2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [48]
A fat older man sat next to Brad. He had body odor. Thank God we’re just going to Pasadena, this guy smells like a salami. The fat man immediately fell asleep and snored loudly. Brad looked at the man’s belly sticking out from his golf shirt. He couldn’t afford the pill? Maybe he had a rare condition and couldn’t take it. Maybe he took it and decided he liked being fat better. Brad started to laugh. This was what his life had come to. Guessing about a fat guy on a bus. He laughed so loud, the man woke up.
“What’s so funny?” the fat guy asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just the way I deal with stress.”
“Tell me about it,” Fatty said. “This is beyond stress. The only thing that makes me feel better is to eat.”
“Really? Have you ever taken—”
“Of course I have.” The fat guy stopped him; he was used to the question. “You know the one-tenth of one percent it doesn’t work on?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re lookin’ at him.”
“Really? I’ve never met anyone it didn’t work on.”
“Well, I lost weight, but the side effects weren’t worth it.”
“What were they?”
“Paranoid thoughts, sweating, heart palpitations, interrupted sleep, the whole nine yards. Everything it said on the package, I got.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? That I’m fat?”
“No. Sorry you had side effects. I’m sure being paranoid was not fun.”
“Listen … what’s your name?”
“Brad.”
“Brad, being overweight is the least of my problems. I’m divorced, I don’t see my kids, they moved back East and what did I do? I chose to stay on the goddamn San Andreas Fault. So now I have nothing. And I’m going to some concentration camp.”
Brad got scared.
“What do you mean? Where are we going?”
“I heard it was like where they put the Japanese in World War Two.”
“You’re kidding. What do you mean?”
“You know, barbed wire, that kind of thing.”
“Who did you hear that from?”
“Someone on line at the food bank.”
“They can’t do that! They don’t have the right to put us there!”
“I don’t know, we’ll find out soon enough. Do you have a protein bar or some cake or something?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m gonna try and go back to sleep. Punch me if I snore too loudly.”
And as his seatmate snored again in less than twenty seconds, Brad just stared out the window.
Before the quake (BQ), a trip from Brad Miller’s condo to Pasadena would have taken twenty minutes, half an hour at most. After the quake (AQ), the trip took almost four hours. Since every road in Los Angeles was severely damaged, decisions had to be made about what to fix first, how much of it to fix, and how permanent the fixes would be. Mostly, with the help from the federal government, roads were patched that were considered the most vital arteries in the city. Where a twelve-lane freeway had once stood, now only one or two lanes were functioning, so people just didn’t travel unless it was an emergency.
When the bus finally pulled into Pasadena, it moved at one or two miles an hour, as surface streets were in just as bad a shape as the freeways. A town like Pasadena, which had hundreds of streets, now had only one or two that were passable. And then Brad saw the sign: ROSE BOWL 2 MILES.
“They’re putting us in the goddamn Rose Bowl!” he said out loud. “I’m not living in the Rose Bowl! I’d rather sleep in the park than sleep in that crummy old place!”
Fatty woke up. “They can’t be putting us in the Rose Bowl.”
“Why?”
“Because it fell down, it was leveled. I saw pictures. That and Dodger Stadium, they were both destroyed.” And then, as the bus turned onto the Rose Bowl grounds, they saw their new home. A tent the size of a football field.
The Rose Bowl had indeed been leveled, and one of the first construction projects the Army Corp of Engineers completed was to push aside the crumbled cement and put up a temporary structure. It wasn’t really a structure; it looked more as if the biggest circus in the world was in town. It was designed to house up to four thousand people.
Inside were rows of bunk beds