The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Love with the Proper Structure

    Zeroing in on the yawing wound of her loss, Minerva had said she had loved Hotel Julian. There are lots of other buildings in Los Angeles, I offered, to assuage her pain – penalty, I thought to myself, for not taking better care of what she claimed to love. But it wasn’t the building she loved, the structure, all those parts lovingly dismantled and carried out by the scroungers, scavengers, salvagers. To love a plate of hot salty fries cooled with catsup, the same love as for a Coney Island hot dog and a cold beer at the ballpark on a summer afternoon as the crowd settles in to a quiet fourth inning, is not the same love one might feel for a fearless fox terrier, or an alley cat rescued from a winter rain, or a baby of necessity given up by its teen mother, or the love for an abusive father or mother whose needs can never be satisfied by the child. Jesus said to love the Father with all your heart, soul, and mind; he didn’t say you had to be happy about it. Likewise, he said to love others as you love yourself; but he didn’t say what to do if you don’t love yourself, if you suffer from anhedonia, if your self esteem has been lowered to the level of a creeping worm. But a worm will turn, as the saying goes, and pressed to love, will. Love is desire that never dies. We often want something that may not be good for us, and the satisfactions those loves might provide quickly peter out, but true love (to coin a phrase) is a want for something that is always good for us, even if that good does not produce the same kinds of satisfactions or gratifications we’ve come to enjoy and want again and again, and which we eventually might come to realize are actually insatiable, and we can only want more. To love is to want less, not more, to be fulfilled, not emptied. To structure is to build, compose, make up.

    “Love with the Proper Structure” is episode 43 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Deconstruction

    Vulnerable was the word Minerva used to describe her building. To keep Hotel Julian afloat, keep up with increases in taxes, licenses, and fees, increases in costs of goods and services, including even a bare bones health care plan for her full time employees, would require new investment, resources, growth, but how would this tired, effete old woman grow an old hotel, expand its business? There was some discussion of building an aggressive, improved business plan, and buying used properties in affordable areas and copying the Hotel Julian model, creating a chain, a brand. That was a pipe dream. The building was wounded, noncompliance its Achilles Heel. We had 30 days to get out, before This Building Condemned notices were issued and displayed, the building then boarded up, sold, and handed over to a commercial developer. But as word of Minerva’s terms of surrender got out, and even before all the current residents could vacate, any number of contractors, recyclers, restoration businesses, carpenters, dismantlers, collectors and antiques dealers, inquired about purchase then invaded to carry the building off in parts. Clearly the hotel was not a sum of its parts. A kind of emergentism became evident. The value of the parts, extracted and made independent of the whole, could not be predicted by appraisal of the whole. A careful, observant, respectful deconstruction started, workers carrying off solid panel doors, and separate from the doors their hardware, glass door knobs, brass hinges. And clear fir sills, window casements, iron weights, leaded glass windows, double hung windows with sagging glass. Radiators, moldings, paneling, chandeliers, bathroom fixtures, porcelain tubs, tongue and groove hardwood flooring. Copper and galvanized pipe. The entire fire escape apparatus. Wall hangings, pictures, rugs, tile, railings, steps. Furniture: walnut bed frames, roll top desks, tables and chairs. The lending library of books from the fallout shelter with the bookcase – purchased and hauled off by Father Juan for Xavier’s school. Full dimensional lumber: 2 by 4’s, 4 by 4’s, 2 by 12’s. Huge basement beams and solid wood headers, the building by then hurriedly vacated. Another staff meeting was called, this one held across the street from the hotel in Minerva’s backyard. She handed each employee an envelope containing a severance bonus made possible by the sales of the individual parts of Hotel Julian, sweetening just a bit the bitter goodbyes.

