Brown's Requiem - James Ellroy [3]
I left the freeway and turned onto Ventura Boulevard, where you can buy anything you want, and anything you don’t want. The storefronts on this smoggy expressway feature manifestations of every scheme, dream, and hustle the jaded American mind can conceive. It is beyond tragedy, beyond vulgarity, beyond satire. It is supreme guilelessness. There are approximately eight billion of these storefronts—and three billion new and used car lots. Cal Myers has three: Cal’s Casa de Cairo, Myers’ Ford, and Cal’s Imports. He makes big bucks. He could sign a contract with a credit agency for his repossessions and save money, but we go back a long time, and he likes as well as fears me.
I ditched the bean-mobile at the Ford lot and dropped the keys and repo order with the sales manager. He told me Cal was across the street at Casa de Cairo filming a commercial.
Cal comes from the same ethnic background I do and we both have blunt, ruddy faces, dark hair, and brown eyes. Black German. There the resemblance ends: he’s much smaller and far more dynamic-looking. The TV cameras were panning as Cal walked down a line of parked cars, stopping in front of each one and extolling its merits. When he got to the last one, he introduced his dog Barko, a senile German Shepherd, to the TV audience. Barko is a nice enough dog, although he smells. He’s been with Cal since before he hit it big. When he was younger, Barko would make on-camera running leaps onto the hoods of cars, turn around, and bark repeatedly at the camera while subtitles were run across the bottom of the TV screen detailing all the wonderful facts about the car he was sitting on. Ingenious. Now that he’s decrepit, Barko has been kicked upstairs to a supporting role: a three-second introduction and a pat on the head from Cal.
Rather than stand around watching dreary retakes of Cal’s spiel, I walked over to his office and let myself in. The large room was out of another era, and I liked it: knotty pine walls with lush, dark-green Persian carpets over an oak floor, bookshelves crammed with texts and picture books on World War II, knotty pine beams studded with ornamental horseshoes. The largest beam, directly over Cal’s giant oak desk, held the Myers Coat of Arms; a vulgar configuration of crosses, flowers, and trumpets around a wounded boar’s head. The walls were festooned with framed photographs of Cal in the embrace of various politicians who had welcomed his campaign contributions. There was Cal with Ronnie Reagan, Cal with Sam Yorty, Cal solemnly shaking hands with Tricky Dick Nixon before his fall.
Cal came in, grinning. “Jesus, Fritz,” he said, “what a work of fucking art! That guy, what’s-his-name? McCoover? We should hire that fucker to redo all our waiting rooms, sales managers’ offices, even redesign our magazine ads. Dragon Wagon! Ha! Ha! Ha! You know what it is, don’t you, Fritz? It’s those goddamned Ricardo Montalban Cordoba ads, ‘I am a man, and I know what I want. I want Cordoba!’ Old Ricardo is a Mexican, this guy McCoover has gotta be a nigger, he sees the ad on TV, decides he wants to be a Mexican, and fucks up a beautiful car designed for white people! Jesus! Fucking Madison Avenue will fuck you every time.” Cal shook his head. “Two good things came out of the deal, though. One, we got old Dragon Baby back, and two, Larry found a bag of weed in the glove compartment. I told him to take it to Reuben and the guys at the car wash. Sparkle up their day.”
I forgot to mention that Cal is also the owner of Cal’s Car Wash, a tax dodge that he operates at a loss to “give my customers the best of … total service for their cars.” He hires nothing but wetbacks, and pays them the minimum wage, naturally. Little goodies, such as the weed and the occasional cases of