Sunday
Here I am out at our house in
Malibu. It is a small house but on a good lot with sweeping ocean
views. It was designed by a well-known Malibu architect and built
in the 1950s. My wife and I painted it pink (wifey’s idea) and my
idea was to put in a lot of trees around it.
When I first started planting, I put in six palms and six oaks
on the north side of the house. Both kinds of trees flourished in
the great Southern California climate. Plus, I watered them a lot
and applied Miracle-Gro.
Our house is next to a vast canyon owned by the state as a water
wash, so that when giant floods come down the mountains behind us,
they have a place to go without washing away all of our houses.
This wash is thickly vegetated and the combination of my palms
and oaks and the forest on state land made a super side view of the
house. I often lay in the guest bedroom, my dog in my arms, and
looked at the endless greenery while I heard the waves and the
occasional motorcyclist.
Then, for reasons I will probably never know, Tino, my ancient,
hulking gardener, started to chop down the oak trees. I told him
never to do it again after the first one but he kept doing it.
A few days ago, he chopped down two magnificently robust,
healthy oaks, leaving my view changed quite severely and for the
worse.
He then presented me with a bill of almost $4500 for doing this
sabotage. I told him the whole thing was an outrage and I would not
pay. He made up a whole series of tall tales, just total nonsense,
about why he had to cut down the trees and why it was so
expensive.
All lies.
I paid him $2500 just to keep him from murdering me, although,
of course, he did not really threaten to murder me. But I am just
furious at him. He does not fertilize the jacarandas at all, and
only I do it, and when I do, they grow, and when I don’t, they die.
I really hate him. But I guess I am stuck with him. He does a great
job at the house in Beverly Hills. Except that he cuts the wiring
for the outside lights every single time we get it fixed.
There is something deeply unsettling about his anger towards me.
It may represent the rage that workers have for people better off
than they are. It may be a personal thing. Whatever it is, I hate
it.
Meanwhile, as I was watering and Miracle-Groing my jacarandas,
my pal B, a beautiful 39-year-old woman, appeared with homemade
chicken soup.
She apologized for being late (which I had not even noticed) and
said it was because she was comforting a friend who had suffered a
major anxiety attack.
Why had the friend suffered an anxiety attack? Why, in Malibu,
had the friend suffered a panic attack? Because her former husband
had yelled at her for doing nothing all day, and because the same
evil doer had cut back her allowance so badly, so brutally, that
she could not afford to feed her horses the usual horse food she
likes to give them. “Their ribs are showing,” said my friend in a
tone of moral indignation. “That man doesn’t care about her horses
at all.”
Hmmm. For one thing, why wasn’t the ex-wife working? The rest of
us work. For another, I find that women who keep horses in Malibu
operate at a high level of anxiety all of the time, no matter how
much money they have or don’t have. Anxious women and horses just
go together. That’s just the way this situation works out. It isn’t
that the horses make the women anxious. Women with high levels of
stress are drawn to horses. Why? Who knows.
Anyway, such are my observations and I hasten to add that I
might well be mistaken.
Things in Malibu are a bit upside down right now, for what it’s
worth. My electrician, a likeable and capable fellow named Mr.
Peak, had a fist fight with a paparazzi a few years ago and was
charged with assault and battery. The community rallied behind him
and he was not only acquitted but elected to the Malibu City
Council with a huge number of votes, by far the highest of anyone
running.
Now, it turns out that he’s suffering from some bi-polar
disorder, has threatened various people in the parking lot of
Pavilions (high end Safeway), and has done some seriously reckless
driving. That’s our Malibu. He’ll probably get even more votes next
time. I would vote for him if I could. He’s a great guy and hey,
who doesn’t have mental problems?
I visited briefly with B., and after she left, lay down and
watched the planes fly high above the ocean. The stars were alight.
It was glorious lying there with Julie. Just glorious.
Peace is glorious.
Monday
Wow, what a busy day.
I awakened feeling suicidal, as always, and took a brief swim,
pursued all around the pool by Julie wanting me to throw the ball
for her. I do throw it but it ruins the swim.
Then a shower, then an egg, then rushing off to a recording
studio to do an instructional video for a very large insurance
company hoping to encourage people to buy its fine annuities. That
took a long time because there was a lot of extremely complex copy
about rates of return and standard deviations.