    “Deconstruction” is episode 42 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • An Air of Bad Ease

    An air of bad ease descended upon the rooftop gathering as employees of Hotel Julian listened to Minerva explain her predicament, and, by process of detrimental reliance, their own. Commercial buildings, particularly those housing paying guests, were subject to strict codes designed to protect the public against construction dangers inherent in aging and disrepair of physical systems that might result in unforeseen and unexpected loss to property or life. The purpose of updated codes was to minimize the uncertainty of loss. While Minerva tried to focus on the cost of updating, including the interruption to business, which would probably put the employees out of work long enough they would have to find work elsewhere, Julian argued the building should qualify for state and national historical interest and preservation. Either way, Minerva countered, the costs would be a show stopper. But there might be preservation funds or grants available for which they could apply. But the project would require neighborhood support, and that was certainly uncertain. Besides, current guests could ill afford future rates required to sustain a renovated project. Would there come a new clientele? In this neighborhood? Did Julian want to participate in a gentrification project? Dour looks and quiet space filled the conversation, which was, for the most part, between Minerva and her son. Hotel Julian was, after all, a family owned business. And there was the problem of the tunnel, built under the public road without permit or any kind of engineering approval. The tunnel coming to light had afforded the inspectors no end of curiosity and enjoyment. At that, faces with frowns glowered in my direction. Prior renovations to the building, particularly the one of the late 1940s, adulterated its original character to a degree it would be difficult to argue its historical nature or value. And now an elevator would need to be installed. The fire escape ladders could no longer be used to access the rooftop for public tavern use. There wasn’t anything about the rooftop bar that met any kind of code, license, or fee requirement. Seamen had been berthing in the hotel since the late 1800s; surely that provided some proof of historical interest. There was no business plan. They had, in a sense, been stealing from the business, letting the building deteriorate from improper maintenance. They had let it go, much as a person aging might be prone to let their own body go, ignoring exercise, diet, health care. Not that they didn’t care for their body, or their mind, but that the maintenance and upkeep became too much to bear. The old building contained a history of stories few today cared about. Neighborhoods change, and they had simply gone with the flow, in part, though, responsible for the direction that flow had taken. They were not slumlords, but a low rent district had evolved over time in their surrounds. They had adapted. Minerva asked for suggestions and questions. What about turning the building into a maritime museum? Find a new owner, one willing to invest in the old. The air on the rooftop, rarely used during the day, the sun rising, warming, then heating the tar roof, became too hot without umbrellas, and Minerva adjourned the meeting without ceremony or decision. I stayed on the roof, still nursing my morning coffee, walking the perimeter, watching the yachts come and go down in the harbor, and saw a few sailors dressed in white pulling detail on a distant Navy Destroyer deck. I was thinking about what might come next, while the others climbed down to go to work. I felt at ease, even as I felt somewhat bad about that easy feeling that comes from an ability to both care and not to care when presented with a prospect designed for either.

    “An Air of Bad Ease” is episode 41 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Code Violations

    A supposedly random building inspection by various authorities at large resulted in a temporary closure of Hotel Julian due to multiple code violations: plumbing, electrical, health – the grammar of business, industry, and construction. Because of the hourly, daily, and weekly services the hotel historically provided, the clientele the hotel attracted consisted primarily of maritime workers or fleet members in a time of severe housing shortages, but its purpose also aided in the growth of a culture of nomadic, vagrant, loitering, independent, outlier peoples arising over the years in its immediate environs. That culture was, come and go, at times more active than others, evident in weekend sidewalk and local park arts and crafts fairs and farmers markets, music busking evenings in parks and outside restaurants and taverns, a monthly swap meet at a defunct outdoor drive-in movie theatre, a local free medical clinic, underground crash pads and overcrowding of rental houses. Also, in panhandling and promiscuous drug use, prostitution, and petty crime incidents some members of the community were alarmed by, and the hotel was often the subject of debate and scapegoating at meetings of local neighborhood and business associations who put pressure on the local government institutions to crack down on illicit behavior. Following the most recent inspection, Minerva was served papers and this property condemned was suddenly a real possibility. At the same time, local gentrification opportunities resulted in her receiving two competing unsolicited offers to purchase the hotel – for demolition. She called for an unprecedented meeting with Julian and the entire hotel staff as well as the proprietors and employees of the ground floor businesses. Rumor had it, she was going to drop out and sell.

