The Mentor (15 page)

“Damn.
 Someone from SkipJet took it?  Well, it’s a big damn company, I
suppose.  My friend is one of their security team.”

Reggie got
back on the merry-go-round for a moment, held tight, and this time looked at me
from its spinning center.

“It...
what?  He don’t work for SkipJet.”  He looked down at the bar, then
back to me.  “I work for them.  He... he don’t work for SkipJet.”

“We
borrowed it?”

Reggie
explained slowly after I’d ordered him a beer (which bothered the barman. Crew
like Reggie, they didn’t get free booze, but high fallutin passengers like
Yours Truly (wink, wink) did.  “Buying” Reggie a beer was just one more
that the bar had to eat).

SkipJet
wasn’t a big conglomerate with offices and accounts in every major city in the
world.  It was what you might call a "millionaire's taxi."
 

The
jet-for-hire company owns about one hundred seventy planes, which hop from city
to city to city all day and night.  A businessman in London gets the nod
for a big deal in Tokyo but has to leave ASAP, but the next commercial flight
is tomorrow?  There’s a SkipJet at Heathrow (probably more than one), his
company rents it out, and it lands in Tokyo a few hours later.  

Then, let's
say, there’s a wealthy, nearly-wedded couple in Tokyo (in my mind it’s the
groom and,
aghast!
, maid-of-honor who skipped out an hour before the
original wedding and are heading to Vegas for their own ceremony).  Once our
businessman lands from London, the plane is turned over and the scalawag-lovers
board for The Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I had to
find out the name of the company that rented the jet.  That was my
breadcrumb.

“Well,
hell,” I said.  “How am I supposed to look through a plane that isn’t
here?”

“You really
can’t, you know?”

“Well, I
suppose I can reach out to SkipJet, like you were saying.”

Reggie took
a big swallow of beer.  “Or, now, hold on.  Listen. I could see where
it went.  Maybe there’s a crew member, where it went to, that could look
through the craft for you.  Now, hey.  That, right? That would be almost
like you did it yourself.”

“How would
you know where it went?”  I said as doe-eyed as possible.

“Easy,” he
said, happy to have calmed the panicked ex-passenger and happy to not have any
questions about missing items associated with his name.  “Take a look at
the manifest,” he said, pulling a device off his hip that looked like a cross
between an iPhone and Spock’s tricorter.

I watched,
trying not to be too eager.

“You can do
that?”  
Ugh
.

“Sure, heck
yeah. “

After a few
taps, he brought up the ID of the aircraft.  The manifest, just as he
said, showed the plane had left Hawaii, gone to Hong Kong then to a small
airport in the south of France.  

I didn’t
care about where it was but where it had been.

“There’s
you guys,” he pointed on one line. Client, origin and time, destination and
time and pilot name.  “R. Davis over here, that’s me.  That’s jet--
oh yeah, a Citation X.  Love those."

I scanned
across the line, past his finger.

“Where are
we listed?  Did he use my real name?”  Could The Mentor’s real name
be a finger-tap away from me?  “I try to keep a low profile.”

“Don’t
worry ‘bout that,” he said, his words casual and slow now.  “Even though
we had to cross way out this way from the mainland, it’s still a domestic.”

“Right.
 Of course.”

“So, it
don’t require we have passenger names on domestic.  Unless they insist or
wanna show it off to their girlfriends, we got a bunch of Don Joes and Jane
Smiths,” he said, slurring.  “And, see, your Citation is, right now... in
a port south of Paris!”  He smiled, looking like he’d taken his first,
tasty cigarette drag of the day. “I know a guy in that hanger.  Perfect.
 He can give it a look.  If it’s there, they can drop it in a pouch. 
Have it to you in no time.”

I looked
again at the line a couple rows up from the one detailing the hop to France.

Honolulu
was the destination.  Point of origin, Atlanta.  Jet’s range was
3,450 miles, so we’d broken up the trip going wheels down for refueling in San
Francisco.  That’s not what interested me.

