'Nerd Hustle: Or, Once Upon a Time in Sherman Oaks', by B. B. Schaikes
Gasoline was 35 cents a gallon. Elliot, Fook, Thea, and Artem, who’d just graduated high school, liked to spend afternoons and evenings driving around greater LA in Elliot’s ’68 VW Beetle. They’d just been to a pinball arcade in Westwood, a happening place and, later, an Atari test site. Then they’d enjoyed some austere pizza at Chesty’s in Sherman Oaks. But it got to be 11:45 at night, and all the places that claimed they’d be open all night were closing, which is how they do it in LA. So Elliot, Fook, Thea and Artem got on the 405 to drive back to their parents’ homes in Pasadena.
“What did you guys think of Chesty’s new ragtime piano player?” Thea asked the boys.
“He should be summarily fired,” said Elliot.
Elliot had requested Scott Joplin’s “Palm Leaf Rag,” but the pianist had played “Maple Leaf Rag.”
“It may have been a simple misunderstanding,” Thea said. “I mean, it’s always “Maple Leaf Rag” that gets requested.”
“Chesty’s should just get a player piano,” Elliot said. “Like the Shakey’s in Pasadena.”
“Would a competent, yet soulless automaton truly preferable?” Fook asked.
“Yes,” Artem said, though he hadn’t really been following the conversation.
A sound like a shotgun blast came from the engine compartment.
“Oh shit,” Elliot said, but his passengers remained calm.
Fook had been through this with Elliot before. Artem was the kind of guy who didn’t get worked up when things blew up. Thea did make a noise, but not a shriek or anything. It was just an inquisitive grunt.
“Don’t worry,” Fook said. “It’s just the fan belt pulley blowing up.”
Elliot’s car’s fan belt pulley tended to do that. It did that probably a dozen times, before Elliot sold that car, six years down the line.
“It’s an inferior design,” said Elliot.
He was just starting his career as a know-it-all. The Volkswagen was his first car. He’d inherited it nine months’ earlier, when his brother went to college. His brother got it from their dad, who bought it from their neighbor Mr. Akasofu, after its brief stint as the Akasofu family car.
They glided to a stop on a side street off the off ramp and opened the engine compartment. The fan belt now consisted of tiny, fibrous shreds wrapped around a shard of metal.
It was nearly midnight. No one had triple A.
Elliot and Fook walked to a Shell station five blocks away. It was open, but the mechanic was long gone. They walked back to the car and got in.
Thea spoke up.
“Did the gas station have the parts?”
“The fan belt, but not the pulley,” Elliot said.
“How are we going to get a pulley?” Thea asked.
“We’ll hitchhike to an auto parts store,” Elliot replied.
That’s what he and Fook had done the previous summer, when the fan belt pulley blew up near Cinco and Tokiwa’s, out in the desert one hundred miles north of LA. Cinco’s had had the fan belt, Fook hitchhiked to Mojave for the pulley, and Elliot got the VW running again, using trial and error. Those old Bugs were made in such a way that anyone could fix them.
Elliot and Fook didn’t bother to fill in Thea and Artem on all this ancient history.
Of course, auto parts stores weren’t open at that hour.
“I guess we’ll have to sleep in the car,” Fook said.
He didn’t seem dismayed by the idea.
Thea went to use the Shell station’s pay phone to notify her parents. She was the only one who had the balls to wake her parents up at midnight. Artem wouldn’t have called his parents even if they were awake.
While Thea was gone, the boys lounged about. Elliot and Fook stuck their legs out the car’s open doors, making the car look like a giant insect. Elliot still wore black wingtips and white socks at that point. He didn’t particularly like his footwear, but his mom bought all his clothes, so when he opened up his closet, those were the shoes he found there. Fook had nearly-obliterated sneakers, which were immersed in giant bellbottoms.
A guy approached from the house side, holding three bottles of beer interspersed between the fingers of one hand, a folded lawn chair in the other. The boys slouched down more in their seats, facing forward, but straining their eyes sideways to track the guy’s movements. The guy stopped at the edge of his sharp-edged lawn, just across the sidewalk from the Volkswagen, and jerked open the lawn chair using just one hand. Then he sat down and cracked a beer.
He had good posture and a buzz cut and was not in his pajamas, but in a short-sleeved, collared shirt, and looked kind of like a white version of Elliot’s dad. But Elliot’s dad was not up at this hour. And Elliot’s dad did not drink beer. Elliot’s dad, using a shot glass, measured out one gin-and-tonic (or one martini, depending on the time of year), at 6:00 pm each night. How did these things make his dad different from this guy, was the question that nearly surfaced in Elliot’s mind. But it slipped back into the murk.
