Empire of Stuff: Book 1 of the Calexit Trilogy

By Gerald Sand

Swimming pools. Porn stars. Canadian spies. Gerald Sand's semi-autobiographical comedy thriller takes us on a hilarious and disturbing romp from 1994 down to Day One of California's coming War of Independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483590530

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Author

I. OVER HARD (October 1994-May 1995)

It was nine P.M. and the sky had gone starry black. Unhealthy-looking palm trees disappeared upward into the cold darkness, and some other kind of jungle foliage was busy eating through a concrete overpass. The ‘Central’ train station in Los Angeles was nothing of the kind. In fifty short years, the entire city had moved fifteen kilometres to the west. Hancock Park, its poshest western suburb back when middle-class people had actually worked downtown, was now considered off the eastern edge of human civilisation. Gabriel Sleath’s fellow train passengers had made this clear; and on arrival, they practically ran to the idling cars of their nervous relatives.

In the two-hundred-metre walk to the bus stop, Sleath passed as much drifting litter as he had seen in the Canadian Maritimes in his whole twenty-year existence. The block’s presiding genius was a woman with a mane of white hair, the body of an Ethiopian famine victim, and a ragged black cloak like the one worn by Death in old one-panel cartoons. The squeaking of her rusted, three-wheeled shopping trolley could be heard from half a block away. Closer at hand, a young man with the most obvious symptoms of whooping cough sat cross-legged against a wall.

From across the street, a man Sleath guessed was an Apache stared at him, grinning mirthlessly through steel-capped teeth. This went on for two or three minutes.

And then the Apache started to walk.

Straight at Sleath.

And then to run.

There is a lot of map-reading and other miscellaneous survival-skills training in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets, and Sleath was an above-average rifleman, but short of actually taking a commission in her majesty’s forces, hand-to-hand combat was not something he’d anticipated learning about, let alone doing. Nevertheless, the calculations came fast. Whooping Cough Lad and Death Herself would be no help to man or beast. The bus-stop sign was firmly cemented in. There were no open businesses, no lighted windows; indeed, no windows that were not boarded up. Even with his heavy overcoat, a silver porringer, and a giant salami in it, Sleath’s suitcase weighed no more than five kilos, and its handle was old and brittle. The Apache was Sleath’s height, heavier, and closing fast.

A bare-handed blow to a mostly-steel jaw was out of the question. Sleath decided to fake a run to the right, pivot and punch the guy in the nuts. He was half a second from executing the fake when three shots from a 9mm pistol pap, pap, papped in the near-silence. The Apache’s eyes disappeared in a red fog and he fell forward, hard, clutching at his throat. Piss pooled by his greasy polyester slacks as he trembled and died. Two policemen in black jodhpurs and motorcycle boots approached slowly. Both had ginger moustaches.

The shorter one prodded the corpse with his toe.

‘Nice shooting, Kurt.’

‘Thanks, Len.’

The one called Kurt had already holstered his Beretta and was carrying a crappy old Luger in a clear plastic bag. He put on a pair of wrist-length black leather gloves, opened the bag, and placed the war relic in the dead man’s left hand.

‘So, kid,’ Len asked, taking out a notepad. ‘How many shots did he fire at you?’

Sleath studied the man’s huge belt of weapons and restraints. With a silent apology to his parents, and Reverend Harrison, and perhaps the concept of honesty itself, Sleath replied,

‘Four. Two at me and two at you.’

Len wrote this down. ‘Kurt, that sound right to you?’

‘Yep.’ Two shots from the Luger thudded into the brown brick wall high above Whooping Cough’s left shoulder. Then another two into the road-bed, one skittering over a manhole cover. Kurt let go of the Apache’s dead arm and kicked two of the ejected shells a little closer to the middle of the street. Verisimilitude.

‘You from England, kid?’

‘Augusta, Maine,’ Sleath answered, vaguely hoping that Maine’s physical proximity to his native New Brunswick would yield a similar accent.

‘E-n-g-l-a-n-d,’ the officer wrote. ‘Name?’

‘Ron P. Stiltson.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Spinning straw into gold.’

