California Dreaming

"All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey.
I've been for a walk on a winter's day.
I'd be safe and warm if I lived in L.A.
California dreamin' on such a winter's day..."
     The Mamas and the Papas  

Well, maybe not safe, and maybe not warm:  a rainy California winter day can soak you to the bone, and as for safety, well, everyone has their own definition.  Some of the scariest moments of my life happened in California, and a few of the best.  But safety isn't always what you really want.  And sometimes I do wax nostalgic for the California of my youth.  The weather, the beaches, the surfers, the food (avocados everywhere), and the mix.  Every kind of music, architecture, food, neighborhood, ethnic / religious / racial / sexual type.  Juicy.  But cool with it.  You can blend in, you can hang out, you can just watch.

And there's a lot to watch in California.  From a woman grocery shopping in a bathing suit and high heels - in 1960 - to Julius Caesar XII in full toga, from the guy who used to drive around in a military tank to the DeLorean contingent, to people riding around in stretch limos, picking up hitchhikers to ask if they've heard their latest song on the radio.  (Which literally happened to me.)  Or meet up with some random person and end up in a three-day poker game in the Hills.  (Which literally happened to me.  One of the participants gave me a guitar.)  Or live on the cheap in a broken-down brick hotel, with hallways from hell, and - (but more on the Blackburn later).  California, a place of empty afternoons, sun-kissed dread, a sense of a past and future being lost... (but more from Jim Gavin later)

This fall, I watched Lodge 49 on AMC, my new favorite show. If you missed it, go to On Demand and catch up.  From the first episode, when ex-surfer Dud (played by a pitch-perfect Wyatt Russell), limping (a snake bit his foot) around Long Beach, finds the magic ring that leads him to Lodge 49 of the Ancient and Benevolent Order of the Lynx, I was in.

From left, Ernie, sitting, Blaise standing, Dud, sitting,
and, of course, the corpse.

For one thing, the characters are great:

Liz (Sonya Cassidy), Dud's sister and polar opposite, works as Hooters-style waitress even thought she's much smarter than that.  By a quirk and a jerk, she gets into one of those boot-camp-style executive try-outs that you hear about but never get in.  And ends up making the final cut, to her own (and everyone else's) amazement.  Even better, when she finally gets a chance to talk to Chief Executive Janet, who really likes her, Liz throws herself off the executive yacht.  I like people who know a cage when they see one, and run like hell.  (Don't worry - she makes it to shore.)

Blaise (David Pasquesi), resident philosopher and alchemist, bartender, pot-seller, and apothecary dreams of finding the One True Lodge.

Ernie (Brent Jennings), Knight to Dud's Squire, a perpetually exasperated plumbing supplies salesman working for the perpetually exasperating Brian Doyle-Murray.  Ernie is looking for the really big score via the Captain (Bruce Campbell of Bubba Ho-Tep) who, when finally found, frolicking in a blow-up wading pool, is a con being conned while conning other cons - so California.

Liz, Dud, and Ernie

And Dud, who glues all of these and more together.  He's a lot more than an ex-surfer with a crippled foot.  He's game for anything.  He is, according to Blaise, someone who knows what's going on.  He is, according to Larry, the Leader of the Lodge, "part of the True Lodge.  He's very special."  Of course, Larry (Kenneth Welsh) appears to be crazy as a loon, and it soon turns out that he has pretty much ruined the Lodge's finances by living off the Lodge and spending a vast sum on the True Scrolls which have since been lost.  But what's a little embezzlement when you're trying to save the Sacred Scrolls?  Meanwhile, Dud might be saving Ernie's exasperated, tired, worn-out-with-hoping soul.  And be turning him into a true Knight again.  And vice versa.

• Meanwhile, there's a live seal that shows up every time something strange is about to happen.
• The occasional hallucination (?) of dragons on the part of almost everyone.
• The sanctum sanctorum turns out to have an even more sanctum sanctorum with a resident reliquam corpus. 