    “Code Violations” is episode 40 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • The Yachts

    Before not long at all, Cajetan got caught in the capture spiral of the fancy riggings of yacht harbor life, seduced by marine varnish and well groomed boats, afternoon Long Island iced teas sipped on a securely docked deck, and untouchable ship’s daughters yearning, not to mention, to hear him tell it, a few ship’s mothers in the bounty. That some best man would certainly unceremoniously cut him adrift should his sycophant stowaway piracies be discovered only seemed to quicken his thirst to drink straight from the yacht hoses – the blower, the bilge, the drain line. He quickly promoted from cleaning boats to supervising the cleaning of boats, and with barely a month’s experience casting about the harbor for starlight opportunities, he started up his own hull cleaning diving company, a one man show, a startup enterprise he was keen to offer me a partnership in as he planned the floating of an initial public offering. All he needed was a bit more capital. I rushed to assure him he had no idea how moody a harbor could be, how skillfully the owners could cast him from dockside to a dirty ocean while they continued to hop yacht to yacht rarely if ever testing their prows against the same seas he grew up in. I told him his two weeks before the mast seemed to have netted him little more than more want, and he’d end up walking some endless plank of broken dreams if he did not soon “heel to his own keel.”

    “The Yachts” is episode 39 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • Postcard from Sylvie

    I wandered over to the post office at Fort MacArthur to check General Delivery and found I had a postcard from Sylvie: Hi, G! With team in Japan 3rd day of 9 day whirlwind tour with 3 game series at the Hiroshima Stadium vs the Carp. Visited the Peace Memorial yesterday. Very sober. Team in good shape, but lost first game to Carp, 5 to 3. Got 6 ok innings out of starter Bell, who gave up 3 runs on 2 walks and a double in the third then a solo homer in the 5th, then bunt, stolen base, and walk off double off reliever Potts by Carp in bottom of 9th. Heading out to ballpark now for some publicity interviews, pics, etc. Hope all’s well w you! Love, Sylvie. Continued walk and from the views around Fort MacArthur I took in the ocean, thinking of the possibility of a neutrino like trip through the waves and I’d instantly be able to join Sylvie at the ballpark and take in the game in Japan with some salty peanuts and a couple of beers and maybe a sushi and rice bento. Instead, I found my way over to the harbor and walked down a ramp to check out the yachts, and there I found Cajetan who had found a job cleaning boats. We agreed to meet up for a beer later on the Rooftop. I walked back to Hotel Julian and pinned Sylvie’s postcard to the wall by the side of my bed, with the pic of the Peace Memorial facing out, and fell asleep and dreamed of meetings and presentations and trips up and down the West Coast thwarted by failed connections, ticketing issues, floods, and train wrecks, roads rising and falling like waves.

    “Postcard from Sylvie” is episode 38 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • Report

    No longer did I keep track of days or dates, months or seasons, maintained no spreadsheets or accounting tables, those oversize green grid papers of boxes for numbers, vertical and horizontal reticulums storing data – what was given, what was taken, what was traded, what was sold, what was lost, what was gained. I had no vision, no mission statement, no objectives, no goals, no action plans, no target dates, no metrics. Business, commerce, like most other human enterprises, relies on language, and I had not yet lost words. The idea of praying, in particular, without words, had not yet come to me. Thus I continued my daily inventories, posting to my pocket notebook what I’d seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt – the fat and flour of living one day at a time, no calendar, no appointment book, no contact list, no cold calls, no hot calls, no calls at all. No leads to follow up on. No inbox. No outbox. I remained aware of my unique position of privilege and how I’d obtained it, specifically the $300 million I’d pilfered from Walter, but just for a few hours, just long enough to cipher off some capital affording me a position from which I could both care and not care, though I had yet to learn to sit still. To report is to back carry, to carry on one’s back what one has accomplished, or failed to – at, with, from, below. A report puts a superior or subordinate or peer or groups thereof on notice of one’s presence, reminds some power of one’s presence, still waiting, awaiting, one’s availability, often irritably so, a codified reminder of jurisdiction and rule, of grip and clout. Reports are the daily bread of officialdom and bureaucracy. When all else fails, when no presentation presents to save one from one’s present predicament, one can always read or write a report.