Instead Elliot began to worry. His dad had recently said the Beetle was costing too much money. He’d said it calmly: calm was Elliot’s dad’s mode 99.9% of the time. Elliot’s dad did, however, have a rarely-seen second mode. Elliot, being a science-minded southern Californian, thought of it as “Richter 8.0.” As with most earthquakes, when his dad blew, there was little or no warning. Could this very night – this one fan-belt pulley episode – unleash The Big One?
As he pondered this disturbing possibility, Elliot was suddenly shoved forward. It was Artem, who wiggled out from the backseat – it was a two-door Beetle -- and started pushing the car down the street. Fook and Elliot got out, and the three of them pushed the Volkswagen two blocks, stopping, by unspoken consensus, in front of a yard festooned with several years’ worth of downed palm fronds and puncture weed.
“Can you believe that guy?” asked Artem, jerking his head back toward the buzzcut man. “Drinking beer right on the sidewalk?”
Elliot and his friends were, at that time, perfectly clean – no weed, no alcohol, no acid. That lasted another twelve, eighteen months.
When Thea got back they settled down for the night. The front had bucket seats, which Elliot and Fook scooched and tilted back as far as possible so they could stretch out their legs. This left Thea and Artem with no leg room whatsoever. However, they didn’t complain. Thea deftly disengaged her dangly earrings from under her bushy hair, deposited them somewhere, curled up her legs (unseen under the long, flouncy skirt of her “granny” dress) and nestled into the VW’s upright, unforgiving corner. Elliot thought she looked comfortable. Was it that she was only five foot one, with no sharp edges anywhere? he might have wondered, had he been slightly more aware. Or was it something in her attitude?
Everyone assumed that they’d fall asleep instantly. Instead they got more and more restless. The night sky was a mottled pink, city light reflecting off the particulate-infiltrated marine layer. It was 80 degrees and kind of humid. Elliot retrieved his mashed-down sleeping bag from the VW’s tiny luggage compartment. Like most valley-raised LA teens, he was inured to heat. He draped the sleeping bag around himself, hoping to create a cozy sense of relaxation. It didn’t work. Then he took his red bandanna and tied it over his glasses. That didn’t help either.
Fook got his ukulele from the VW’s tiny trunk and fooled around on it. After dribs and drabs of this and that, it started to sound like something, and Fook started singing:
There were three men came out the West,
Their fortunes for to try,
These three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn must die.
Artem interrupted.
“I’ve got a bottle-crowning machine,” he said.
“How did you get it?” asked Elliot.
“There’s a hatch in the ceiling of my parents’ closet that I’d been meaning to check out for a while,” Artem explained. “I used an eight-foot ladder.”
“Does your dad make his own beer?” Elliot said.
“My dad has nothing to do with this,” Artem said, in a tone of disgust, which was his usual tone.
Elliot admired Artem’s dad: he was an aeronautical engineer.
“A couple weeks ago I brewed some bottles of ginger beer,” continued Artem. “One of them blew up.”
“What was the failure mode?” asked Elliot.
“The bottom burst off.”
Each time the conversation tapered off, Fook offered a musical interlude.
They've hired men with scythes so sharp,
To cut him at the knee,
They've rolled and tied him by the way,
Serving him most barbarously.
“That’s kind of a gruesome song,” Elliot said.
“It’s folk,” Fook said. “It’s about making beer.”
“Ohhhh!” Elliot said.
“Can you play ‘Medicated Goo’?” Thea asked Fook.
“Is ‘Medicated Goo’ a drug reference?” Elliot asked.
He wasn’t into rock-and-roll yet at that point. Also he was censorious of medicinals.
“’Medicated Goo’ does touch on drug use,” said Fook.
“Not drug-use endorsement, though, I’d argue,” Thea said. “‘Medicated Goo’ would be good on the uke. It might be kind of soothing.”
“Nothing is soothing on the ukulele,” Artem said.
“That’s just not true,” Fook said, riffing on “Medicated Goo.”
“The uke got a bad name from ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips.’ ‘Tiptoe’ demeans the instrument,” he said, sounding a bit heated.
But then he mellowed, and played Brahm’s “Lullaby” on infinite repeat, as he and Thea debated who played the guitar solo on “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” Elliott, who didn’t know anything about that stuff, and Artem, who didn’t care, discussed the feasibility of building a railroad hand car that they could use to travel through Los Angeles, via LA’s wealth of disused railroad track.