A filthy orange bus hove into view at the other end of the block and paused. The driver must have seen the dead body. That, or the fourth shot from the Luger had popped a tyre or something. Kurt lit his flashlight, waved it above his head, and beckoned the bus forward, his body language adamant. It complied, but slowly.

‘Word of advice, kid.’

‘Sir?’

‘Don’t go east of La Brea with a thousand-dollar suitcase.’

‘Fuck, Len,’ the other officer laughed. ‘Don’t go east of La Brea ever.’

Kurt banged his flashlight on the doors of the bus. They opened with a hiss and Sleath got in.

*

The saga of Sleath – Sleath the valiant, Sleath the terrible – had begun ten days earlier, on George Street in Fredericton. The weirdly gable-covered blue timber house in which he had grown up overlooked an almost wholly dissimilar house of the same great age, and the massy brown stone Anglican church that he and his parents attended exactly twice per year. Sleath trudged back through the slush from an exceptionally dull Hallowe’en party up the street, hosted by a fellow UNB student whom he was half-heartedly trying to seduce because of her purely physical resemblance to The Lost One. With a warming beer and a mounting sense of regret, Sleath had watched as twelve boys dressed as pirates, Romans, and sheikhs tried to impress seven girls, all of whom had chosen erroneously to believe that cats are sexy, and as a corollary, that putting eyebrow pencil on the tip of your nose is sufficient to make you look like a cat.

Sleath’s front door opened with a familiar, timeless creak. His mother sat in the warm incandescent glow of the living room, un-rocking in a turned maple rocking chair, mending a red and black hooked rug that completely covered her lower body. She was every bit as chubby, blonde and deeply relaxed as Sleath himself was gaunt, dark and intense. In a separate pool of yellow light at the Irish Georgian partners’ desk beyond, the great white head of Mr. Sleath Sr. nodded slowly as the great white hands tagged silver spoons.

‘You’re home early, Gabe.’

‘Yes. The party was – just not very interesting.’ He placed his sombrero on the coat rack and his black moustache in the waste-paper basket. ‘Any market for two authentically detailed Colt Navy-style cap guns?’

‘Put them on the kitchen table, dear. How’s Jenny?’

‘She’s just – fine.’ He very deliberately scraped the crud off his boots before stepping farther into the room. ‘I’ve decided to go. To Los Angeles.’

Mrs. Sleath looked down at her rug and frowned. ‘Isn’t that where Chloe went?’

Mr. Sleath Sr. coughed; it was more like the bark of a rather displeased wolf. ‘Clear on the other side of fricking Jonathan-Land.’

‘What about your studies?’ his mother said evenly.

‘Well, I’m convinced that re-use is the answer to the landfill problem, and a lot of other problems. And you know I’ve always wanted to start my own shop. Not in competition with yours, of course. And if I’m going, I might as well go all the way to the biggest and most wasteful market in the history of the world.’

‘I suppose you’ll want money.’

‘No, Dad.’

‘No?’

‘All I would need is six items, now in stock, and which I picked up in the first place.’

‘Well,’ said Mr. Sleath Sr. after hearing the list of merchandise. ‘If it were your sister or brother or any of your cousins, I would pretty much lock them in the cupboard under the stairs. But …’

‘Gabe, you’re the most resourceful person your father and I have ever met. We have no doubt you’ll make a great success of this. But remember, America is … it’s just a place. Take their money, but don’t get mixed up in anything.’

‘I won’t.’

Sleath meant them at time, but untruer words had never been spoken.

In the end, his parents made only two other requests: that he take some salami with him, and that he visit his American cousin Steve Drucker, a senior at Dartmouth, on the way south through New Hampshire.

And so it came to pass that on Bonfire Night 1994, Gabriel Sleath UE, one week into his twenties and whistling Johnny Cope, deserted his native soil, walked undocumented across the border into Jonathan-Land at Vanceboro, Maine, and stuck out his thumb. He wore an RCAF Omega chronograph wristwatch, a fur-lined bogatyrka hat from the Russian Civil War, a British Army greatcoat fully provenanced to General Orde Wingate, and a 1935-dated, Musa-Shiya-signed Hawaiian shirt featuring a design of off-white palm trees on a midnight blue ground. In his left hand he carried a pre-war French designer suitcase, containing (in addition to three prodigious salamies) a silver porringer made in Boston in 1772. There is no truth to the subsequent legend that Sleath whittled a hickory pole from which he suspended twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold maple leaf coins in a red bandana, and walked all the way to Los Angeles with it slung over his shoulder. That is the kind of stupid shit that only happens in animated mouse movies and Jacques Callot etchings.