Plus Jim Gavin, its creator, truly captures the feeling of California:  “Years and years of reading, combined with years and years of working dead end jobs. I wanted to capture the SoCal landscape that I know and love — freeways, strip malls, burger joints — and infuse it with a sense of grandeur and mystery.”  (LALoyolan)

It works because California is all extremes - it's a state where Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown have all been governors.  There are (or were) cults, communes, branches, insurance salesmen and con men everywhere.  There are just as many bogus land developers in California as Florida, it's just that they're better surfers.  Sometimes.  With better music in the background.  Southern California and Northern California have almost nothing in common, and San Francisco is the equivalent of an Italian city state.

And there's the entertainment industry, which looms over everything like the Catholic Church in Italy.  It's why all the beauty pageant / talent show / body builder contest winners go to California, because they know they've got a shot.  And then they run into each other and every other beauty pageant / talent show / body builder contest winner from the last 40 years, and they have to figure out how to stand out.  And make a living.  Porn, physical trainers, child minders, pool boys, escort services, waitstaff, and clerks, are mostly made up of former winners, terrified of becoming losers, willing to do anything to crack into show business and become a winner again.  Often beginning - and, sadly, ending - with plastic surgery.  Since everyone tries to go to the best plastic surgeons, the same best plastic surgeons, sooner or later everyone gets The Look:  whether perky blond(e)s, sharp brunettes, feisty redheads, strong-jawed military, girl/boy next door, Number 12 Looks Just Like You.

Photo by Bengt Nyman
Flickr IMG_3770

Which is why the most interesting people in L.A. are all the other residents:  from the somewhat normal people which keep everything going to the downright crazy people, who all came out because, well, anything can happen, and while you're waiting, there's surfing.

Which brings us to the old Blackburn Hotel, which probably got torn down years ago, but was LA's version of the Chelsea Hotel in NYC, one of the few cheap, cheap, cheap places in a major city.  Because Los Angeles, like New York City, is a Third World country, where the rich and famous hang out cheek by jowl with the street people.  Where you can go from homeless to famous in two degrees of separation.  Or less.  Where anyone can end up as a star, or at least in a movie.  Hell, I woke up one morning at the Blackburn, and came downstairs to find people actually shooting a scene in the lobby.  Cables everywhere, and me with a hangover.

Anyway, I fell in love Lodge 49:  Thankfully it's been renewed for Season 2, so go binge-watch it on AMC On Demand, and wait, with great anticipation, for what happens as Ernie heads to Mexico with "El Confidente" (Cheech Marin)  to find the Sacred Scrolls.  And maybe find out how the reliquiam corpus got dead.  And how can you get from Long Beach Lodge 49 to London Central Lodge so quickly?

Meanwhile, enjoy Season 1.  Like California, like life, it's episodic and irrational, but with an underlying rhythm.  Full of hints and glimpses of a deeper meaning, and very strong on the universal need for a quest.  There are Arthurian legends and old mythology (is Dud a young Achilles, a young Fisher King, or simply Adam?  Or are he and his sister really Apollo and Artemis?).  There's alchemy, magic, hope and dragons.  And a lot of quietly wonderful dialog.


"We both have a background in residential hydronics."
“What’s the use of living forever if you’re all alone on a Sunday?”
“It’s a basic feature of capitalism: You can’t get loose, even on weekends.”
“It was perfect, but I didn’t realize it was perfect until later.”
“People always go looking for unicorns when we’ve got rhinos.”

"Signs and symbols, Ernie."

The Digital Detective, Banking part 3

This continues a series of articles about computer fraud. Originally I practiced a career of systems software design and computer consulting, but I sometimes came upon a more shadowy world, that of computer crime. I seldom sought out fraud but I sometimes stumbled upon it, picking up undetected clues others missed.

This episode doesn’t deal with crime, per se, but it includes a con, minor as it is. The scheme required a little ‘social engineering’ and, though the word might be Yiddish, no one can schmooze like Southerners.

