Truly Like Lightning Page 3

  In the beginning, to build out beyond his little reading shed, he’d needed the muscle of his fraternity of Hollywood below-the-line tradesmen to dig the well and help him with soil. He was lucky that the water table under his land was around three hundred feet; in some places in the desert, it was as deep as six hundred. He was able to get a drill rig as a favor—so the well had cost him less than five thousand dollars, which nonetheless nearly bankrupted him. His stunt brothers were so goddamn helpful and charitable—they worked for days for free, and without them, he could not have conjured Agadda da Vida from the dust alone. And at first, for a few months anyway, some old drinking buddies would come and hang out a bit with their strictly sober, formerly hell-raising, newly Mormon friend. But Bronson was no longer the gas he used to be. The men now found they had little in common without the work and the booze; and after about six months, with lives and families of their own, no one ever visited again.

  Since then, only the occasional park ranger had made contact, but most of them were dissuaded from venturing farther by the “No Trespassing” signs and eerie, apocalyptic scarecrows, as well as rumors Bronson himself had started about booby traps, land mines, and punji stick hellholes. In this way, Bronson created a wide, scary, barren buffer around the compound that he liked to think of as the “Forbidden Zone” in the Planet of the Apes movies.

  Bronson could ride a horse for an entire morning and not reach the end of his land. He was like some biblical figure that way. Lightning illuminated the landscape briefly. He let loose with a war whoop, a rebel yell, even a Maori haka chant, and other vocalizations of warriors he had impersonated during his years on-screen as bad guys had gone from Indians to Englishmen to Russians to Middle Easterners and around again. More lightning as if in response. There it is, thought Bronson. The sign. Followed by balls-rattling thunder. Thunder was God clearing his throat, about to speak. But no rain yet, no precipitation.

  Bronson brooded on the word. Precipitation. Precipitate. Precipice. Yes—the rain god was calling him to the edge of a cliff, and the rain would be the sign, and the lightning would show him where, show him the way, and the thunder he would translate. He had forced himself to give up the Prozac cold turkey upon entering the desert, and he now came to see the recurrence of the lightning flashes for what he believed they always had been—visions. Not hallucinations, visions. For the desert had cured him of the migraines that used to follow these episodes. Bronson was not sure if the lightning flashes were originating in his brain or the heavens tonight. This was either a sign of recurrent illness or heavenly wellness, but that discrimination no longer interested him. Perhaps they were one and the same. It was his duty to watch and listen for the gems. But Lord, he was troubled by new thoughts.

  He looked way ahead to where the cities lay, past the San Jacinto Mountains—he couldn’t make out any lights along the ground, but he knew where the modern world began because its light pollution made the stars fade and lose their brilliance up ahead. The stars could not compete with man-made interference. Bronson did not want to draw closer to that shit. He dismounted and walked toward three simple stone markers, one larger and two smaller. They were not part of the natural landscape. They had been shaped and placed there by human hands with great care. He ran his hands along each stone like a blind man reading Braille. Then he looked straight up at his stars. The lightning was a feint. Nothing, the night was clear as day.

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out his peep stones, his absurd technology, held them to his eyes, and again peered up at the heavens, trying to read God’s pointillist writing.

  “I beseech Thee for guidance, for forgiveness, but Thou givest me nothing but empty noises. Why has Thou dried up and turned Thy back?”

  Bronson waited for a reply. The god of the desert gave him nothing but a cold shoulder. He knew his impatience, his neediness, his lust, his pride, his lack of gratitude were all sins, compounded now by anger. As the deadly sins came cascading down upon him instead of the life-giving rain, he shouted, “I am angered by Thy absence, Father, for keeping such distance.”

  His horse snorted. At least someone is listening, Bronson thought. He recalled a touchstone from one of his dark angels, Captain Ahab—“I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.” And he knew this was not blasphemy. Timid piety was a lukewarm embrace, and Bronson was hot to trot for his God—he was the last true cowboy and he was gonna lasso the fucking truth. His defiant faith was alive with curses and recriminations, spitting, raised fists and middle fingers, alive. Outweighed and outclassed though he’d always be, Bronson wrestled with his God. He knew what the ancients knew, that prayer and violence were brother vectors throughout all time. He knew that where he stood, God once stood, and as God had been man, man would be God. God and man were one in the same, at different stages. He was really listening in the intense dark and quiet for himself, for his future, improved, perfected self.