“Who was smoking in this car?” asked Thea.
She said it mildly, but Fook played a harsh dissonant riff that made the question sound dramatic.
“Nobody,” Elliot said.
He didn’t smoke, and was offended.
“Varla Quirk smokes,” Fook said, referencing a classmate.
“That’s disgusting,” Artem said.
“And yet she’s very attractive,” Fook said, strumming a benevolent chord.
“Doesn’t Varla go out with that big cretin Rudyard?” Elliot said.
“Rudyard’s not that intimidating,” Artem said.
“He’s a golfer,” offered Fook.
Burly, though, compared to Fook, who had the build of a soda straw, including a bad slouch.
“Varla broke up with Ruddy,” Thea said. Fook started playing “Ode to Joy.”
“That’s promising,” said Artem. “Maybe she’ll stop smoking, too.”
“Her freckles are half of her appeal,” said Fook dreamily. “I wonder how thickly they’re dispersed, and in what areas.”
“Usually you need to get some sun on an area,” said Artem, “to bring the freckles out.”
“Maybe she’s a naturist,” Fook said.
Nudism was kind of a thing in those days, but Fook called it naturism, to sound less like a perv.
“Although she is quite fetching in her straw cowgirl hat and boots.”
That was the waitress outfit at Steak Corral, where Varla was waitressing that summer.
“Let’s go to Steak Corral on Friday night.”
“That’s not possible,” said Elliot.
“We’ll go to Steak Corral at 5:00 and get home in time for Star Trek,” said Fook, riffing on the “Star Trek” theme.
“Aren’t you going out with Cissie on Friday?” Thea asked Artem.
Cissie was a blonde theater girl with granny glasses. Artem had the hots for Cissie, and, unlike Elliot and Fook, he had the guts to ask girls out.
“Yeah,” said Artem. “But I can go out twice. Early with you guys, and later with Cissie.”
“You’re missing Star Trek?” asked Elliot. “Man. You really like her, don’t you?”
“Of course. She’s near-perfect.”
“So near-perfect that you’d marry her?” asked Fook.
He pizzicato’d “Get Me To the Church on Time” from My Fair Lady. His parents had that album.
Artem looked surprised.
“Why would you take a perfectly great girl and make her into a . . . wife?”
“I see what you mean,” said Thea.
Moonlight feebly penetrated the slowly-abating smog, the heat subsided, and time began to pass more quickly. Elliot’s bandanna/sleep mask kept falling off, so he couldn’t help but glance, using the rear- and side-view mirrors, at Thea’s giant, frizzy hair. It looked comfy, and he would’ve liked to rest his head on it. But he wouldn’t want to give Thea the wrong idea, and she was in the back seat, and also he just wasn’t up to it.
Fook’s strumming gave the conversation an unusual quality. He played the uke as punctuation to sentences, or made questioning, approving, or disapproving sounds with it, in response to things that people said. The uke started seeming like a fifth person in the car. Meanwhile Elliot, Thea and Artem talked about the future, in terms of records they wanted to buy; Elliot’s intention to ride his bicycle up Mt. Wilson; Thea making some money by lifeguarding at the Plunge; and Artem’s plan to order, through inter-library loan, a bunch of books about the Spanish Civil War.
They didn’t talk about aspirations or dreams or stuff like that.
They must’ve finally gone to sleep, because they woke up well into a stifling cloudless day. They all walked down to Ventura Boulevard to use the Shell station’s bathroom. Then talk turned to food.
“We must locate breakfast burritos,” Elliot said.
“We’re in the Valley. Ergo, we should all have chili sizes,” Artem said. “With eggs over easy, jalapeno and extra pickles, it’s a perfect breakfast.”
“Pickles take things out of the breakfast-food category,” said Thea.
“Not true,” Fook said.
“Demonstrably not,” Elliot agreed.
“In any case, a chile size is modular,” Artem said.
“Alright,” Thea said. “But can we not eat standing up?”
“Why don’t we find a Denny’s?” Fook asked.
“No,” Elliot said.
His family had gone to the Denny’s on the other side of Tejon Pass. They were seated, but were never served, and after an hour, had to just get up and leave.
While the boys continued discussing the various foods’ individual merits, Thea went through the crevices of her purse.
Then she asked, “What’s it going to cost to get a fan belt pulley?”
Silence descended.
“About 15 bucks,” Elliot finally said.