The story came to my attention while consulting for banks, this one deep in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. My landlord for part of the stay was an eccentric but colorful codger. He talked about a neighbor who leased farm land from him but failed to pay his rent. Outsiders might expect he pulled on a jug of rye whiskey as he talked, but all he did was lean back in his recliner, sip beer, and twirl a never-lit cigarette while a cheerful woman less than half his age clattered in the kitchen. I jotted down his story long before I became a writer, so kindly forgive error and stylistic issues as I strove to capture his dialogue.

1950s era corn picker

Damn Ernie. I hounded that man all summer long for the rent. Finally last fall, I hooked up my corn picker and started up the corn rows. Now a corn picker ain’t a quiet machine, and lo and behold, neighbor Ernie come dashin’ out of his farmhouse yellin’ and cursin’ that I’m stealing his corn.

I said to him I couldn’t possibly be stealing corn off my own land, unrented land at that. He steamed and stormed and said the seed and planting labor had been his, and anyway he was just a little late with the rent, three or four months, maybe four or five, weren’t nuthin.

I told him that I was just going to keep picking corn for myself until someone showed up with rent money. He dashed off like banshees themselves chased him. Pretty soon he comes back waving his checkbook.

I said, “Ernie, are you sure there’s money in that account?” Oh yes. He told me twice there was, so I said there’d better be, and he said he wanted the corn I’d picked. I told him to consider the already picked corn interest and collection fees. Fact is, I finished the rest of that row, which he just hated.

So the skinflint S.O.B. hustled off to hitch up his combine and wagon, and I find myself a few bushels better off than I was before. I cleaned up and headed in town to the bank, right past Ernie who’s racing his machinery through the fields.

At the bank, I always get in Molly’s line. She’s a sweet, buxom lass, and I’d been thinking about asking her out.^†

Anyway, I get up to her teller window and she said the account’s a bit short to cover the check. I asked her exactly how short, and she said she wasn’t allowed to tell me that.

So darlin’, I cajoled, is this check completely worthless, or did Ernie at least come close? Looking at her computer, she said he was purty close.

Well, I says to her kind of reflectively, I want to tell my neighbor Ernie how much he needs to cover my check. Like would he have to deposit only $10? No, she said, ten dollars wouldn’t cover it.

Well, says I, would $20 or $30 do? No, she smiled at me, it’s not quite enough.

Hmm, says I, I wonder if $40 or $50 would suffice? Um, she said to me, that first amount ought to cover it.

Thank you, I says, I’ll tell that rascal he needs to put $40 in the bank. By the way, sweet thing, can I have a deposit slip? And you think maybe I can call you up? For, uh, you know, maybe dinner Saturday?

So I walked out of there with a bounce in my step, a deposit slip and her phone number. I was feelin’ purty good. What I did was get in my car and circle around through the bank’s drive-thru. I already had Ernie’s account number on the check, so I just filled out the slip and shot it through the air tube with two $20 bills. Sure enough, the receipt came back showing $1002.39. Good on Molly.

But wait, I say, I almost forgot to cash a check. I send over Ernie’s $1000 check and this time I got back a thousand dollars.

Fair enough. I probably had $40 in shelled corn and a lesson I ain’t gonna rent to Ernie no more.

Ernie got stupid, though, and instead of being grateful I didn’t bounce his worthless ass along with his worthless check and turn both over to the sheriff for collection, he raised holy hell at the bank yelling someone manipulated his account.

I took Molly to the horse show that Saturday. Now I tell you personal like, you want to get a lady in a receptive mood, bein’ around horses will do it. Something about women and horseflesh– just a word to the wise.

Anyway, Molly, she confided the bank said it was apparent someone had taken liberties, but they couldn’t blame the girl who took the deposit and they couldn’t blame the teller that cashed the check. They just gave everybody a stern reminder warning.

Ernie wanted to call the authorities, but the branch manager explained Ernie’d be the one in trouble for writing bad checks. He didn’t mention Molly could have gotten in trouble if they’d figured out her role.