I
recognized the entry under “Client.”  I'd heard of
them
, of course.

“Thanks,
Reggie.”

Reggie
stood and started to dial his cell phone, giving me the thumbs up.  I hit
him back with it but my mind was already somewhere else.

What did
The Mentor have to do with a charity owned by one of the world’s wealthiest
men?

Chapter
Eight

On the
plane back to the States, I was lucky enough to find some headphones in the
magazine pouch and I wore those for the entire trip, even when not listening to
music.  Just needed to sleep.

Of course,
Reggie’s friend had not found any wallet aboard
le jet
.   I
thanked him for trying so hard, it meant the world to me he’d cared enough to
check, and told him “no harm, no foul.”  We tried, so forget all about it.

When we
finally landed in Los Angeles, it was about eight and by the time I called the
theater— after eleven o’clock back home— it was closed and everyone but the
spooky, Polish cleaning crew (
“‘Ders bee-emm in da girls batt-room!”
)
had gone home.

The phone
at Pavan’s just rang and rang.  Guess he hadn’t gotten the bleach yet.

From the
airport, I took a shuttle bus to the hotel closest to Sunset because if I had
to stay up the night, Sunset was the place to do it.

There’s
something about Sunset Avenue in Los Angeles that I love.  Years ago, a
buddy and I drove out to L.A. and stayed for a week.  Well, I stayed for a
week, he just stayed.  My lift back was via Greyhound.

We spent
more time wandering up and down Sunset than in the cheap hotel.  He’d
popped a handful of mushrooms and spent the next couple hours bitching he’d
been ripped off.  To me, not a magic mushroom advocate, sure, but you
didn’t
need
mushrooms to enjoy Sunset Avenue.  Hell, it could even
be dangerous.

For the
past several hours, I’d been getting pretty hungry.  The flight had a
dinner but the feast of unidentified white meat, with white gravy, and white
dinner roll (obviously the head chef was from the U.K.) didn’t really fill me
up.  Driving the flight attendant crazy, I subsequently chomped through
enough salted peanuts to induce high blood pressure.

Now,
peanutless, I wandered Sunset.  

Years ago,
I’d read a Hemmingway book.  Not a fiction but one where he was recalling
a time when he’d been living in earth twentieth century Paris.  Can’t
recall if he’d been married, I think so, but he was broke so he and his wife or
girlfriend would have very little dough for food.

When he was
really hungry, Ernie'd go to museums.  He said something like you
appreciated art more when you’re hungry.  My grumbling stomach and I stared
through the display store windows at the shiny, whirring gadgets of The Sharper
Image.  Sure, it was hard to argue that electronic, chrome-plated nose hair
clippers with
NeverCharge
™ LED (for the deep 'uns) was exactly
art
,
but it seemed fair to judge them on the same principle.

I had to
get something in my ample belly.  There are a bunch of these little
sidewalk cafes on Sunset, one after another, so crammed together you can’t
really tell where one ends and one begins.  Walking down the sidewalk and
weaving through the occasional sprawl of awning, I could see as one group of
four was leaving that they’d left behind a basket of bread.

Then one of
them, a woman with bug-eye sunglasses, caught the sight of me staring at the
food they’d left behind and looked way, frowning.

Pathetic. 
I jammed my hands in my pockets and took a couple big strides up the street,
out of the woman’s glare.  Was I really scoping people’s discarded scraps,
like a dog, looking for food? 

Every now
and then, there's a moment that stops you, as if your life were being played
back like your own, personal Zapruder film in some smoke filled room.

A guy in an
overly starched dress shirt, buzz cut, black-rimmed glasses and with a pipe
jammed between his teeth is up at the screen and calls out, "
Stop!
"
and says things like, "
See it's right about here, in frame 842, where
our subject-- the chubby fellah, you see?-- he realizes, 'by golly what in the
holy hades has my life become?'  It's a corker, for certain.  Roll film!
"

Finally, my
thoughts went back to the conversation with Reggie the Drunkard Pilot back at
the airport in Honolulu.  I'd purposely kept that at bay for hours so I
could let it brew a while in my subconscious.  Yeah, that was the main reason.