Now ravenous, they all returned to the VW, emptied their pockets and pooled their cash. They laid it all out by denomination (including coinage) on the bench seat in the back of the VW, to be orderly, and to keep it safe from prying eyes. In the process, Elliot, who had never ridden in, or even really looked at the back seat of his car, noticed, for the first time, two circles in the plastic upholstery. They looked like cigarette burns.
Thea had a five-dollar bill; Elliot had one dollar and twelve cents left after buying the fan belt the previous night; Fook had two bits; and Artem had a two-dollar bill that he planned never to use, because by then two-dollar bills weren’t being issued. They’d had a massive change hoard the previous night, but it was earned by the arcade.
“Let’s search the car,” said Thea. “The car key gnomes might have left us something.”
Car key gnomes? Elliot thought. Was this a European thing? Elliot had always thought Thea’s parents seemed really foreign.
There weren’t many places to search in a VW. Nor were Elliot, Elliot’s brother, their dad, or the Akasofu family the type of people who lost track of change. Thea worked her fingers into the crease where the back met the seat, but all she found was a rhinestone-encrusted barrette. She laid it on the seat in diplomatic silence. They all looked at it for a while. Then Elliot put it in the glove compartment. His brother hadn’t had a girlfriend in high school, and the Asafokus had no daughters. What went on his car when he wasn’t around?
They sat down on the curb. Some old, hard-looking oranges hung on a nearby tree. It now dawned on Elliot that an orange tree might be something that you’d want to have, rather than a burdensome object that your dad made you prune and water. But he’d never steal an orange. It wasn’t that the buzzcut white men in these houses scared him. Not at all. It was that people stole avocados from Elliot’s family’s avocado trees, and he regarded them as criminals. What enraged him most – what first destroyed Elliot’s faith in humanity -- was that, right before Halloween, some delinquent neighbor kids stole his pumpkins that he’d been carefully growing in his side yard for months.
What were they going to do about the money? Elliot thought of the tough girls – girls – who shook him down for lunch money in middle school. Well, now he was six feet two inches tall, no longer being shaken down by girls, but he also wasn’t like those guys who raised money by claiming they needed it for their grandmas’ funerals. Elliot knew guys who’d gone through four, five grandmas that way. He and Fook had never run any kind of scam, never had to hustle up a red cent. As for Artem and Thea, they positively disapproved of things like that. So now they all were screwed.
“I have an idea,” Fook said.
He picked up Elliot’s grubby bandanna from beneath the gas pedal – it had fallen off Elliot’s glasses in the night -- grabbed his uke and headed back to Ventura Boulevard. Elliot, Thea and Artem tagged along. Fook stopped in front of a donut shop, spread out the bandanna on the ground, and placed his two quarters on it. Then he pulled himself somewhat erect and launched into “John Barleycorn.”
Elliot was not sure what to think. But then he spotted an expression that he’d never seen before on Artem’s face. It was a look of horror.
Elliot unconsciously receded from the group, drifting slowly east past a dry cleaners and coming to rest in front of a taco stand. Thea, to pretend she didn’t know Fook, or else out of the milk of human kindness, posed as interested spectator, swaying slightly to the music. She tried for a smile, though it kept fading and having to be re-applied, like lipstick. Artem donned his “bored” look, leaning his fireplug-like form against the wall, arms folded loosely on his chest, chin slightly up, in a Ya wanna make me? posture. He looked like an unkempt, zitty bouncer.
The donut shop was doing a brisk business, and in the to-and-fro-ing, some passersby dropped a dime near the bandanna. The ten cents – which may have been dropped by accident – adjusted Elliot’s attitude. As a mid-century teenage suburban Angeleno, he didn’t know from busking. But, seeing the dime, it occurred to him that Fook’s shenanigans might count as a valid amateur theatrical, the sort of thing people routinely put up with, like school plays.
A mom and a little girl emerged from the donut store. The little girl stopped and looked at Fook. She raised her hand assertively, much the way that Elliot did in class.
Fook stopped singing.
“Yes?”
“Are you Tiny Tim?” she asked.
Wow, thought Elliot. Kids didn’t know much. Maybe it was Fook’s hair, which was long, scraggly and black, like Tiny Tim’s. Fook shook his head.
“But would you play ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips’?” she asked.
Fook’s forehead took on a corrugated look.
“Okay,” he finally said, and launched into ‘Tiptoe” as into a pool, complete with the falsetto.
He was rewarded with big smiles from his two-person audience.