Molly said she knew I’d manipulated her and wanted to know if I’d asked her out from obligation or guilt. I said I didn’t want to sully a relationship thinking I used her. She needed a lot of reassurance about that, and so Friday nights and Saturday nights we just get romantic and I give her plenty of reassuring. Been about a year now. Figure we can go on with this for a long, long time.

And he winked at the cheerful lass in the kitchen doorway.

---

† Commonly in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, ‘out’ sounds are pronounced like a Scottish ‘oot’. Thus he really said, “I’d been thinking aboot asking her oot.”

Duping Delight

“He lied for pleasure,” Fuselier said— Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, a clinical psychologist and an FBI investigator.
In this case, he was talking about Eric Harris of Columbine notoriety. But millions of people who aren’t mass murderers also lie for pleasure. They tread beyond compulsive, they go beyond obsessive– they lie for enjoyment, gratification, and amusement.

Psychologist Paul Ekman says lying represents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile. He calls it ‘duping delight’.

It’s rare for the average person to get to know a criminal mind. I’m not talking about the desperate committer of crimes or those who’ve lost their way, but people who deliberately set out to steal or defraud for no other reason than they wish to.

Oddly enough, most fraudsters I’ve personally known have been disbarred lawyers. Truly. Wait, I’m not picking on lawyers as a class nor am I providing fodder for lawyer jokes– we can do that another time if my friend Dale turns a blind eye. But for unexplained reasons that seem beyond coincidence, the major swindlers I’ve encountered have been former attorneys and one a former judge. They all hail from Florida as well, formerly a haven for con artists and scammers selling underwater parcels of land.

My friend Sharon sent me an Orlando Sentinel article titled “Husband of disbarred attorney sues her, alleging fraud, forgery.” Strange as that sounds, it barely hints at the machinations involved… you’ve got to read the article.

It put me in mind of another lawyer whom I’ll call Dr. Bob Black.

Judge Not Lest… an opinion piece

I met ‘Dr. Black’ at a local college campus. We chatted between breaks. He failed to let on he’d been disbarred, although he mentioned numerous times he’d been a judge. He shared he was raised in financial comfort and had been well educated. His relationship with his parents, especially Bob Sr, sounded complex and later left me wondering about the residual effects.

Black had bought a minor mansion in an Orlando historical district. He’d gutted it and was in the process of slicing its interior into small apartments when the Historical Society called a halt, pointing out that ruining a historical building and establishing multi-family residences in a single-family zone was forbidden. Unfazed, Black put it up for sale, advertising it as partially converted to apartments but possibly not mentioning the legal stumbling blocks.

At the time of his real estate ventures, Bob was also hawking a computer he called the Macintosh XLS. I recognized the machine as an Apple Lisa, the forerunner to the Mac, although Black claimed it was not a Lisa but a super-advanced product that outclassed other computers— especially its price of $10 000, about five times the price of a Mac at the time.

A little research showed he was buying refurbished units from a company in Shreveport, bundling them with freeware and shareware, and offering training worth “thousands of dollars.” As it happened, he was paying less than $40 for adult classes at Winter Park Tech where my friend Geri taught. Geri found herself with more than one of his victims in her classes, including one man whose wife was dying of cancer and was barely holding together emotionally.

The Scheme

Black was buying outdated, refurbished computers for a few hundred dollars, adding freeware (free software) and $40 worth of classes, and then selling them as high-end products to the unsuspecting.

Dr. Black was a snappy dresser. Even at casual gatherings he wore suits, and under his suits he wore sweater vests, not a common sight in Florida.

He liked talking to me, even when I’d call him on some of his shenanigans. When I asked barbed questions, he showed a politely bland face, no anger or irritation at all. I wondered if he masked his feelings or felt nothing at all. Did he choose me just to have one person to talk to?