But in the eerie way of such legends, and unbeknownst to Sleath or anyone else, the retail value of the six above-named items was almost exactly twenty thousand dollars.

*

A wall of blond beef known as ‘Druck’ to his fraternity brothers, Stevens Drucker broke his promise to meet his cousin Gabriel Sleath at the bus stop on Wheelock Street in Dartmouth. Sleath had to find the frat house using a ‘Not To Scale’ local tourist map and the Silvy trekking compass he’d been presented with by the headmaster of Whelpley-Thomas upon winning his Army Cadet Gold Star. In hindsight, cold ears or no, arriving at the Dartmouth chapter of Phi Gamma Upsilon wearing a pointy Soviet hat was not the best choice. The bogatyrka was ripped from his head the moment he stepped through the door; but two keg-stands and a dozen avowals of capitalism later, ‘Druck’s Commie Brother’ might have been their friend of many years.

Drucker finished the weak Spanish beer clutched in his teeth, not touching it with his hands. He spat the empty bottle to the floor, and continued to bounce up and down, toga flapping over his maroon Woodstock ’94 t-shirt, arms locked with the nearly identical men on either side. Gabriel Sleath, who was nearly six feet tall and not considered slight by Commonwealth standards, reflected that he could have fit both his legs inside Druck’s thigh.

From his defensive position on the shag carpet in the corner by the record player, Sleath continued to marvel at the lack of family resemblance. Drucker was a Sleath on his mother’s side, but not very closely related to the Fredericton Sleaths. His Canadian great-great grandmother Harriet Sleath had moved to Boston after the Great Fire of Saint John, in 1877, and had married into simulated Yankee gentry of the most repulsive variety. By the 1950s, the small, amoral family Harriet had spawned was rich enough to buy back the Old Sleath House in Fairfield County, Connecticut, which had been built in 1680, and which a bunch of fucking Jonathans had stolen in typically violent and disgusting circumstances in the winter of 1778.

Within the extended family, it was rumoured that Druck’s father – finding himself in some financial difficulties in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash – torched the Old Sleath House, got away with it, built an exact replica of it with the insurance money, and banked a six-figure profit. Certainly, the quality of the replica house was good enough, just, to get him a medal from the local Historical Preservation biddies. It was now decorated with items calculated to suggest that Drucker the Elder was a big-game hunter (he was not). Gabriel Sleath did not know of this design scheme, of course, because while the Druckers had routinely invited themselves to Fredericton during the canoeing season, reciprocal invitations to Fairfield were not made at any time.

An hour later, as he searched for an unoccupied washroom, Sleath’s Russian hat was returned to him by a kind-faced girl with perfect makeup and severe black bangs. Sleath asked whom she knew at the party. After silently applauding his correct use of ‘whom’, she replied, ‘No one. I’m doing field work for a class at Cornell.’

‘In what subject?’

‘Male Chauvinism four-thirty-four.’

He never found out if this was a real class. The girl said she’d grown up Quaker and her name was Jean. On a horrible brown cloth couch, Jean and Sleath lay side by side telling wild, half-true stories about grandparents (two of hers were from Bristol, England) and siblings and pets and space aliens and laughing and taking short naps.

‘But why do you call Americans Jonathans?’ she asked.

‘Sorry, we all say it back home. From Brother Jonathan? He preceded Uncle Sam and Columbia as the personification of the U.S.A. In, um, political cartoons.’

‘Before Uncle Sam? That’s a long time ago.’

‘It doesn’t seem quite as long, if a Jonathan stole your house,’ he said, grinning and hitting her lightly with a pillow. ‘And orchard, grist-mill, dairy cow, four horses, three pistols, two swords, fifty-four Amsterdam pounds of cheese, two hundred Queen Anne gallons of Madeira wine …’

The mad inventory of grievances shortly reduced them both to peals of helpless laughter.