Five-person, actually. Elliot was amazed: Fook sounded just like Tiny Tim. Did he actually have talent? Thea clapped, sincerely. Artem, chin in hand like the Thinker, appeared to weigh signing Fook to a major record label. Was Fook’s money-making plan not as idiotic as they thought?
“What do you say, Lisa?” the mom said, as Fook gave a little bow.
“Thank you sir!” the little girl said.
And the mom gave Fook a quarter!
Off they went, the mom advising, “Lisa, Tiny Tim’s not Japanese.”
Fook resumed “John Barleycorn,” but more light-heartedly.
“They've hired men with crab-tree sticks,
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller he has served him worse than that,
For he's ground him between two stones.”
Two little boys shot past, running full-tilt toward the donut shop, then skidded to a stop and turned around to look at Fook. They were riveted, probably by the grisly lyrics, which, however, made their mother wince.
As she dragged them away, the taller boy asked, “Is that man a beatnik?”
“No, honey, he’s a hippie,” she replied.
Huh? Elliot looked at Fook, his best friend since sixth grade. Fook did have long, greasy hair, and small wire-rimmed glasses, which also were greasy. And yet: he lived in a well-cleaned home, with a neatly-mown lawn, and got an A in AP Physics (Elliot got an A+). His analysis of Fook’s cultural niche complete, Elliot relaxed. Those people were sadly misinformed.
A bedraggled old man in ancient work clothes tottered up in front of Fook.
“You’ve got real talent, son,” the guy told Fook. “What dragged you to the gutter? The war, I guess?”
“Oh. No, sir,” said Fook, considerably startled. “I just – well, I had car trouble.”
“You don’t say, now,” said the old man. “That’s just what happened to me.”
What a coincidence, thought Elliot.
“I’d just gotten out, you see,” the man went on.
Out of what? wondered Elliot.
The man was laden with tattoos, which, in the early ‘70s, meant the service, prison, or a biker gang.
“Came down to see my cousin in the spring of ’68, and my old Plymouth threw a rod, right on this block. When I went to the gas station to pizzle, some hudlums stripped it to the bone.”
The man made a sudden grabbing motion, enliving the tale; Fook jumped backward in alarm.
“Later the police said the Plymouth’s carcass was blocking the street sweeper, and they hauled it off. I been here ever since.”
He concluded with an incongruous chuckle.
“Wow,” Fook said.
Elliot began to grow concerned. Maybe it was a mistake to leave the Volkswagen in front of the most dilapidated house in Sherman Oaks. Maybe they should have left it by the buzzcut guy’s house. No hudlums would’ve dared touch it.
“I want to help you out, Mr. . . . ” the guy continued.
“Robert,” said Fook. It was his given name.
“Here you go, Mr. Robert.” The guy held out a tattered dollar bill.
“I can’t take that, sir.”
“I don’t mind if you spend it on a drink,” the old guy said, waving the dollar at a bar across the street.
He swayed a little.
“Tell you what. Let’s have a drink together. Bring your friends.”
He waved his arm around at Elliot, Artem and Thea, magnanimously. They all froze, alarmed. They’d thought they were just spectators.
Just then an aproned guy came out of the donut store.
“No begging,” he said.
Fook and the old guy looked at the aproned guy. Fook seemed profoundly shocked; the old guy, not.
“I’m providing a service,” Fook said, pushing up his glasses. “A service of value.”
“You have five seconds to get out of here,” the guy said. “You’re bothering my customers.”
He took a quick drag on a cigarette whose glowing tip barely protruded from his apparently-fireproof knuckles. He had those fat kind of hands that seem pre-formed into fists. The old guy, with honed survival instincts, dematerialized.
“Your customers like me,” Fook said testily, pointing through the shop window at his former audience, the little boys.
They were now plastered gleefully to the glass, no doubt hoping for a fight.
Artem approached, apparently to drag Fook out of the argument so he could live to defend his random principles another day. Elliot didn’t know whether it was Artem’s default surly look that did the trick, his eleven o’clock shadow, his scabby, bleedy face, which he got from shaving over his acne by feel while reading books, or their joint reek from spending the night in the VW.
In any case, when the aproned guy saw Artem, he retreated, telling some other aproned guy, “There’s a bunch of vagrants out here. Call the cops.”
“We may need another location,” Fook said.