  Bronson was at home here with an Old Testament God in Joshua Tree, and at home with the legend that the treelike plant had been given its name by Mormon settlers for a resemblance they saw to Moses reaching his hands skyward in supportive prayer as Joshua fought Amalek in Exodus 17. Unlike Moses, whose tired arms were held aloft by Aaron and Hur, Bronson didn’t need help to keep his hands up all day—his prayerful stance was similar to a boxer’s. His fight was his prayer.

  He’d been born the wrong color in the wrong century to the wrong father and the wrong mother in the right country. He was meant to be a Lamanite, a Native American, an Israelite. His spirit was meant to take a body in the time of miracles and authenticity when men could be men and cowboys and prophets. But no matter, Smith had shown him, the way a lightning bolt reveals what the darkness conceals, what he was truly meant to be. He had been illuminated by Joseph Smith, and he would live the ancient way in the latter day.

  More lightning, more thunder, and still no rain.

  Unsatisfied and jangly, his simmering rage for order unslaked, Bronson jammed the peep stones back in his pocket. Dawn was coming and even the stars above the empty desert were diminishing naturally with the still unseen rising sun. He kissed the three headstones, jumped back on his horse, and turned him for home. For sure, God was trying to tell him something, but God, playing hard to get, would have to wait on Bronson now. He knew you shouldn’t quit five minutes before the miracle happened, but he had two wives and ten children back at the house to breakfast with and instruct this morning.

  2.

  “FUCKING SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RAIN,” Maya Abbadessa cursed, as she stepped out of her rented bungalow on Princeton Street toward the matte black Tesla she couldn’t really afford, parked down the block. She’d cut an incongruous figure anywhere but in Santa Monica, in her tight black millennial businesswoman’s dress, black heels, and stuffed backpack over one shoulder, a purple yoga mat sticking up out of it like a Technicolor exclamation point. Bare shouldered, she shivered and recalled what a good friend back east had said about living and dressing for the day in the conundrum of atmospheric sameness punctured by occasional biblical catastrophe that is Southern California—“It’s hot and it’s cold. At the same time.”

  It was a Friday morning, and Maya had to pack to leave for her weekend from work, hence the weighed-down, chic Sherpa/Zen escort look. Her commute to Praetorian Capital, where she found employment after graduating from the Wharton School of Business three years ago, was only about a mile; walkable, but not in these heels. She’d wanted to grab one of those Bird scooters and roll to work like a ten-year-old as she sometimes did, but she needed to stay dry enough to keep her outfit from getting obscene. Her long-range weekend plans rendered her pricey car impractical today. Elon Musk’s electric unicorn felt more like an Edsel when you contemplated finding convenient charging stations on the 300-mile round-trip to the desert, which was where she was headed directly after work today. Running out of battery in the Mojave was an option, and therefore not an option. The young guns,
the Young Turks, at Praetorian were having a semi-sanctioned Molly / Ecstasy / peyote / cocaine / Casamigos / Cuban cigar / Corona vision quest /weekend getaway / spitball session (a phenomenon not covered by the Wharton curriculum) in Joshua Tree this weekend.

  This would be Maya’s first desert sojourn. But these weekends were near mythical (“what happens in Joshua Tree, stays in Joshua Tree”) for the ill-advised hookups, bad acid trips, and off-the-wall business ideas that erupted from them like lava from a dormant volcano that wreaks Pompeii-like devastation or the happy miracle of more Hawaiian real estate. And real estate was mostly what Praetorian did. Legend had it that the idea to buy Michael Jackson’s Neverland estate a decade earlier had come from one of the now fired, tripping Turks after seeing an image of the ceramic Bubbles the Chimp, from the Jeff Koons piece, spring to a kind of Claymation life and float before him, whispering the enigmatic phrase “never … land” in the young man’s ear, along with a quarter-billion-dollar bid. That the monkey’s name was Bubbles was tragically overlooked by the would-be real estate titan, as these men and women were lifelong literalists who played with numbers, not words.