When dawn came Jean sucked Sleath’s cock. He didn’t expect this, though she’d been planning to do it for six hours or more. When he reciprocated with two fingers and a thumb she nearly brought the house down. It was the first whole waking hour in which he had not thought of Chloe Douglas since the summer of 1991.

Less than a minute after Jean’s climax, the basement lounge in which they lay was invaded by huge whooping boys. Sleath stood, assuming they needed placating. It was, after all, not yet seven A.M. ‘Sorry if we woke you, Rod. Todd.’

‘Woke us? Fuck! We’ve been up all night watching the results!’ Hoots and cheers.

‘Results?’

Led by the one called Todd, these proceeded in call-and-response fashion as the brothers, Druck included, continued to crowd into the room.

‘Governorships?’

‘Eight!’

‘Senate seats?’

‘Ten!’

‘House seats?’

‘Fifty-four!’

Over the next few seconds, Sleath groped his way to the knowledge that the Republican Party had gained overall control of the U.S. Congress for the first time since the early 1950s, despite new elections being held seemingly every ten minutes. He was spun around by a massive arm and found himself face to face with Druck, beer-stench rolling from his leering maw.

‘Gabe, did you bone this fat chick?’

‘You’re one to talk, Bluto,’ Sleath responded with a jocular arm-punch. Laughter at Druck’s expense came from the crowd; Druck turned to argue with it. Sleath slumped to Jean’s side, took her hand and kissed it.

Three hours later, Sleath and Druck were sitting with Jean at a diner on South Main Street that served beer with its traditional breakfast fare. Jovial bickering over tax policy filled the uncomfortable silence that resulted when Druck and Jean realised they had no friends in common. Sleath was baffled by this discussion, but silent for a different reason.

As often happened, was remembering something with crystal clarity, something that should have struck him as odd when it happened, but didn’t. Between the second and third of last night’s keg stands, Sleath had mentioned Chloe, and Druck had mumbled that she was a ‘real nice girl’. Yet, as Sleath now recollected, during both of Druck’s visits to New Brunswick since he himself had met Chloe, she had been out of the province: the first time in British Columbia and the second in Switzerland.

As the splendid hourglass figure of Jean A. McIlteer (Balch Hall room 71) stepped out of the crosswalk and out of view, Sleath turned to his cousin and asked:

‘So when did you meet Chloe?’

The big man completed the third beer of the breakfast. ‘September. No, enda August.’

‘What year, though?’

‘This year, dipshit.’

Dumbstruck, Sleath clenched his oversized hard plastic iced-coffee cup with both hands.

‘Yeah, she stayed with me for a coupla days on her way to New York.’

‘You mean L.A.’

‘Yeah, whatever. Actress stuff. She was real nice.’

‘So she just turned up? Here?’

‘Free country. Got my number from your mom.’

‘What did you guys talk about?’

‘Y’know, stuff. She said you were hung like a moose. She needed somebody smaller-dicked. Oh, and with a Ferrari.’

‘Not about me. About where she was going to live, where she was hoping to find work.’

‘Nah. L.A.’s dirt cheap, she’ll have just rolled up and found somewhere to crash. You can go a month there on three, four hundred bucks and have an awesome time.’

They joked and chatted for a few more minutes about other things. Then, as was his eleven A.M. custom, Druck headed for the gym to do some lifting with his buddies from ROTC. Sleath said goodbye and returned to the frat house, ostensibly because he had left his (non-existent) passport. In fact, he questioned two of the more hung-over brothers about Chloe. Independently of one another, they confirmed that she had stayed with Druck, in his room, for between two and three weeks.

*

The border between L.A. and Culver City was just an arbitrary line in the street, but the difference between the L.A. City buses and the Culver City ones was as profound as that between East and West Germany. Sleath’s ride through Koreatown was memorable chiefly for a passenger who skated up and down the aisle on rollerblades, dragging behind him a golf club, or rather a former golf club, which months or years of being dragged on pavements had sharpened to a wicked, shiny point. It would have been the work of a moment to transform it from a rudder into a deadly war-hammer. The man’s eyes, hidden behind blue mirrored sunglasses, revealed nothing. Sleath found himself wondering, absurdly, if the skater was blind.