They resumed strolling, though at a faster pace. Fook spotted an amateurishly-drawn pink mandala chalked on a telephone pole down a side street, and turned down that street. They followed a trail of pink mandalas, each chalked in a more slipshod and haphazard fashion than the last. These led to “Phreda’s Phynery,” a consignment shop with loud Nehru jackets in the window that, thought Elliot, no one in their right mind would ever buy; “The Fracas,” a closed nightclub with a forbidding black façade; and a “Bead Shop.” The Bead Shop’s drawn shades gave it a dormant look, yet it had a steady stream of customers. Elliot noticed that the top and bottom horizontals of the capital “B” were painted in a color that almost matched the background color of the sign. From a distance, it appeared to read “Head Shop.”
“This street is full of nonconformists,” Elliot said. “Let’s keep going.”
“Yet this sub-urban” —as Fook liked to say it—“ecology may be music-friendly. Let me just try one song.”
He placed Elliot’s bandanna on some grass near the “Bead Shop” and worked on getting “Green-Eyed Lady” into shape. Elliot and Artem, their mental acuity sapped by hunger, sleep deprivation, and total unpreparedness for their situation, collapsed nearby. Thea circled the area, then headed purposefully down the block, as if on recon.
A red-haired, Fabulous-Furry-Freak-Brothers type, wearing a patch-pocketed fringe vest over a City of Devils t-shirt, came out of the Bead Shop and headed toward them. Some skinny humanoid in a long skirt, shawl and headwrap came out of Phreda’s. They were carrying large bags. Maybe they were tired, or thought Fook’s playing was a “happening;” in any case, they flopped on the grass amongst Elliot and Artem.
“I had no idea there was a street like this in Sherman Oaks,” Fook said to the City-of-Devils guy. “It’s a microcosm of the counterculture.”
“Yeah,” the City-of-Devils guy agreed. “It’s microcosmic.”
He blinked at length, then said, “You have such a small guitar. Don’t you have the bread for a big one?”
Elliot couldn’t tell if he was a jerkass, making fun of Fook, or just a dolt.
“It’s a ukulele,” Fook said.
“It was introduced to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants,” he explained, as he tried to segue back to singing.
“What’s that song?” the Devil guy asked.
“’Green-Eyed Lady,’” Fook said.
“You groove with it, my man, you really do,” Devil Guy said. “But it doesn’t sound much like the Fifth Dimension.”
“The Fifth Dimension didn’t do ‘Green-Eyed Lady,’” Fook said. “It was Sugarloaf.”
“Can’t be. I never heard of Sugarloaf.”
“You may know them as Chocolate Hair. And before that, they were Moonraker.”
DG fished around in his large sack and brought out two sets of bongos, each with a single intact drum head. He tried to set a beat. Fook worked with him, attempting a Grateful-Dead type improv, but even Elliot could see that DG had no natural ability.
Meanwhile the humanoid inched behind Fook, brought forth its knuckly fingers and started braiding Fook’s hair. As Elliot watched, wondering if hair-braiding could transmit disease, he marveled at Fook’s ability to keep his cool. He wished Thea would step in. Elliot stared down the block to her, willing his eyeballs to act as tractor beams, and she magically came back. However, she did not step in. Nor did she sit down. After a couple minutes, the boys gradually stood up, taking a dignified amount of time. Elliot studied Thea’s face out of the corner of his eyes. Had she decided things had gone too far? Had she broken her five-dollar-bill, found a pay phone, and summoned her parents? He’d hoped to avoid that outcome. But Thea dispelled his concern by handing out two cherry lollipops to each of them. Elliot and Artem each started on a lollipop. Fook stuck both in his mouth at once.
“Do you always carry these? Or is there a dry cleaners’ around here?” Elliot asked.
“I got them from a Hare Krishna,” Thea said.
“They may be impregnated with hallucinogens,” Elliot said.
But he was too hungry to abstain.
The Fracas’s door slammed open, issuing a loud screech of microphone feedback and some yelling. A middle-aged, black-leather-jacket-guy came out, sucking a cig, and took them all in from a distance. Then he headed down to the end of the block, where, Elliot now saw, maybe fifty people were lined up between strings of plastic triangle flags taped to traffic cones.
DG and the shawl-wrapped humanoid got up and headed for the line, and Thea joined them. Thea began to elicit conversation from the humanoid. Could any girl could talk to any other girl? Elliot wondered. Or did Thea have some kind of special talent? The boys followed, drawn by the line’s sheer mass, and accompanying gravitational force.
“What’s the line for?” asked Fook, as they walked along.
“Three Wishes,” Thea said. This got Fook excited: Three Wishes was a famous Valley swap meet.
