Expiration Date (20 page)

Abruptly Elizalde wondered if she should have brought along a witness. In an even voice she said, “These methods are no more—”

“Voodoo dolls, Dr. Elizalde! I can’t believe you credit such—”

“I don’t credit them, any more than I credit Rorschach blots as really being pictures of monsters!” She had made herself take a deep breath then. “Really. Listen. By having patients do readings with cards and planchettes I get them to be unself-consciously objective—about themselves, their spouses, parents, children. The readings let me see, without the patients having to tell me, the problems that deeply concern them, traumas that they subconsciously know should be exposed. A lot of people
can’t do
the abstraction needed to see things in blots, or—or see motivations in situational sketches that look like old storyboards from ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ But if they’ve grown
up
with
these
symbols, they—”

“The subject is closed,” Alden said tremulously. “I order you to resume the standard psychiatric routines.”

Elizalde knew what that meant—see each patient for ten minutes at a visit, during which time she would be expected to do nothing more than look at the patient’s chart, ask the patient how he or she was doing, assess the medications and perhaps tweak the prescription a little; nothing more than maintenance, generally by means of Thorazine.

She had left his office without another word, but she had not obeyed him. While the other psychiatrists’ offices had all looked alike—the metal desk, the announcements taped to the walls, the particleboard bookcase, the toys in the corner for patients’ children—Elizalde’s office had gone on looking like a
bruja’s
den, with the religious
veladoro
candles on the shelves, pictures of Jesus and Mary and filthy old St. Lazar on the walls, and Ouija boards and crystal balls holding down the papers on the desk. She had even had, and frequently used to good effect, one of those giant black 8-bails, in the little window at the base of which messages like
Good Luck
and
True Love
would float to the surface when the thing was turned upside down. A simple “What do you think that’s referring to, for you?”—with any of these admittedly morbid toys—had often unlocked important fears and resentments.

Some of the other members of the psychiatric team had frequently talked about raising “spiritual awareness” in their patients, and had liked to use the blurry jargon of New Age mysticism, but even they found Elizalde’s use of spiritualism vulgar and demeaningly utilitarian—especially since Elizalde insisted that there was not a particle of intrinsic
truth
behind
any
sort of spiritualism.

Too, she had not been inclined to come up with the trendy sorts of diagnoses. It had been popular among psychiatrists then to uncover hitherto-unsuspected childhood memories of sexual abuse, just as ten years earlier all the patients had been diagnosed as having “anger” that needed to “be worked through.” Elizalde was sure that guilt and shame were the next emotions that patients would be encouraged to rid themselves of.

She herself thought that guilt and shame were often healthy and appropriate responses to one’s past behavior.

And so she had again been called in to Alden’s office.

This time he had simply asked her to submit her resignation. He assured her that if she did not resign, she’d be “put on the shitlist” with the Peer Review Organization and the National Register of Physicians—suspended from taking any Medicare or Medicaid patients, and thus unhirable at any hospital in the country.

He had given her the rest of the day off to think about it, and she had paced up and down the living room of her Los Feliz house, determined to call “60 Minutes” and the Los
Angeles Times
; she would expose the county psychiatric system, rout the self-righteous nurses, get Alden’s job. But by the next morning she had realized that she would not be able to win this fight—and at last she had driven to the hospital and mutely handed in her resignation.

Then she had gone into private practice. She found a chiropractor who agreed to let her rent his storefront Alvarado Street office on Tuesdays, and she worked as a secretary for a downtown law firm the rest of the week.

Her Tuesday psychiatric business had been slow at first—two or three patients, sometimes a fifty-minute group “séance”—but good results earned referrals for her from local businesses and even from the county, and within six months she had
moved into an office of her own, between a credit dentist and a car-insurance office on Beverly. Soon she’d had to hire a receptionist to help out with correspondence and billing the insurance companies.

Finally, on Halloween night in 1990, she had held the last of her séance sessions. And it had been for real.

E
LIZALDE HAD
been walking west on the Whittier Boulevard sidewalk for the last several blocks, having fled Soto Street, and now she stopped.

In 1990, Frank Rocha had been living in a little bungalow-style house just north of MacArthur Park. Elizalde had called on him twice, in the determined, I-make-house-calls spirit she’d had at the time, and she thought she could find the place again.

He had had a wife, and…two daughters?

Standing on the sidewalk in the morning sun, Elizalde was snapping her fingers with controlled, fearful excitement. She knew that her two years of aimless wandering around the country had been just postponement; or not postponement but preparation, getting her strength back, for…

For the perilous and almost certainly pointless ordeal of making amends.

Amado Street, it had been. She would be able to find it once she had got to MacArthur Park. She took a deep breath, and then began walking, looking for a bus stop.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

S
INCE
this was in effect breakfast, Pete Sullivan had ordered a Coors Light with his menudo. The beer was finished by the time the waiter carried the bowl of tripe stew to his corner table, so he waved the empty glass at the man.

