Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

“Hey, brother!” he shouted over the music, “come on in and join the party!”

Roused from his clinch by Budge’s shout, Candyman looked up and gave me a lazy wave, a blissful smile, and a slurred, “Rob, mah man!” before being tugged back down by his inamorata.

“Hey, Budge, who you say this is singing?” the black woman not necking with Reggie yelled. She was barefoot, wearing purple capris and a yellow tank top. Her hair was teased up into an impressive Angela Davis-type ‘fro.

“My girl, Teena Marie,” Budge shouted ecstatically. “The queen of blue-eyed soul!”

Before hooking up with Rick James and becoming the only white female soul singer to have a number-one record, Teena Marie had been a student at Venice High School in the same class as Budge. His second claim to fame was that he had taken her to the prom their junior year. It was 1973 and the Gondoliers had had a good season the previous fall. He was a popular athlete and she was a wild beauty already flaunting her irresistible voice in area talent shows, looking for a way out of her parents’ world. The way he told it, they made out on the beach afterward and she let him get his fingers wet rubbing her through her panties. For some reason, in a house full of tall tales, everyone believed him. Maybe it was because he had every record she had ever made, knew the title of every song, and still talked about her on a daily basis even though five presidents had been elected and twenty-three Southern California springs had come and gone since the two of them walked barefoot in the sand listening to the surf crash in the darkness.

“That’s some swinging shit,” the woman said, doing a sexy little double-clutch frug in front of the stereo while her girlfriend slurped on my partner.

Budge came over to me grinning. “I got a girl in the bedroom,” he whispered.

“Yeah, I saw her. She looks nice.”

“Gonna get my knob polished!”

“That should be fun,” I said. “Listen, I’m going to turn the music down a little bit so Sharpnick doesn’t get wind of the party. You don’t want her swooping in on her broomstick and spoiling all the fun.”

“Aw-screw her,” he said with drunken courage. “She ain’t nothing but a walking skeleton. Pete knows how to handle her.”

As if on cue, Pete entered the room from the kitchen, wearing his pea-coat with the collar turned up. I assumed he had come into the house through the back door, same as Budge and his girl. He stopped just inside the living room and glanced around with darting eyes.

“Hey, look, it’s Party Pete!” Budge yelled, drawing everyone’s attention to the ex-sailor.

Squaring his shoulders and sticking out his chest, Pete marched over to the stereo and turned the volume down to a conversational level.

“Negative,” he said. “I’m not partying tonight. Got an oh-six-hundred wakeup mañana. So let’s keep the noise down. We don’t want the shore patrol showing up.”

“Loosen up, Moe,” Reggie said, coming up for air. “It’s only ten-thirty.”

“Yeah, man, it’s Saturday night!” Budge said. “Time for a party! Grab a girl and join in.”

“What you mean you ain’t partying tonight?” Reggie’s hottie said, sniffing. “You smell like you just put one out.”

“You’re crazy,” Pete said, backing away. “You better keep the noise down, if you know what’s good for you.”

He glared at Reggie and the girl for a few seconds, then turned on his heel and marched down the hall and into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. He had completely dropped all pretense of respect or friendship toward me and Reggie.

“You see that shit?” Candyman said. He was sitting up on the couch with a disgusted look on his face.

“I know,” Budge said, his jolly mood punctured. “If Pete don’t want to party, he don’t want nobody else to party either.”

“Nah,” Candyman said, shaking his head in an anti-Shoshana manner.

“What?” Budge said.

“That little sumbitch wearing new boots.”

“Whurd he get money for new kicks?” Budge said.

“That’s what I want to know,” Candyman said, angrily. “Look like Wolverines. Hundred bucks a pair.”

The next morning was crystalline. The wind blowing down from the mountains had cleared every particle of pollution from the air before it died down to a light breeze in the night, making the world look clean and new, like an aquarium after the water has been changed. When I left the snoring house a few minutes past seven, the fronds on the palm trees along Pacific were fluttering like tinsel in the early sunlight. A block away, the jade-green sea was full to the brim, stretching in a sparkling sheet to the razor-line of the horizon.

I was thinking diamonds as I walked north along the deserted boardwalk to Santa Monica, watching the Ferris wheel grow from the size of a quarter to a structure that loomed high above me. In the restaurant at the end of the pier, I ate pancakes and sausage, washing the meal down with a glass of milk and finishing up with two cups of strong black coffee. Afterward, chemically exhilarated, I strolled inland on Colorado, past the homeless encampments in Palisades Park, to Lincoln, which I followed south to Broadway. Grim-faced churchgoers in expensive cars made up most of the traffic. Their eyes darted as they drove, looking for sinners. I came under suspicion. It was justified.

When I arrived at Baba’s Hindu church, the place was bustling with volunteer workers. There were cheery old ladies in overalls weeding the flowerbeds and hippies on stepladders washing windows. Along the Seventh Street side of the hulking Queen Anne, a dozen or so men and women were standing by a pile of extension ladders and aluminum walk planks, looking as clueless as Eskimos in Acapulco.

Ganesha seemed to be in charge, his ocher robe moving back and forth between groups as he offered encouragement and answered questions. I didn’t see Mary or Baba Raba, but Evelyn Evermore, whom I had hoped to encounter, was among the group by the extension ladders. She was wearing Jordache jeans that fit her just right, showing her shape but not constricting her movement, and a brown-and-gold Pendleton shirt with the cuffs turned back neatly to her elbows, exposing downy forearms. Her thick platinum hair was tied back in a ponytail with a yellow ribbon.

Ganesha walked briskly up to Evelyn’s group just as I joined it.

“Does anyone here know roofing?” he asked hopefully, looking up from his clipboard.

I waited to see if anyone else was going to say anything, but they just looked at one another with the silly smiles and shrugs of the spiritually inclined but mechanically inept.

Karma yoga has a magical allure for most meditation students because washing the dishes or weeding the garden is actually a lot easier than concentrating on a candle flame, and the results are more apparent to others. Honest swamis often are on a shoestring budget. They need volunteer workers to keep their ashrams afloat on the cosmic tide and tend to dole out effusive praise for minor tasks.

So everyone wants to help. And that works out fine with weeds and dirty dishes. Problems rear when skilled labor is required. Turn most of these proto-yogis loose on a task more complicated than painting a door and you’re courting disaster. Give them a simple plumbing job, for instance, and hot water will soon be coming out of the cold tap while the lights blink off when you flush the toilet. If the group Ganesha was addressing tackled the roof without supervision, you’d be able to take a shower in the living room next time it rained.

“I know something about it,” I said.

He turned toward me eagerly, recoiled slightly when he recognized me, then suppressed that reaction with a determined nod.