“I thought it was called the Black Lagoon,” Elliot said.
“It depends on your personal experience,” Fook said.
“It does not depend on personal experience,” the leather-jacket-guy said.
They’d all caught up with him.
“It’s the Vert-Hex Swap Meet. End of story.”
The guy’s contrariness enraged Elliot. Though decades later, as he combed through the “You Know You’re From the Valley When” website, Elliot learned the swap meet was, in fact, the sole residue of the Vertex-Hexon, a business-attracting Googie-Populuxe landmark planned by some Valley businessmen that never actually got off the drawing board.
“Is this swap meet legitimate?” asked Elliot. “Or do they just sell stolen goods?”
Elliot had been to the Rose Bowl Swap Meet and was convinced he saw his stolen bike there.
“Ownership, like life, is of a temporal nature,” the leather-jacket guy said, pissing Elliot off more.
Fook put down his bandanna next to the line and, surveying the motley assortment of old people, moms with kids, and the unemployed, started playing “When I’m 64”, the most wholesome Beatles’ song he knew. Only toddlers seemed to pay him much attention.
“Let’s investigate the swap meet,” Elliot said.
“The chances of finding a Volkswagen fan belt pulley are infinitesimal,” Artem said.
“You don’t actually know that,” Elliot said. “You haven’t a single datum.”
The leather-jacket-guy went off, yelling at some Hare Krishnas who had congregated, chanting, near the swap-meet entrance. Elliot, Artem and Thea, through inertia, got in line with DG and the humanoid. But the line was long. Soon Artem began to crack his knuckles, one of the many signs of his impatience.
“There’s got to be something we can do to raise ten lousy bucks,” Artem said. “The uke’s not gonna do it.”
He had to raise his voice. The Hare Krishnas were gradually approaching, and, between their chanting and their flutes, were drowning out conversation.
“The problem is, art in this country is commodified,” Artem hollered. “And Fook’s music is merely ephemeral.”
“What you say?” DG said.
“It’s not considered a service of value,” Artem said.
Elliot frowned. He’d been thinking the same thing, but didn’t like hearing Artem say it. Also, the Hare Krishnas were getting to him.
“Maybe you should tell these cult members to scram,” Elliot told Artem. “Don’t you regard religion as the opiate of the masses?”
“Not Hare Krishnas,” Artem said. “They’re more like the herbal tea of the masses.”
Thea could see that Elliot needed more personal space. She flagged down the Hare Krishna who had given her the cherry lollipops.
“We’re solidly Jewish, Baptist, atheist and Buddhist,” she told him, in her reasonable way.
The Hare Krishna looked at them mournfully. He seemed about their age. His hair was barely long enough to gather into a topknot, and he had no official robes. He was barefoot, and wearing a grubby white, collared shirt and blue trousers. Maybe it was the shirt and trousers, or maybe it was something else, but Elliot’s dad re-entered Elliot’s mind, seeming, for the moment, less intimidating.
“You’re missing out on the Great Enjoyer,” the young Hare Krishna said.
“Yes,” said Thea. “I’m sorry.”
The Hare Krishna’s white tilaka was smeared, his shaven forehead sweaty. “Catch you later,” Thea said to him, making – to Elliot’s astonishment – sincere eye contact. The Hare Krishnas slowly moved off, mostly likely out of sheer coincidence.
“I’m not Baptist. I’m Methodist,” Elliot said.
“I couldn’t remember the name of your sect,” Thea said. “I wonder if the Hare Krishnas are making any money. They’re musical.”
“They’re not loud enough today,” said DG. “If they get loud enough, people pay them to leave.”
“Fook’s also not loud enough,” Artem said.
“I feel like he has an audience,” Thea mused as some tag-playing preschooler ran full steam into her legs and knocked her over. “The problem may be his presentation.”
The humanoid spoke.
“I like his music,” she said, gazing on Fook.
“Stay beautiful,” she murmured.
This was the first time Elliot had heard that phrase, and it struck him as idiotic.
“If I had money, though,” the humanoid continued, “I’d buy an ice cream.”
Elliot had a flash of insight.
“Actually, the problem is there’s some kind of disconnect. Between the people who value Fook’s ukulele playing, and the people who have disposable income to dish out.”
“This is the problem of all artists,” Thea said.
Elliot didn’t give her remark a second thought. But it came back to him years later, when he ran across her dad’s obit in the Pasadena Star-News. Thea’s dad was a Pasadena post-office clerk, but it turned out he was also a violinist, back in Poland.