At two A.M., at one of fifty diners on Sepulveda Boulevard, Sleath ordered breakfast.

‘How’d you like your eggs,’ the young dumpy yellow-polyester waitress asked, or really just said.

‘Fried.’

She looked at him for the first time. ‘You mean over medium?’

‘I’m not sure. I just want them to look like a typical picture of some cooked eggs. Like this picture here. I like the yolks to be hard enough that I can cut them out without them breaking.’

The waitress’s face continued falling. ‘So, over hard?’

‘I suppose. Whatever you say. I’m new to California, just arrived this evening.’

Whatever light was left in her eyes died quickly. ‘Three eggs, over hard.’

When the eggs came, all the yolks were not merely broken; their broken bits were so thoroughly mixed together with the whites that Sleath could obtain no pure piece of either that was larger than his thumbnail. Hungry and queasy, he left the morass uneaten.

One blissfully short and lunatic-free bus ride later, Sleath walked into the neon tiki courtyard of Beano’s Motel. His legs were soaked to the skin, the work of a lawn sprinkler on a timer. The old Scotsman behind the high desk took thirty of Sleath’s last three hundred and twenty dollars and handed him a key on a blue plastic fob.

‘Your name Mr. Stealth?’

‘Sleath?’

‘You’ve got a message.’

It could only have been from the cops. Sleath’s heart did a backflip.

Beano, if that was indeed his name, handed Sleath a green cardboard Leake of Northampton shoebox. It was marked ‘G. SLEATH’ in black felt-tip, and bound firmly with office tape. It was almost as heavy as his suitcase, and unwieldy with it.

‘Thanks?’

‘Check out is at ten-thirty.’ Beano’s tone disinvited any further conversation.

In his square, low-ceilinged, brown-shag-carpeted upstairs room, Sleath used the key to saw the box open. Inside, next to a thick wad of ten-dollar bills, was a dull grey Canadian Inglis pistol. Unusually, it had a five-hundred-metre adjustable ramp sight, and was slotted for a shoulder stock. There were two thirteen-round magazines, both loaded, one in the gun and one in the external magazine pouch of a green flapped holster. Two fifty-round cardboard boxes contained more ammo, half of it military ball and the other half ‘man-stopper’ hollowpoints.

A receipt from Dunn & Sons Guns Guns and More! Guns of Washington Boulevard, Culver City, revealed that the whole rig had been purchased that June for four hundred dollars plus tax. On the back of the receipt was a note written neatly in green fountain pen.

Sleath! Looks as though you need a proper place to live, old man. Meet me tomorrow at three at the Beverly Hills Hunt Club. Bring your new pistola. Hint: the Club is nowhere near Beverly Hills. Hint no. 2: buy a Tomas Guide, be it with your last penny. –Mackannel

Sleath placed the note on the plasticky table with a kind of suspicious awe. The only Mackannel he knew was a much older boy from Whelpley-Thomas. That boy had gone on to RMCC Kingston and thence, Sleath had heard, home to Gagetown via service in the Oka Crisis with Princess Louise’s Canadian Hussars, the ‘Crazy Eights’. How could he possibly have known which motel, in a city of twenty million people, Sleath would stay in? When Sleath himself had only picked it twenty minutes ago, at random, from the window of a moving bus? For that matter, what was Mackannel doing in Los Angeles at all?

*

The largely windowless low concrete building in a weedy expanse of waste ground by some railway tracks and an empty canal was, in truth, about as unlike a Beverly Hills club as a person raised by television could readily imagine. But Sleath’s immediate family had never owned a TV, so he proceeded in a state of unblemished acceptance. Paunchy men with grey moustaches, some in Veterans of Foreign Wars sidecaps or U.S.-military-themed baseball hats, passed purposefully between the club and their nondescript American-made cars, carrying little murderous bags and boxes. The air had a bitter chemical reek that had nothing to do with the gunfire, barely audible from inside. Having joined the club for one day for a token sum, and having established that Mackannel was not already inside (it was only two-thirty), Sleath returned to the parking area.