    “Report” is episode 37 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • Hotel Julian Lobby Lending Library

    I returned to the fallout shelter to retrieve the books, carrying out several full boxes through the tunnel. I also carried up the bookcase, recruiting Cajetan’s help, our second Right On Moving Company job. I was living now in a monthly room on the 3rd floor of Hotel Julian, Seattle and Walter and my Risk Management career receding like a Ship of Fools in a bottle on an outgoing tide. Sylvie was preoccupied, occupied, post occupied, and will have been occupied with her baseball team and league business commitments. She enjoyed the game: the travel, the players, the games from the press box, the scouting, the trades, the score and stats keeping, the smells of the locker rooms, bats and balls and gloves and towels, the lighted ballparks – oasis in the urban night, where she arrived early and stayed late. I set up a self help lending library in the lobby of Hotel Julian with the books from the fallout shelter. I didn’t bother organizing the books but filled the shelves hodgepodge, figuring they’d just get all messed up anyway. I made a card catalog using some 3 by 5 cards I’d found in Rosella’s. I pasted an envelope on the inside flap of the back of each book. In the envelope I placed a 3 by 5 card, cut to size for some of the smaller paperbacks. On the card I wrote the name of the book and drew a table with three columns: name, date checked out, and date checked back in. On the wall above the bookshelves I affixed a card rack and posted instructions: patrons are encouraged to take a book, one at a time, sign your name and your checkout date, place card in rack, return book when finished, find the book’s card, write in check in date, and return book to shelves. Inside the front cover of each book, I wrote: Property of Hotel Julian Lobby Lending Library. I made an index of the books in a spiral notebook that sat on top of the shelves, and took a simple count. At the launch of the library, celebrated with Dawn and Eve and other members of the hotel staff, and also Rosella and Ramon and their four girls, and Cajetan and Minerva, the following books were available for checkout: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Ivanhoe, The Scarlet Letter, The Voyage of the Beagle, Experiments on Plant Hybridization, A Tale of Two Cities, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Vanity Fair, Lorna Doone, The Red Badge of Courage, Trilby, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Heart of Darkness, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Principles of Geology, King Solomon’s Mines, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Works of Li Po The Chinese Poet: Done into English Verse, Chinese Military Dictionary (War Department Technical Manual), Flatland, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Time Machine, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Dracula, Not Without Laughter, The Turn of the Screw, Moby-Dick, McTeague, On the Origin of Species, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Banjo, Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, Mansfield Park, Ulysses, The Last of the Mohicans, The Plays of William Shakespeare, The Holy Bible, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, The Call of the Wild, Winesburg Ohio, At the Mountains of Madness, and Wuthering Heights. Also, Webster’s New International Dictionary (second edition, 1934). Thus the library consisted of 58 books.

    “Hotel Julian Lobby Lending Library” is episode 36 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • Rosella’s Market

    Rosella’s, the neighborhood grocery in the space on the northwest corner of the ground floor of Hotel Julien, was open, more or less, 24 hours a day, year round. Occasionally, Rosella’s might close, without notice or explanation, for an hour or two or more, or for an entire day, and would reopen unceremoniously as if it had never been closed. Rosella’s specialty was not-quite-fresh fruits, vegetables, and breads she sold past their sell-by or best-by dates: day old breads and pastries, bruised fruits, withering vegetables. Her suppliers included the large supermarkets located not too far away but throughout the Southland, and local bakeries, and truck farmers in from the valleys. Her buyers (or collectors, for they usually hauled off the food without cost) included a family of 12, including 6 boys and 4 girls, and her husband, Ramon, though he and his oldest sons spent most of their time busy with the family bricklaying business – Ramon’s specialty was brick patios, walkways, outdoor fireplaces, walls. I found it hard to go into Rosella’s, even if just to buy an apple for an afternoon snack, without wandering around considering the diverse displays of other things for sale: hats, tshirts, and flip-flops; guitar strings (but only one kind – Augustine Red Label Classical); magazines and newspapers (English and Spanish), and used paperback and comic books; kites and windsocks; plastic bats and balls, kazoos, hula hoops. Also beer and wine; candy; canned goods (most past their sell-by date); beef jerky; bubblegum (the kind with the cartoon prizes); pizza by the slice cooked in a microwave and hot dogs from a table top machine with bun warmer (several tables with chairs and umbrellas provided sidewalk sit out space for eating); cereals and nuts; cat and dog food; flowers, dried and almost fresh; peanut butter and oatmeal. Rosella also sold postage stamps. You could purchase a money order. You could pay your utility bills. Milk, pop, juice. Single, double, triple A batteries. Cookies, spices, pastas. And the bins of fruits and vegetables: lemons and limes, apples, oranges, bananas, garlic, mushrooms, potatoes, peaches, onions, tomatoes, avocados. And the breads: como, sourdough, brioche, baguette, rye, pita, bagels, tortillas, biscuits. Surfmats and swim fins. From the shelves, walls, floor, and ceiling of Rosella’s, was stacked, hung, crated, or boxed, something for anyone.