At some point Artem, Elliot and Thea realized that you had to pay fifty cents to get into the swap meet, so it was no-go.
“That’s why we brought this Fracas trash,” DG said, kicking his bag, which he’d dropped to the ground. “If you sell stuff you don’t have to pay the entrance fee.”
“You’re actually going to sell those defunct bongos?” Artem asked.
“Nope. Those are, like, decoys. I’m selling better stuff,” DG said, patting his patch pocket. “We’ll dump the bongos out the backdoor once we get in.”
Perhaps in misinterpretation of Artem and Elliot’s looks of disapproval, he asked, “Do you want that junk?” The bag was chock full of broken bongos, tambourines missing most of their jingles, and the missing jingles. Of course they wanted it. Elliot ran back to the Beetle and got his toolbox. Then he and Artem sat on the grass and separated broken from intact bongos and attached intact ones together; and reattached jingles to tambourines. Small children accumulated around them, using the newly-repaired instruments as noisemakers. Fook continued playing the ukulele, though now dressed in a ‘40s era suit and straw boater: Phreda’s rejects, obtained from the humanoid’s bag. Thea and the humanoid, a/k/a Gretchen, salvaged a cracked brandy snifter from the Fracas trash and seeded it with their sparse change. Gretchen scrounged some materials from Phreda’s, and she and Thea made poster:
Music is fun with Robert Fukui, multi-instrumentalist!
Give your child a ukulele lession ** TODAY ** Just a quarter!
Mr. Fukui takes Requests! Brighten your day with “Tiptoe through the Tulips”!
Help this young man earn his way to Juilliard!
Fook made $8 by the time the swap meet closed. Elliot, Fook, Thea and Artem netted the remainder by selling the Hare Krishnas the now-functional drums and tambourines.
They went back to the VW, where Fook, Thea and Artem planned to hang out while Elliot caught a ride to the auto parts store. The buzzcut guy must have been on the lookout, because he showed up the minute they got there.
“I saw you kids sleeping in that Volkswagen last night,” he said. “Believe me when I say that, if that car’s still on my street tomorrow, they’re gonna tow it.”
“We believe you,” Fook said.
The guy looked at the red bandanna, bulging with its massive trove of coins; Elliot had to support it from the bottom.
“Well. I’ll give you this,” he said, turning on his heel. “You kids sure know how to hustle people.”
“We don’t hustle people,” Elliot said, to the guy’s receding back. “We offer a service of value.”
*****
Elliot’s dad didn’t blow up, since he didn’t have to shell out to fix the Beetle. Things continued much as before, although the next Friday night, when Elliot, Fook, Thea and Artem went to the Steak Corral, Elliot noticed something he would not have, but for their little adventure: rhinestone-encrusted barrettes in the hair of Varla Quirk. Fook had always had Elliot’s spare VW key – Elliot gave it to him when he got the car – and when Elliot put two and two together, he was kind of shocked. He considered asking for his key back. But he never got around to it.
Other than that, Elliot’s main takeaway from the episode was that Volkswagens are crap cars. Which is what he told his grandson fifty years down the line, when his grandson said he was gonna buy one. Elliot explained how his ’68 VW’s fan belt pulley blew up a dozen times. The grandson questioned Elliot about his methodology for fixing the fan belt pulley. Within moments the grandson proved, using YouTube videos posted by German car nuts, that all those times when young Elliot fixed the fan belt pulley, he fixed it incorrectly. He didn’t tension the fan belt properly. He didn’t use the right number of shims. Or any shims, in fact.
Elliot, wondering how an 18-year-old kid got to be such a know-it-all, conceded victory and fled the field. It was 6:00 pm, and August. Using a shot glass, Elliot made himself a gin-and-tonic and sat back to reflect. How primitive he, Fook, Artem and Thea had been, at his grandson’s age. If only they’d had Google – or, for that matter, credit cards; modern “helicopter” parents; or a modicum of common sense -- they’d have fixed that fan belt pulley correctly the first time it blew up, out by Cinco and Tokiwa’s. Or they’d have hired a real mechanic. Then the fan belt pulley would have been fine, forever after. They’d have been able to return straight to Pasadena, right after finishing their pizza, that night in Sherman Oaks.
But where would have been the fun in that?
B. B. Schaikes' fiction and poetry have appeared in Pangyrus, Merion West, Scribeworth, Sundial (Pushcart nomination) and orangepeel literary magazine. Her story "Turf" won Leaf by Leaf's first prize in fiction in 2024. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University in 2025.