Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

“Aw, come on, Pete,” Budge said. “She’ll have a shit fit if we don’t get it cleaned up before she comes back.”

“That bitch ain’t coming back,” Pete said. “She’s got three other houses to check on. We’ll clean up when we’re goddamn good and ready.”

“You sure that eye-talian hadn’t paid you yet?” Candyman said to Pete.

“What do you mean, am I sure? Didn’t you hear me tell Sharpnick he’s going to pay us on Monday?”

“I heard you all right. Like I heard you tell her me and Budge was the ones had a party you didn’t know nothing about, when it was you pulled a case of wine off a liquor truck and got the whole thing started. Where’d you get the money to eat in Antonio’s if you didn’t collect that check?”

Reggie’s nickname for our housemates caught the tricky blend of companionship and hostility that linked them. Like the original Stooges, Pete and his pals, while inseparable, were never far from bonking one another on the head with a monkey wrench or gouging an eye.

“I wasn’t eating in there,” Pete said. “I was conducting business, trying to keep you two swabbies off the streets. I only said that about the party to confuse the bitch. One of us has to stay on her good side or she might evict us.”

“You’re trying to confuse someone, all right,” Candyman said. “I’m going with you to get that check on Monday.”

“No problemo,” Pete said.

I was thinking diamonds as I emerged into the sparkling seaside air. Where were they? Would we be able to find them in time? What was the next step if there was nothing about Baba Raba at the library?

I swung down to the boardwalk to get a Coke before heading inland, hoping the effervescent sugar and caffeine would give me some chemical inspiration. The boardwalk was not actually a walkway made of boards but an asphalt path lined with stalls and storefronts and old hotels on the inland side. Street performers and artisans set up booths and spread blankets to display their wares along the other side of the path, at the edge of the sand that stretched down to the ocean. Heading south, drinking from my twenty-ounce bottle of cola, I saw Ozone Pacific sitting cross-legged beneath his palm tree. It seemed like he was always around. I seldom went to the beach without seeing his blond head bobbing in the crowd. He was playing with his plastic gold coins, holding them in a stack in one hand and then dribbling them into the open palm of the other. He had nice hands, unusual for a homeless guy. They looked like a girl’s hands, with long shapely fingers and neatly trimmed nails. When he saw me, he waved and smiled.

“Hi, Rob!” he said when I walked over. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.”

“This would be a good day to get out into the country for a while, don’t you think, Rob? Wouldn’t you like to see all those animals? I just love cows and horses and all those other animals they have on farms.”

He was dressed, as always, in filthy white sneakers, worn-out blue jeans, and a long-sleeved white-and-brown cowboy shirt with pearl buttons. He often talked about getting out into the country.

“Did you used to live in the country?” I asked him.

“I thought I did, but now I’m not too sure,” he said, serious for a moment. “I know my mom used to tell me about it.”

He was an exceptionally childlike young man, someone who had never grown up for some reason and probably never would. I wondered what had become of his family and how he had ended up here.

“Don’t you love cows and horses and roosters and stuff?” he said, smiling again.

“I do, actually.”

“Me, too,” he said, smiling still more broadly in a way that made me smile with him.

“What are you in such a good mood about?”

“I’m rich,” he said, ecstatic, dribbling his coins again and then tossing them up in the air so that they rained down around him.

I had an urge to practice some unlicensed reality therapy and point out to him that the coins were plastic, but I bit my tongue as he gathered them up. He was probably mildly retarded. If the plastic disks made him feel rich, what was the harm? He was no more deluded than people who bought into the artificial value of diamonds with thousands of real dollars or built their identities out of the fool’s gold of brand names, department store clerks and Hollywood stars who wouldn’t have been able to see themselves in the mirror if they weren’t looking through Ray-Bans or to believe in their own reality if their bodies weren’t wrapped in designer duds.

I took a long, searing drink of my Coke, the only kind of cola I ever buy, then screwed the top back on and held the half-full bottle out to Ozone.

“You want the rest of this?”

“Sure, Rob. Thanks!” He put the bottle in his Batman backpack.

“See you later,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“To the library.”

“Can I walk over that way with you?”

“Of course you can. What kind of books do you like?”

“Books about the country,” he said. “Ones with pictures of cows and horses.”

As we went south along the boardwalk toward the terminus of Venice Boulevard, where it stops, awestruck at the sight of the Pacific, shopkeepers and street performers shouted out friendly greetings to my companion. Some called him by his strange name, Ozone Pacific. Others called him Oz. Despite his limitations and lack of resources, or maybe because of those limitations, he was a popular character in the carnival world that clung to the edge of the continent. He seemed to know everyone.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Baba Raba?” I asked him as we passed a body-piercing booth sandwiched in between a Thai takeout place and a shop that sold incense and statues of Buddha and Shiva.

“Do you know Baba Raba?” he said, excited.

“No. But I’ve heard of him. Do you know him?”

“Yes. He’s a nice man. He talked to me before and made me feel better when I was sad.”

“Really? Does he live around here?”

“He has an ash farm over that way.” Ozone waved his rayon-clad arm toward the east, toward Lincoln Avenue and the 405 and the whole Los Angeles basin. “What is an ash farm, anyway, Rob?”

“It’s not an ash farm, Oz, it’s an ashram.”

“What’s that?”

We had come to Venice Boulevard and turned inland between the brightly painted fronts of the restaurants and bars that lined the block between the boardwalk and Pacific Avenue. The street was colorful as Bob Marley’s cap, and reggae music blasted from speakers on a patio where people were eating rice and beans with jerk chicken.

“It’s a place where people go to meditate and pray,” I said. “Kind of like a church. Do you know where his ashram is? Is it near here?”

“I don’t know, Rob.”

“Do you know when he is going to be down here again?”

“No. I haven’t seen him for a while. I wish he’d come back.”

The soothing sound of the surf crumbling on the beige sand a hundred yards behind us gradually blended with the sound of traffic as we approached the intersection of Venice Boulevard and Pacific Avenue.

“Are you going to be seeing him, Rob?”

“I might be.”

“Would you ask him if I can have my picture back?”

We were standing at the intersection, waiting for the light to change, surrounded by a mixed crowd of local hipsters, homeless people, and tourists.

“What picture?” I asked him, keeping an eye on the signal on the other side of the busy street. “The one of the lady?”

“Yes,” he said.

Just then the light changed and the walk signal came on and I crossed the avenue with the herd.