Encino Hills Samsara

Glaucio Aquila piloted Baby Blue’s baby blue 1973 Mustang 302 convertible down the Ventura, rear seat loaded with lavender Cattelyas it had taken him all morning to amass. He’d relieved Dottie’s on Sherman Way, Tina’s in Woodland Hills, and San Fernando Florist—way the hell up in the north Valley—of their inventory. All for Priscilla, who was feeling repressed. Or maybe she had said depressed?

Paul in a pup tent in their backyard could have had something to do with it.

“I had a dream,” she said rolling over to rub Glaucio’s belly the way she did every morning. “The house was on fire. I ran outside in my pajamas and Paul said, ‘What’s the ruckus?’ I told him, ‘The house is on fire.’ He said, ‘I see the exterior motion sensor lights that just turned on. I see the fluorescents flickering in the kitchen. I see the lights over on the 405. I see no fire.’ I told him, ‘You think everything that isn’t your own illumination is insignificant.’”

It was true. Paul had a tendency to focus on himself.

“Promise,” he told Priscilla. “He’ll only be here for a while.”

But then he thought of Paul’s tendency to extend everything past its natural limits. His correspondences, for example, could go on ad nauseam, beginning with him describing some slight he had experienced in the world at large, devolving into a disquisition on the nature of humiliation, segueing to a brief history of the trope of the scapegoat, reminding him of a trip he took to Germany in which a dead end street became symbolic of the plight of the capitalistic world, leading him to an insight into his relationship with his father (R.I.P.) and a revisiting of a long-running fight he had with his siblings over the disposition of family funds.

Thus the oblation of orchids, their delicate stems and blooms necessitating that the lid stay on, even though, on an April day in Southern California, the smog at a bare minimum, he should have been blazing down the freeway with the wind whipping his pate.

Paul in the backyard was, it was probably true, a transgression too far, a thing to be atoned for. Priscilla said, “I would have thought given everything that’s happened you’d learned to get a date certain for his EDT,” the night she got home to find Paul drinking a beer by the pool. “I know, I know,” Glaucio said, “But if you can’t be there for a friend in need, what’s your friendship good for?” Priscilla said, “Are we sure ‘friend’ is the right term for him?”

Priscilla’s opinions of Paul:

Inconsiderate

Narcissistic

A DSM-V category of his own (provisional, not reimbursed for by insurance)

Freeloading

Unappreciative of all that Glaucio had done for him over the years

Jejeune

Paul’s opinions of Priscilla (never voiced, but inferred):

Self-centered

Inferior in the intellect department

Shallow

Unappreciative of all that Glaucio had done for her over the years

Back at Brooklyn Tech, Glaucio and Paul had aspired to glory, hanging on the every word or scribbled blackboard equation of Mr. Zechariah with the plastic pocket guard, Mr. Aretas, who looked like a young Peter Lorre, Mr. Nikita, whose nickname was Khrushchev: the nerdier the better, the better to lead them to the hallowed halls of NASA and engineering launches to the Moon.

So what happened there?

Too much blotter acid in Berkeley for Paul, there as an eager supplicant when Owsley was handing out the squares. Lunar voyages less appealing, after that, than those to some internal maria of nectar, tranquility, storms, forgetfulness, such that one day he came back from a grad class in post-classical mechanics, tried to feed his roommate’s dog, spilled a 40-pound-sack of kibble on the linoleum, decided he needed a drink and a bath, not necessarily in that order, and be-toweled, ankled down the rickety steps of the clapboard rental house onto College Avenue, where he joined a passing band of Hare Krishnas. It had been a long road back from there.

As for Glaucio, he had determined that astrophysics required too much effort, that internal combustion engines—your 351 Cleveland Q code, SD-455, 455 stage 1—held quite enough thrust for him, no need to escape Earth’s gravity. In addition, for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom, literature assumed a far greater pull than differential equations, an epiphany delivered by his reading of The Crying of Lot 49. Thus his cross-country transposition to the land of Yoyodyne for Ph.D. study at the USC English department. Whence he had come to judge the quick and the not-so-quick off the line in the confines of the freshman composition classroom at Northridge.