After he'd
spoken with his friend at the hanger in Bergerac, France, where a bachelor
party of ex-pat Americans living in Germany were dropping in to soak up the
local wine, Reggie and I had a final beer together, and I left.

But not
before the pilot regaled me with his little proprietary tricorder.  The flight
data, all of it, was sensitive in one manner or another, so it had to be
jumbled-- encoded-- before it was dropped onto the wireless carrier.  The
primary function of Reggie's device-- which looked like a big, blocky cell
phone--  was to decipher the encoding and then display it on the little four
inch screen.

Naturally,
my name was not on the manifest.  Neither was "the big, black
fellah," as he'd called him.  Listed only the passenger count: two.
   

Reggie has
said that it's not any of his business to check identification, so he's doesn't
get into any of that sort of paperwork.  Besides, with a company like the
Solomon-Bluth Foundation, as Reggie has put it, "with all the good they
do, who's going to question them anyhow?"

Solomon-Bluth
had picked up the tab for our charter.  And it made no sense whatsoever. 

So, I had
my breadcrumb.  But what next?

First
things first-- walking Sunset in Los Angeles, I still had a small hunger
problem to solve.  I thought about getting off the main road because the
smell of the food was making me nuts.

Then, up
ahead, I saw a possibility.

“Hey, you
got any spare change?”

The guy may
have seen me coming up to him but didn't acknowledge it right away.  He and his
sign were on the sidewalk, leaning up against a music store that had closed for
the night.  Bum break, I guess.  

The hair on
his face was bushy but not caked in food or anything.  The whites of his
eyes were pretty clear—I’d seen plenty of bums back in Atlanta, and like my guy
in the Marietta square, this guy looked pretty good for being homeless.
 Maybe it was some sort of part time gig.

I smiled,
struck giddy by the irony.  I said to the bum a second time, “Can you
spare a couple bucks, buddy?”

He looked
at me with a strange smile.  His eyes darted away for a second, and then
opened his mouth to speak, but words seemed to be stuck on his crooked teeth.
 He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand and squinted up at me.

“What?”

“I asked
you if you had a couple bucks.  I got jacked— no bank card, no plastic, no
cash.”

He stood
quickly, wobbled for a moment, and for a second I thought he was going to run.
 At full height, he still had to crane his neck up to see me.

“Ha,
that
ain’t gonna work,” he said, waving me toward a shadowed gap between two
buildings.  Leaning against the mud-caked brick, he pulled out a soft pack
of smokes.  Pointing to my left with the cigs he said, “Watch my sign for
a sec, will ya?”

I nodded,
looked up and down the street.  Pulling out a zippo with a Harley Davidson
logo, he lit his cigarette, snapped the metal top down with a flick of his
wrist and eyed me through smoke.

“Now, I’ll
give ya a couple tips, but you gotta find a different corner.”

“What?
 Bum tips?”  I said, taking a step back.  “I don’t want tips.
 I just--“

“An' don’t
work anything from La Brea to Fairfax Avenue because that’s Drew’s area.
 He and I bunk together, and I don’t need no excuses from him about not
coming up with his share.”

I crossed
my arms, sickened that I’d even started the conversation.

Somewhere,
deep in my brain, I heard:
"Stop!  Oh zow-wie, look at our man here.  Frame
1311.  Consorting with ne'er-do-wells?  The indigent?  It seems his desperation
knows no bounds.  Tears your heart out, it does.  Roll film!"

The scruffy
man had more: “And, you don't just ask for cash.  You gotta imply that you'll
blow outta there if they just come up with a buck or two.”

Imply
?  The bum had just hit me with ‘
imply
.’