The woman who supervised me was very charming, though, so the
time went quickly.
Then, a mad rush over hill and dale to Studio City to do a
commentary for CBS about a major foreign affairs challenge from
North Korea.
Our usual makeup girl, Jodie, was absent, and we had a new
artist with the lovely name of Leilani. Just a stunner, but
obviously down. She was subdued, she told us, because her father, a
world name in surfing, had died a few months ago of a burst colon.
“It went septic very fast,” she said.
“I am so sorry,” I told her. “Losing a father is agony. I lost
mine in 1999, and I miss him keenly every hour of every day.”
Leilani was grateful for my empathy.
“When you lose a parent,” I said, “it’s as if a brick wall had
been put up in front of your front door. It will never go away. But
after a few years, it is covered with ivy, and after that, it
occasionally has roses.” My genius friend, Babs Bernstein, M.D.,
told me that metaphor.
Leilani was very touched by that story.
However, she trumped my ace.
“I wanted some distraction after my father passed,” she said, as
she applied my makeup, “so my best girlfriend and I went on a trip
to Turkey.”
“Oooh, scary,” I said. “Look what happened to James Bond in
Turkey in Skyfall.”
“Actually we loved it,” she said. “Until something bad
happened.”
“What was that, if I may dare ask?” I asked.
(Remember we were in a video recording studio with a prompter
girl and a director/cameraman.)
“My friend’s ex husband killed their two children and then
himself,” she said, fighting back tears.
“ARE YOU KIDDING?” I asked. “THAT IS HORRIBLE. IS THAT REALLY
TRUE?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He was mentally ill, plus he was in the middle of a divorce
with her and they were fighting about child support. He had always
had problems. He thought 9/11 was some sort of government
conspiracy.”
He had mental problems? There’s a shock. Wow. That changed
everything.
We finished the recording but we were all in a state of deep,
deep sorrow. What a story. What an amazing, horrible story.
Apparently, he drugged the kids, both teenagers, then shot them as
they slept, then shot himself. He left an angry note and a bag of
pennies in his safe deposit box.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. “Didn’t the wife know him well
enough not to leave her kids with him while she visited Turkey?” I
guess not.
I drove home in a very roundabout way because Laurel
Canyon, my usual route, was blocked off because of an accident
involving a motorcycle policeman. It took over an hour to get
home.
I slept for a good hour, and in my groggy state, when I
awakened, I could not recall where I was or who I was. I guess I
never know the answers to those questions.
Then we got in our car with Julie and our new GSP, JoJo, and
drove down to our home in Rancho Mirage. We stopped for chicken at
Carl’s, Jr. Delicious. I swam for a long time under the stars, but
my head was spinning.
There are too many sick people in this world. Too many of them
have guns and some have nuclear weapons.
Thursday
I see that my close pal, Barack Hussein Obama, as in “Sweet Home,
Mister Obama,” has spoken in Israel asking the Israelis to stop
being so mean to the Palestinians. “Imagine if you were a
Palestinian kid under occupation and under someone else’s control
all of the time,” said Mr. Obama (I’m paraphrasing here). “You’d
feel bad.”
What a creep Obama is. The Arabs in Israel have more rights,
more legal protection, access to better education, more
representation in the government than Arabs in any other Middle
Eastern country. Israel has offered peace to the Palestinians over
and over again. Israel gave back the Gaza strip to the Arabs twice,
once fully equipped with modern agricultural facilities.
The response of many Palestinians is terror, murder of
civilians, destruction even of what the Israelis gave them.
Doesn’t Obama get it? The Israelis want peace. The Palestinians
don’t. It is that simple. The Israelis want peace and the
opportunity to live in Israel. The Palestinians — a lot of them
anyway — want the Israelis dead. Doesn’t Obama get anything this
basic?
Obama burst upon the national scene with a speech at the DNC in
2004 pleading for Palestinians, totally ignoring the terror threat
to Israel from them. He is still beating that dead horse.
He just does not get it about Islamic rage and how intractable
envy and jealousy are. I wonder why Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t
get it. A deep mystery. I will have him talk to Tino.
I cannot think about it. I lay in bed for an hour as the sun
set. My wife sat out by the pool in a red pantsuit. How did I get
such a perfect being as wifey? A living deity in my life, by my
pool, Glory be.