He claimed to have been a judge, and apparently that was true. The ‘Dr’ part he tacked onto his name– He liked the sound of it. Beyond the connotation of ‘juris’, it had no more meaning than the ‘Dr’ in Dr. Pepper.

Judgment-Proof

Black confided he was ‘judgment-proof’ and explained he maintained real property in his wife’s name and kept all his other assets offshore. The topic of disbarment didn’t disturb him… he simply acted as if he didn’t hear those questions, although once he hinted at a political misunderstanding.

One of his controlling peculiarities was to arrange meetings with clients at odd minutes on the clock, say 9:42 or 10:13. Black claimed he was too tightly scheduled to waste appointments on the half or quarter hour.

His attitude toward ripping off people was entirely incomprehensible to most observers. Black exhibited zero contrition but especially no shame whatsoever. He displayed a bullying arrogance toward anyone he could. He may have fancied himself superior to lesser people; others were merely ants that he righteously stepped on if they got in his way. Bob seemed to typify a sociopath in every sense of the word.

The Detective and the Reporter

A pair of related calls came in on my consulting line. Geri had referred one caller, a former New York City homicide detective who’d been defrauded by Black. The other was from our local WCPX star consumer crusader, Ellen MacFarlane. The detective happened to know Ellen’s mother, a NYC judge, and her sister, a force within the New York Department of Consumer Affairs. They asked me if I would provide technical knowledge for an exposé of Dr. Bob Black.

Ellen suffered from multiple sclerosis, but she was a fighter. I sat in on the interviews, sometimes feeding her questions. Black’s strategy was to answer no question directly. If she asked him about reselling obsolete equipment, he would respond with a rambling discourse on Steve Jobs, Reaganomics, and local gardening regulations. He exhausted the lady, but Ellen managed to air the segment.

The detective wasn’t done. He sued Black and called me as a witness.

We sat waiting for Black in the judge’s chambers. At nearly half-past the hour, the phone rang. The judge put it on speaker phone: A whimpering Black claimed he was deathly ill.

The judge said, “Frankly, Mr. Black, you don’t have much credibility around this court. However, I’ll continue this case if you get a doctor’s note to me within three days.”

Upon my return to court, I bumped into Black. He always acted polite to me and he did so this time, impervious to my cool nod. This time, the parties indicated they were considering a settlement. I wasn’t called to court again so I don’t know what, if any, judgment or restitution was involved.

To say Black was a scoundrel or a rascal is to diminish the impact he had on others. The Yiddish word ‘gonif’ comes close, implying a thief and a cheat.

Most of us would like to leave the world a better place. Besides social currency, reputation is a reflection of future self, the part that remains after we’re gone. We can’t all be great authors, musicians, artists, nurses, and teachers, but we can be good people. People who don’t care are alien to the rest of us.

I’ll bracket this article with “in my opinion,” but Black made a living from cheating people. He could argue he gave naïve people what they asked for (“They should have done their homework”) and what he promised (“So what if I sold them free software and who’s to say the $40 course isn’t worth thousands”).

For all that, my greatest astonishment centered around his lack of shame. I used to attend LegalSIG, a special interest group run by a local law firm concerning matters of business and law. Black would attend, showing no chagrin, no humiliation, not the least discomfort. Most people would not put themselves through such mortification, but Black felt no discomposure. He was internally ‘judgement-proof’ emotionally as well as financially.

Friends asked why ‘Black’ singled me out to talk. Partly, people found it easy to chat with me, even confide, but also I could listen without hating him, which I suspect many of his colleagues and victims must have done. From him, of course, I heard only fragments of his exploits. He never mentioned the word ‘victims’, but hinted those who’d fallen for his schemes were weak-minded. He sometimes suggested when his prey rose up, they were unfairly trying to victimize him for being the more clever.

I can’t read a mind like his, but I began to suspect that if he dealt with emotions at all, he might have felt no wrong. He might even have believed himself entitled, that he had the right to exploit lesser humans, those who could not harm others. If so, I feel sorry for him. But I'll never know for sure.