Suddenly
I’m like some homeless intern.  “Here’s the thing—“

“Like,” he
continued the Bum 101 class, “you need just one dollar more and then you got
bus fare back to the valley or something.  If you think you can shake ‘em
for more, tell them you’re going to Washington.  Then, they don’t know if
it’s city or state, so that can work both wa—“

“Listen,” I
said, exhausted, my anger draining from me.  “I’m serious.  I lost
everything, and I was just hoping to get a burrito or something.  You got
a good wad of dough in the can there, I just need like two bucks for dinner.”

His eyes
went wide for a moment, and then he quickly stuffed the rattling stew can into
his greasy jacket, now realizing that I wasn’t looking for the
Panhandling
for Dummies
excerpt.

“No way,
stay away from what’s mine.”  He stepped back into the alley a little.

“I’m not
going to rob you man, just need a little bit until tomorrow when my friend can
get me some cash.”

The bum’s
eyes darted up and down the street for a second, and he fingered a button on
his coat.  “Boy, that
does
sound pathetic,” he said but I don’t
think he was talking to me.  Suddenly angry again, he said, “Man, you’ve
got to work for your dough.  I ain’t just gonna give you what I got.”

“How about
this,” I said and his face darkened.  “I work right here.  You and
me, side by side, partners.”

“This ain’t
a partnership kinda deal!”  He said loud, then blinked away frustrated
tears.  “You don’t get anything working in groups.  People won't fork
over—“

“Okay, then
it’ll cost you two bucks to get me off your corner, man.”

“What?”

“Gimme two
bucks, and I’m outta here.”

“No wa—“

“Okay,
price just went up.  Three bucks.”

Mr. Bum
leapt for his sign, but I blocked him.  He tried running around the other
side of me, and I stopped him there, too.  For as out of shape as I was,
he was worse.  But not by much.  

“Gimme my
sign!”

“Now it's four
bucks.”

He raised
his hands.  “HOLD on there.  Just stop that!”  He eyed me,
glanced at his sign, eyeballed me again.  “You said two bucks at first.”

“Yeah, now
it’s four.  You wanna go five?”

He reached
into his coat.  “How about three, asshole?”

I'M NOT
USUALLY SOMEONE who gets grossed out by stuff.  You know, gum on the
sidewalk, dog poop in the grass, and people that booger-mine at four way stops.
 Whatever.  But the public payphone I was using had a
fungus
growing on it.  And, damn, it smelled.  I wondered if Pavan’s Uncle
Rolo had come to L.A.

Carefully
dialing up Pavan's number again, I held the phone a few inches from my ear and
tried to not let the smell bring up my dinner.

After my
bum spat, I’d left Sunset looking for a fast food restaurant and ended up in a
Mexican neighborhood.  Lots of car repair joints and people sitting out on
their porches in the warm night air.  

I found a
place by smell alone.  It didn't even look like it had a sign.  The guy behind
the counter actually greeted me in Spanish.  I pulled out my dough,
glanced at the menu written in green magic marker above his head and told him I
wanted two burritos.  His eyebrows jumped and held there.  

He’d said:
“Two?”

“Yeah, I
haven’t eaten since the middle of the Pacific.”

He
shrugged, nodded, and barked something over his shoulder, his gaze not breaking
from mine the entire time, as if I were some apparition that could poof into
the ether at any given moment.

When the
burritos came out, each was as big as my forearm.  

No joke.

I mean,
seriously, we send a couple of these guys to Africa and hunger
on the entire
continent
is history in one day.  Fuck Bono.

“Damn, man,
you could have told me how big they were,” I’d said poking at one with a spork.
 It looked like I was trying to harpoon Moby Dick with a plastic garden
rake.

He’d said,
“Yeah, 'cept I don’t speak any English.”

I paid for
my food and left, seeking out a phone to call my friend.

Payphones
are hard to come by these days but there are a few gas stations that will hang
them on a corner because illegal aliens, drug dealers and twice-abducted-nearly-killed-by-lava
types still need them.

Pavan
waited patiently as I explained what Reggie the Drunk had laid on me.
 After a moment, he asked: "Who's Sampson-boof?"

"No,
man.  Solomon-Bluth," I said.  "The pay phone is probably
just all jacked, sorry if it's hard to hear."