsibility. Another skyrocket shot perfectly over our heads—nearly horizontal—only slightly lighting a waft of Janet’s hair. She ducked, laughing.
“You can outlaw that stuff, Ms. Librado,” I told her, upright again after the firey work. “You’re a big wig in town these days.”
“Why? she dusted off the top of her head. “They’re fun!”
“Yeah. Rockets are the red glare.”
No sooner had we moved away from the skyrocket and horse’s hooves did someone call out Janet’s name. It came twice.
“Janet. Janet!”
Janet was one of the most recognizable faces in town. It went without saying. But you just didn’t call her by name like that. The occasional young woman or school girl might saunter up to her and ask, politely, for an autograph or shake her hand. But calling Janet’s name out in public was not something you did.
It came again out of the crowd. We both knew who it was.
“Oh, god. There he is,” Janet shirked.
“Of course,” I replied as we passed booths on the street. “What would Old Spanish Days be without Mr. Mission photos and his coffee table books.”
“Hey, Janet!” Gerry Danskin, fifty-ish, wide-eyed and ebullient, inanely Danny Kaye with blond highlights in his sandy hair, extended a hand. Janet was still ten paces away. “Did the committee get my letter?” he reached over his table of the photos and publications.
“They did, Gerry.”
“And?”
“Gerry,” she replied. “I don’t do business outside of the office.“
Danskin pepped, “How about cultural business, Jan? Look at the setting,” passing a hand over books stacked and ready. “Local people, local food and tradition,” he periscoped around. “I just thought you might give me a little nudge as to the committee’s attitude.”
Janet stared him down as he tilted his head trying to get a read on her.
By all accounts, Gerry Danskin was a success. His photos had appeared in all the major travel magazines like Islands and Travel Pro. His series on the California Missions had appeared in Sunset (and was subsequently turned into his first book, The Modern Missions: Recipe for Romance). He was skilled at both color and black-and-white photography, aging contemporary photographs to look vintage, hand-tinting color photos to look aged. With his success publishing the mission photos, he became one of the members of the local cabal who, as they had at least twice every decade, called for the rebuilding of Mission El Fornio.
“Good for tourism. Good for the city,” Gerry and his folk would shake hands. “And good for business.”
In 1984, Gerry Danskin walked the grounds with Nancy Reagan for CBS’ “60 Minutes,” arm in arm, talking about California’s past and posing for photos. Gerry was pretty certain that with enough effort—and some great photos—the mission could be rebuilt. And that, Gerry knew—clamped to Nancy at the time—would no doubt add to his legacy.
But like a lot of ambitious people, the “G Man,” as some people called him, wasn’t satisfied with his resume. While his mission book had started soft cover, perfect-bound, coffee table, and gone on in its second printing to be hardcover, coffee table—a process that usually goes the other direction—Danskin’s biggest complaint came with his failure to get any of his work into National Geographic.
The G Man had sent unsolicited photos and proposals for stories. He connected with an agent for years solely to get his work into the Geographic. He lobbied for a story on the missions, Anza, Serra (Danskin was a member of SCOFS or “The Society to Canonize Father Serra”). He pushed for pieces on the Spanish, Mexicans, Yankees, Chinese, Basque sheep herders, local cliff dwelling voles, old rusty nails of the pioneers, 7-11 Slurpees—whatever it took to get an article and its accompanying photos into the Geographic—to no avail.
“You can work hard, focus, be diligent, even change friends and restaurants,” he once confided. “But you just can’t get into National Geographic.”
To a point, Gerry’s mission photos might have sold well, but they were the work of a cultural weasel—trestles full of vines and bouganvilla petals cast in front of bell towers that never even existed in the time of Junipero Serra and his cronies. Gerry Danskin was Hallmark card all the way in the history department.
“Alright, Gerry,” Janet pulled away. “I have to go.”
“Ah,” he chided, looking me over. “You know you’ve always got a signed copy of any of my books just waiting for you..”
“Call my office,” Janet turned, taking my arm as we headed back into the crowd, a cologne of barbecue smoke at our necks.
“Someday,” Janet said. “I’m going to send that clown packing.”
“Someday,” I replied “I’m gonna put that clown in a head lock.”Next, Janet's story and the Chinese presence in El Fornio are discussed.
READ Chapter 3