    “Rosella’s Market” is episode 35 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • Bingo at Xavier

    Xavier Roman Catholic Church was within walking distance from Hotel Julian. Hearing they hosted bingo every Monday night, I walked over to play a few cards. About 20 players sat at tables in the church hall, Father Juan calling the numbers from a podium on a stage. I bought half a dozen cards at 50 cents each at a table set up at the entrance, took a paper cup of coffee, and found a seat at a table where sat a couple of ancient nuns wearing simple blue scarves, rosary necklaces, short black smocks, and Jack Purcell canvas shoes, white with the navy blue stripe on the toes. The night was hot out but the hall was cooled by three electric fans dropping from the ceiling. At one table was a family of seven: father, mother, grandmother, and four children aged about 6 to 12, three girls and a boy. They were all attentively playing multiple cards but occasionally one of the kids pointed to another’s card where a call otherwise might have been missed. A new game began, and I paid attention to my own card, intending to play but one card per game, in no hurry. I would drop my winnings, if any, into the donation box on my way out. The room was quiet, Father Juan calling the numbers in a sonorous, serious voice. The night passed on peacefully. If one of the kids shouted Bingo! a polite applause ensued, and the nuns smiled their approval. I sipped my coffee, unused to late evening caffeine, and after a couple of cups began to feel more alert to the musty smell of the hall, the noises – shuffling of cards, shoes, chairs scraping as someone got up for a trip to the refreshment table or restroom – and in the quiet between calls I could hear the soft whir of the big fans slowly turning above.

    “Bingo at Xavier” is episode 34 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.

  • Fallout and Fall In

    The hidden room, while abandoned, was hardly a secret. Everyone at Hotel Julian knew about it. As I had guessed, it was built during the hotel reconstruction phase in the late 1940’s. Designed to function as a nuclear fallout shelter, the room was built by Minerva’s late husband, who had died not from fallout, but from fall in. Climbing out one night after a bout in his room with a bottle of rum, he slipped and fell to the bottom of the well shaft, where he perished from the fall, from drowning, from hypothermia – or all of the above. He had gone missing for over a week before Minerva woke up one morning with a start, the noir thought of what probably happened to him suddenly dawning on her. I had been very nervous about Zoeasta making it back to her kittens, in spite of Minerva’s expressed confidence in the cat, and, initially, anyway, a bit ruffled at her criticisms of my current, what to call it, walk of life, and also suspicious of just how she came to know so much about me, I excused myself with the rational reason I wanted to be sure Zoeasta was back safe with her litter. Sylvie, for one, would never forgive me if she were to read that something awkward had befallen the kittens. Put another way, she’d shove a ball lightning up my butt if she found I was responsible for anything bad happening to any of the cats. Minerva insisted though I return to finish our conversation, she called it that, though I had said little, apparently my deeds speaking volumes to her already. Minerva’s house sat on the corner lot opposite the grocery of Hotel Julian. It took me less than a minute to run across the street and around the back of the hotel to the basement entrance, skip down the stairs, and check on Zoeasta, who I found licking her kittens, all five of them, I made certain, while they pummeled and sucked at her teats, all in a new padded and carpet lined box that sat just outside Eve’s door, and there stood Eve and Dawn glowering at me. We know where you’ve been, Eve said. You shouldn’t have taken Zoeasta with you. We were already planning on moving the litter closer to us and to her litter box and her food and water. I must have looked pathetic, and Dawn absolved me by saying the kittens were already about a week old and Zoeasta wasn’t away over an hour, and everybody seemed happy in their places. Are you going back to finish your conversation with Minerva, Eve asked. Minerva owns the hotel, you know. She keeps tabs on everything. Julian is her son. She makes decisions, Dawn added. And she’s decided she likes you, Eve said. Is that a good thing, I wondered, but kept the question to myself.

    “Fallout and Fall In” is episode 33 of Inventories
    a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.
    (Click link for continuous, one page view of all episodes.)

    Note: With episode 30, the title of the novel was changed
    from the original working title of “Ball Lightning” to Inventories.