In the rearview mirror, he could see it before maybe it saw him, but like lightning from behind came a rev and another 302, now beside him, a gleaming Blue Glow, top down. The mustachioed driver gestured with a thumbs up, meaning, “Open ‘er up! What fool rolls their Stang with the soft top closed on a day like this?” Glaucio jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the back seat, not sure he conveyed his full meaning in regards his tender cargo as the guy grinned and gunned thrumming on by.

No sign of Priscilla when he rolled into the drive. As forecast, she’d hitched a ride down to the Boulevard with their neighbor Betty for her dental appointment. Come to think of it, the Cattelyas could also serve as thanks for sharing her car while his was in for crankshaft grinding and balancing, best left to professionals with the right tools, even with his proficiency.

After much halloo-ing, he located Paul in the guest bathroom. Add that to the DSM-V description: over-fastidiousness with regard to bathing, although Glaucio always figured he performed tasks not necessarily related to hygiene when closeted thusly though preferred not to think too hard about it. Maybe it was preferable to Paul floundering around in the grand-piano shaped pool seeming just on the verge of drowning.

Eight trips to carry the flowers in, each in a distinct container, the names of which he had enquired about at the shops and written down with care: a white ceramic cylinder on a gold-painted base; an alabaster cachepot; a woven sweetgrass basket; a green and white chinoiserie planter; a Cotswold long pot; an hexagonal zinc receptacle; an antique terracotta tureen; an egg-shaped green-glazed planter; a paisley printed burlap bag; a small wooden trug; a pressed-glass bowl; a cast aluminum basket; a mug with butterflies (his least favorite); a Mason jar; and a small lath crate. Arrayed on the kitchen counter, they looked like a Greek chorus waiting to comment.

“For Priscilla, not for me, I assume,” said Paul, bare feet slapping vestiges of bathwater across the tile.

Glaucio felt a stab of anger. Surprised, he said, “Tell me brother.” Waited a beat, said, “Tell me something brother.”

Paul raised his bushy eyebrows. Stared. Goggled. Shook his head. “Tell what?” he said.

“Tell me what you think you’re doing here.”

“Exponentially? As in, distributed according to a given time constant?”

“I mean, for how long and why?”

Paul pressed his lips together.

“Because, this isn’t Berkeley in ’77. This isn’t Stuart Street. You can’t just camp out here for six years chanting and doing yoga and awaiting Krishna consciousness.”

“Cruel.”

“No, my friend. Who gave you the dough to retrieve some semblance of a life after you realized you weren’t escaping the cycle of life and death so easily? Who let you live on the sofa in Studio City for long as it takes to gestate a whole damn human without once hustling you to figure it out? That time is past. I should have asked in advance, but I’m asking now. No, I’m telling: a couple more days, max. Then you find another option.”

“Bad data points, as always,” said Paul. “You never even realized how much you were gaining. Bhakti, man. I gave you selfless service. Plus, you been taking yours. Those four squares her family owns outside Dodge City. Think you’d be in this joint otherwise?”

Glaucio stood there. He laughed. “Forget it,” he said. Took out his wallet. Pulled out two bills. Extended them.

“A pair of Benjamins?” said Paul.

“Your ticket out of here,” said Glaucio. “Bus leaves in 15.”

“You only ever think about yourself,” said Paul.

“You can even take the pup tent if you want it,” said Glaucio.

The orchids, in all their hues, all their stages of bloom and fade, appeared to be nodding, dimly looking on.

By the time he heard the neighbor pull into the cul-de-sac, Glaucio had supervised Paul’s exit (backpack bobbing downhill), cleaned the bathroom, bagged empty chip bags and beer bottles from around the pool and back lawn, packed up the tent, and put Spinout on the turntable. He felt badly, fleetingly, but he wasn’t, after all, his brother’s keeper. So that when Priscilla walked in the door, the arrayed orchids, wavering slightly as the sound waves laved them, looked like they were singing “All That I Am” to her. “For you, Baby Blue, for no reason whatsoever,” Glaucio said with a sweep of his arm, hoping his gesture encompassed not only the flowers but also the absence of a pup tent in the back yard.

Priscilla seemed to register what he wanted her to register, and turned her gaze firmly to the display. “Aww, Glaucio,” she said, “you are and always will be the light of my life.”