He did not have long to wait.

The roar of the Jensen Interceptor’s seven-litre engine preceded it considerably. It was so loud, in fact, that it set off the car alarm of every car parked along Olympic Boulevard. As the metallic sage-green behemoth pulled up, half a dozen club members clasped their hands over their ears. Adding insult to injury, the driver then blared the horn: one of those custom airhorns – illegal in California but beloved of Mexican long-haul truck drivers – that plays a tune. This one played La Cucaracha. Mackannel parked two metres from the front door at no particular angle and got out. His face was difficult for Sleath to remember clearly, but apart from that, the guy hadn’t changed much: six foot two, medium build, tidy dark ’fifties-movie-star hair. He waved dismissively at a middle-aged ex-marine who was giving him The Finger.

A short, droopy-faced, very old man in big sunglasses got out of the Jensen’s passenger seat, shook Sleath’s hand and introduced himself as Hume. Sleath noticed that, unlike those of the other visitors, Mackannel’s pistol was not concealed, but in a tan leather shoulder-holster, prominently worn over a dark Hawaiian shirt very similar to Sleath’s own.

The pissed-off marine noticed the holster too.

‘It’s called a concealed carry permit for a reason, fuckwad!’

‘It’s called diplomatic immunity, sir,’ Mackannel shouted back cheerily.

‘What the fuck?’

‘God save the Queen. Have a nice day.’

Six hundred rounds apiece later, Sleath felt he would never be as good a shot as his schoolmate, but still pretty good. Hume also shot accurately, and with considerable glee. Out of ammunition and unwilling either to go to Dunn & Sons for more, or to pay the club’s inflated prices, they rumbled north, an early Jed Dilligan album just audible over the engine noise. After about ten minutes, they turned in to an apparently unclaimed four acres of tarmac. People were practically killing each other for parking meters on every side.

‘It’s tenants-only parking for an earthquake-condemned and evacuated building,’ Mackannel explained. ‘Someone will claim it and start charging a fortune for it sooner or later. Until then it’s a tow-away zone. Except for us,’ he added, pointing to his car’s plate, which read DIPLOMAT/TG-2R.

‘Real?’ Sleath asked, as casually as he could.

‘My uncle Colin is the second consul. And in case you’re too polite to ask the follow-up question: yes, I actually do work for him.’

They had arrived at Munty’s Steaks, an utterly improbable round mafia penthouse with panoramic views and a placard advertising a soul singer called Prince Thaddeus. The cloudy pink sunset looked as fake as everything else. Without asking where they wanted to sit, the hostess conducted them out to a red booth in an otherwise empty private room at the back, nearly as large as the main dining room.

Without asking what they wanted, Hume ordered a round of double Irish whiskies and talked for a few minutes about his wife, whom he had loved deeply, and who had recently died. ‘That’s a very nice watch,’ he said to Sleath at length. ‘Maybe the nicest watch I’ve seen.’

‘And no ordinary watch,’ Sleath said, taking it off and handing it to him.

‘It’s a Royal Canadian Air Force Omega-Lemania HA-sixty, isn’t it?’ Hume growled.

‘Close. It’s the HA-fifty-eight.’

‘Hogwash,’ Hume said.

‘No such thing,’ added Mackannel, who happened to be wearing a 1949 Royal Navy Lemania HS-9.

Sleath took the Omega gently back from Hume, removed the black nylon strap, and showed Mackannel the back of the case.

‘What does it say?’ Hume demanded impatiently.

Mackannel read it to him, frowning. ‘RCAF, HA five eight stroke nought, nought, nought, one. J. Zurakowski, twenty-fifth of March 1958.’

‘But that…’

‘Zurakowski flew the Avro Arrow on its maiden flight!’

‘Wearing that.’

‘Horsefeathers.’

‘When was the maiden flight of the Arrow?’

‘Do you want me to read the back of the damn watch again?’

‘Assuming this isn’t an HA-sixty that you re-engraved your damn self,’ Hume said, ‘how much do you want for it?’

Sleath thought carefully. ‘We should have it valued by three valuers. One