“Exiles Under the Bridge” a Novel by Andrew B. Hurvitz Rory in the RV
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
“Exiles Under the Bridge” A Novel By Andrew B. Hurvitz Rory in the RV On the outskirts of Pasadena, along the western border where it straddles the Arroyo Seco in its hollow, an old, dented RV was parked, behind a grove of oaks, aside a concrete encased stream where the water hardly flows. A half-mile upstream from the rusty and forgotten and marooned vehicle, The Colorado Street Bridge, magnificent, arched, soared overhead, a civic marker of grace and strength. Rory Calhoun Gilmore, 47, lived in the RV. He ventured out by day, collecting bottles and cans. He crawled back inside at night, into his furtive shelter, and slept on the floor on a bed of newspapers. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 2 He had a part-time job as a warehouse worker at Cabinet Town, a Chinese owned kitchen remodeling store, in San Gabriel. He would take the bus out there on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, earn about $200, paid in cash on Saturday night, and come back and live in the RV where his only expense was nothing. Rory had stringy, long, gray hair and a scraggly beard, frozen like a waterfall in winter. Thorns and sunburns whittled his long, expressive hands into reddish parched appendages caked with dust and brushed with motor oil. He was tall, walked with a limp and he used a tree branch cane. A wool herringbone driving cap obscured his eyes under a visor of shadow. Despite his disabilities, he got around at a fast pace, walking deliberately, to nowhere in particular. In his vagrancy he still had dignity. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 3 He worked hard at Cabinet Town, lifting and unloading heavy boxes, wheeling them in and out of the hand truck, sweeping floors, organizing shelves of doors and hardware. These work tasks kept him thin, kept him alive, kept him possessed of some small measure of self-worth. He was not just a homeless man, he was a non-conformist, and he wanted to remain just that. When he went out along the sidewalks of Colorado Boulevard, noisily pushing a steel basket of rattling cans and bottles, quite a few strangers were enamored by him, drawn into his ruined beauty, a cane-carrying prophet of Old Town Pasadena, a biblical Brad Pitt. Something in his dishevelment seemed untrue, for he looked, under his mask of filth, once patrician. Indeed, he was. His family was prominent, old Angelenos who made money in oil and real estate. Now Rory ventured alone, disconnected, severed from his relations. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 4 His parents, George and Edna, had brought up Rory and his older brother Ed in a 4-bedroom, 3-car garage home across from the same parkland, the same arroyo, where he now lived in his RV, homeless. Once upon a time, he was the beautiful boy in the beautiful house with the beautiful mom, and it must have seemed, so long ago, that nothing bad would ever befall this favored son. He had fallen far from his privileged roots. He could look across from his encampment and see his childhood home on S. Arroyo, a custom-built ranch on a half-acre. It had crisscrossed paned windows, olive green, stained siding over red brick, and a low-pitched roof with wide eaves, a shady residence under the oaks, a study in relaxed casual, luxuriant rusticity. On winter nights in the RV, shivering, wrapped in blankets, he recalled his childhood of chilly nights in the 1970s when his family burned logs and sat on shag rugs in a dark den illuminated by fire and clicked by crackle. The adults drank sherry, the children played Scrabble. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 5 That was long ago, in California, 50 years ago, when telephones were plugged into the wall, people showered with bar soap, read newspapers, consumed black pepper as an exotic spice, and hung café curtains and wood shutters in wall-to-wall carpeted bedrooms papered in gold and black wallpaper. That was then, when Rory was young, when everything foolish and dangerous was a learning experience, and the cops knew your name, and they stopped to help you when you had fallen off your bike. But modern America, in its feverish decline, caught up with Rory Calhoun Gilmore and not even his inherited position insulated him from mass indifference to individual suffering in these harrowing 21st Century times. He went on, surviving, without his brother, without his dead parents. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 6 He ate saltines culled from the trash and drank sodas discarded on the dirt-hiking path near the bridge. He nourished himself with local plants, nibbling on red Toyon berries growing all around the chaparral, smashing fallen walnuts with fist-sized rocks. He washed himself in bottled water and wiped off with oak leaves and newspapers. Rory still knew the Arroyo well and got around in the dark and the light; on bike, on foot, always exploring without fear. There was still a foolish bravery about him. Sleep terrified him most. He often woke up screaming, gasping for breath, full on night terrors. When he shouted, he threw off the coats and sheets that covered him, and bolted up, sweaty and disoriented, under the musty down jackets, jeans and t-shirts. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 7 To a hypochondriac symptoms of the mind, imaginary or real, are all the same. The terrors of going mad, of dizziness, of getting lost in the very backyard he knew so well, all these fears conspired to unhinge him. He had a prescription for Clozapine. It calmed him. But sometimes he would just forget to take it. He had grown up bi-polar but his illness was under control. And then, after 30, he stopped his medications. And lost his mind. On the day he lost his mind again the weather was sunny, the air was brisk, the temperatures cool, and the mountains stood crisp, clear and infallible. Those sparkling days in Southern California when it seems nothing can go wrong are always tragic. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 8 The day he lost his mind it was dawn, just morning and Rory was in his car, stopped at a red light at Orange Grove and Colorado. And he was seized with terror for no damn good reason. He abandoned his car and ran back south down Orange Grove, tearing his shirt off, pulling his belt out of the pants, falling on the ground, wrestling with his pants, stripping them off and screaming. Everyone drove by and nobody stopped. After that panic attack, Rory went to live, somewhere east of Duarte, and told nobody. He went into the great, lost America wandering, ill, without family and hope. Then somehow, like a migrating bird, he circled back to Pasadena. He moved down into the Arroyo, within the woods, along a hill beside his old house. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 9 2017: The Fire They were four teens who were out late at night, looking for trouble. They rode their bikes down to the Arroyo and went into the park. They saw an RV. They laughed. They went to gather some wood and dried leaves. They stuffed it all into some large plastic garbage bags. Quietly, next to midnight, they placed the flammable bags under the trailer where Rory slept. And one of the boys took a plastic lighter and ignited the debris. And they all biked off fast, holding their hands over their mouths to suppress laughter, cycling up the hill, jumping off their bikes on the street, falling down in spasms of idiocy, getting back on their wheels and riding off into the night hoping they killed someone. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 10 Rory awoke to find the RV ablaze. He was blinded and choked by the smoke. He pushed his way out of the door into the darkness. He coughed violently, expelling heaves of smoke out of his lungs, gasping for breath as flames consumed the RV. The fire leapt out of the trailer and ignited some nearby trees. And then the whole scene was a massacre of burning wood, leaves, brush, grass; blackened branches, melted plastic, followed by the popping, staccato rustle of fire and then an exploding propane tank. On the ground, face caked in dirt, staring up at his saviors, he was revived with filtered air behind an oxygen mask, surrounded by emergency medical technicians, firefighters and flashing red lights. The first responders carried him on gurney, up the hill into the waiting ambulance, just across the street from his childhood home. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 11 The Gilmores Rory’s father, George Gilmore, had family backing, backing to pursue creative endeavors, like screenwriting, which he imagined himself talented at. He became friends with some movie people, most notably writer Dominick Dunne, who introduced him to studio people, writers, producers and actors. In 1969 George wrote a screenplay, “Lincoln the Savior” and gave it to Mr. Dunne, who showed it to Director Sidney Lumet, who never read it. George wrote another spec in 1970. Exiles Under the Bridge Hurvitz, Andrew 12 “General Grant and the Missus” was a potential vehicle for Paul Newman and Faye Dunaway. But that script sat unsold and unread even though George judged it to be a superb successor to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He groomed himself as an erudite WASP would. He was a conservative dresser, keeping his hair trimmed well into the early 1970s.