“Another Coors,” noted the waiter, nodding. From the moment Sullivan had sat down, the man had proudly insisted on speaking English. “That was
unleaded
, right?” “Right,” said Sullivan. “Right,” he repeated quietly as the waiter walked back to the counter. Unleaded, he thought. That’s the only kind of gasoline they sell now, so people with old vehicles like mine have to dump little jugs of lead substitute into the tank every time they fill up. Probably the term
unleaded
for light beer will still be in use long after leaded gasoline is forgotten, and everyone will assume that its a corruption of some old beer term.
Uhnledden
, he thought blurrily.
The original light beer, brewed since the Middle Ages in the ancient German village of Bad Fahrting.

There were two or three plastic bottles of shampoo now alongside the bottles of lead substitute in the box under the sink in his van, and he imagined strolling into the men’s gym at City College up on Vermont and pouring the wrong stuff onto his head in the shower. He could claim it was a delousing measure. It probably would
work
as a delousing measure. But what would he tell the gas-station attendant when he poured shampoo into the gas tank?

The shampoo had been only ninety-nine cents a bottle—logically—at the Arab-run ninety-nine-cent store he’d stopped at on Western. The ubiquitous little L.A. strip malls seemed to be all ninety-nine-cent stores now, as they had seemed to be all Mexican-style barbecue chicken places in the eighties.

T
INY
N
AYLOR
’
S
was gone, and so he had driven on down Sunset past the various coffee shops that he still thought of as
the chicken-hawk place, the A.A. and N.A. place,
he rock-’n’-roll place, the punk-rock-hell place
. God knew what sorts of crowds they attracted now. Ben Frank’s was still by the La Cienega intersection, and he remembered that it had been such a hangout for the long-hair-and-granny-glasses types in the sixties that the casting call ad for the Monkees’ TV show had said, “Ben Frank’s types wanted.”

He had turned south on Highland and then east again on Melrose—and discovered that Melrose Avenue, though still animated, had died. He remembered when Flip, the huge used-clothing store, had burned in ‘83 or ‘84, and had then had an epic fire sale out on the sidewalk—kimonos and tuxedos and fedoras, all selling cheap in the hot sun and the loud rock music. Now there was a Gap clothing store, just like you’d see in any mall. In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg.

Once safely past the neighborhood of deLarava’s studio, he had turned south on Western and driven down to Wilshire and followed it farther east, past the marooned Art Deco relics of the Wiltern Building and the Bullocks Wilshire, to Hoover Street; east of Hoover, Wilshire slants through MacArthur Park (Sullivan’s father had always stubbornly gone on calling it Westlake Park, as it had been called before World War II, but today Sullivan sped through to Alvarado without thinking about the old man), and Sullivan recalled that the boulevard would end a mile or so ahead, just past the Harbor Freeway.

Here in this triangle between the Harbor and Hollywood Freeways were the narrow streets and old houses of the area known as the Temple-Beaudry district. Over on the far side of the freeways, on the hill above downtown L.A., the grand Victorian houses of Bunker Hill had stood until thirty years ago. Anonymous office towers stood there now; and on this side Sullivan saw new cleared lots and construction, and he knew that Temple-Beaudry would soon go the same way.

He had got off Wilshire and driven around through the pepper-tree-shaded streets, and had eventually found this place—a tiny Mexican restaurant called Los Tres Jesuses. Presumably it was owned by three guys who each had the common Hispanic first name Jesus—pronounced
Hey-soos
, and usually, perhaps out of reverence, replaced with the nickname Chui—pronounced Chewy. “The Three Chewies” had sounded to him like a good place to get breakfast.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop, he thought now as he took a sip of his second cold beer. Manny, Moe, and Flapjack. Larry, Moe, and Culero. Sukie had called people
culero
sometimes—it meant, roughly, coward.

He picked up his spoon and dipped it into the hot menudo. Even the steam from it, sharp with garlic and onion and cilantro, was strengthening; in a few minutes he
had eaten it all, chewed up every white rectangle of tripe and mopped up the last of the red, beefy broth with tortillas.

He wiped his forehead with the paper napkin and waved the second emptied bottle of beer at the waiter. He put it down and shook a cigarette out of the pack, and as he struck a match he noticed that the tin ashtray on the table had a crude felt-pen drawing of a skull in the dish of it, with, carefully lettered around the rim, the words L.A. CIGAR TOO TRAGICAL.

It was a palindrome—L.A. cigar both ways, with toot in the middle.

Startled an instant in advance, he dropped the burning match onto the drawn skull, and the ashtray glared for a moment with a silent puff of flame, as if someone had previously poured a film of high-proof brandy into it.

The flame was out instantly, and the faint whiff of…bacon?…was gone as soon as Sullivan caught a trace of it.

Suddenly he was nervous—but a moment later all that happened was that a car alarm started up in the lot behind the bar.
Beep…beep…beep…
He smiled wryly
Que culero
, he thought—but his hand was almost twitching with impatience for the third beer.