  The mile commute to the Praetorian offices could take anywhere from three to thirty-five minutes in the clogged arteries of West LA traffic. The offices were nestled into a full block-long complex on Colorado Avenue that also housed the HBO, AMC, and Hulu television networks, along with myriad law firms and other businesses. Once entering off Colorado, Maya parked two floors beneath the earth. You could tell a person’s Praetorian status by how close to Hades your parking spot was—Maya had moved one floor closer to the sunlight in her three years there but was definitely still a Satan-adjacent Persephone. Her commute within the building was nearly as long as to the building.

  However, as a bonus, she would sometimes run into celebrities coming and going to and from meetings with the gatekeepers, searching for their cars. Nicole Kidman had asked if she had any gum once. Or a mint. She didn’t. That was a bummer. She fucked up once by mistaking Seth Rogen for Jonah Hill and purring “Superbaaaaad” at him, not realizing the faux pas till a week later. Whoops. Keanu Reeves had once held the elevator door for her. He was cool. That was cool. She had said to him, “You’re the best.”

  Keanu’d said, “Thank you.” It was a story she often told.

  The founder of Praetorian was the American Dreamer success story and self-made billionaire Robert Malouf. The son of a Palestinian immigrant set carpenter in Culver City, Malouf had Gatsbyed himself, despite a baldness so complete he bore a passing resemblance to Stanley Tucci on good days, and Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu on market-turndown bad ones, into a jet-owning, polo-playing playboy with billions in assets, debts, and connections to seats of power in the States, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. The Neverland debacle notwithstanding, Malouf was the sole center of Praetorian’s $40 billion in assets; an early rising, maddeningly nonlinear thinker, and a whiz at bending financial guardrails and identifying distressed assets and undervalued real estate. While the market had contracted in fear after 2008, Malouf expanded his portfolio in a mammoth buying spree and scored the biggest wins of his storied career.

  His business mission, “alt-cap”—he branded it for “altruist capitalism”—enabled middle-class families, like the one in which he’d been raised, to stay in their overleveraged family homes even after those properties had tanked in value after the crash. And he had done that. A savior of the American Dream. That these families had gone from owning to renting from him, and that those rents kept rising, was not his fault, but rather a consequence of their overreaching minor greed and subsequent bad debt. He had almost single-handedly (along with assists from his compadres at the lending banks and money houses—Steve Mnuchin over at OneWest, Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan, et al.), using the housing crash of 2008 as his pivot and the Obama too-big-to-fail bailout as his backstop to protect him from loss, transformed American small-home ownership, mostly in the west, into a type of feudal serfdom. Seeing the future, actually making the future, he had gambled with the American taxpayer’s house money and reaped billions by borrowing millions to gobble up thousands of modest foreclosures forfeited by the suckers who lost their life savings to the mirage of the subprime and the reverse mortgage. “But they’re not homeless now,” he liked to say. “We are the good guys.”

  But that legendary play was almost ten years ago now; he himself had largely cashed out of that market, and there were whispers that Malouf’s best days and ideas were behind him, that he had surrounded himself with yes-men who shielded him from the word on the street. Two deals in the last few years had netted more than $4 billion in losses and cost one president of the company his job, and there was no doubt that the Praetorian board now had their omnivorous eyes on its founder. That’s where Maya saw herself coming in. She would tell him the truth, the hard truth, and thereby save his ass. He was gonna have to hear it from a woman, a young woman with her finger on the pulse; she would be the only one with balls enough to hold up the mirror and deliver the news. That was her ticket. The readiness, the timing was all.

  Though he could be generous with himself and often took his private plane (earning the admiring sobriquet “King Learjet” from his worshipful minions) for five-minute air commutes from Hollywood Burbank Airport in the Valley to Santa Monica Airport, Malouf could be cringingly cheap with his employees. Legend had it that a former assistant once handed him a receipt from the car wash for his McLaren, and Malouf, spotting an additional charge on the slip of $1.50 for something called a “Cokie,” stopped the young man at the office doorway, handing him the receipt to check, and then curiously inquired as to what a “Cokie” was, and why was he paying a buck fifty for it. The assistant laughed at the misprint. “Oh, that’s a cookie, while I was waiting for the car I got a cookie, they left out an ‘o.’” Malouf smiled, nodded, wagged his finger, and said, “No Cokie.” And then he fired a grown man for putting his hand in the Cokie jar, taking the dollar fifty out of his last paycheck.

  He was a constantly smiling presence of practiced avuncularity, with the studied air of a man who didn’t have a care in the world while he gambled daily with millions of dollars. His habitual greeting, “How can I help?” was quite disarming, even though one came to quickly realize that he meant it more as a rhetorical question than an actual offer of assistance. The young guns, of which Maya was one, knew that the correct response to “How can I help?” was “I got this, Boss.” Whatever “this” was. Just get ’er done.

  And, oh, how Maya wanted to get it done, get something done, a big score that would bring her closer to under the big man’s wing, make her his anointed one. A Neverland-type outside-the-box vision, only profitable. She was already pulling down low six figures, but with a good commission and a nice ride upon the two sweetest words in the big realty business—carried interest—she could really start to feather a serious nest. Her own father had died when she was three; she had no memory of him. Maybe that’s why it felt good to want to please an older man like Malouf. She knew maybe that was a little fucked up, not pervy, definitely complicated, but she figured the end justified the means—what’s the problem with wanting to be great at her job? Some people carried their wounds into adulthood to hurt others; some used them to rule the world. Pleasing a Daddy Warbucks figure like Malouf would only mean great things for her. Win/win. She knew the score.

  The Praetorian workplace was a frat-like nest of vipers, mostly men in their early thirties, and Maya, the only woman. Insecure about his own intelligence, Malouf didn’t like to surround himself with the smartest guys in the room, not the Harvard/Wharton nexus. He preferred the community college scrappers; he liked to hire the late bloomers with chips on their shoulders, the C students with something to prove to all those who had underestimated them in high school and college—in his sage words, “Fat girls are grateful for the fuck.” The most prized asset here was not book learnin’, it was loyalty, complete and, many had found or would one day find, unrequited loy
alty to the big boss man.

  In his own starfuckery way, Malouf had named his newest group of nascent killers the “Young Turks,” emulating that tired moniker from the overhyped agents in Michael Ovitz’s late ’80s/early ’90s CAA talent agency. Malouf had been obsessed with moviemaking since he was a child. His father would bring him to work constructing sets for movies on the Paramount, Fox, and Warner Bros. lots.

  It was on the Paramount lot in 1963, building sets for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, that an inattentive nine-year-old Bobby Malouf had lost his left index finger to his father’s electric saw. He remembered in hyperreal detail his father’s expression turning from anger to horror. He could still see his father retrieving the sawdust-covered, lifeless finger like a dropped, bread-crumbed hors d’oeuvre, jamming it into his coverall pocket in the vain hope that it could be reattached and his boy made whole. Malouf could recall the shocked silence of the trip to the lot hospital in a golf cart, a bloody dishrag, with the stitching “Watch and Pray” needlepointed on it, over his throbbing hand. Almost since that day, he had harbored dreams of revenge, of owning the business that emasculated his father and took his own finger; to own a studio like Murdoch owned Fox—that was his white whale lurking beneath the surface.

  Maya was the only female Turk. She could be loyal, but she was also street- and book smart, and that’s how she was gonna rise, an undeniable combo. She wanted, needed, to distinguish herself from the backslapping loyal boys, while simultaneously showing the boss that, as a woman, a brilliant woman, she brought an XX factor to this macho game, that her wo-machismo was different and useful, that she was a banger and street brawler in three-inch heels. She could be it all, and she wanted it all.