Editor’s Note: The following column is a work of fiction inspired by the recent arrest of the disabled veteran known to many as the “Mayor of Woodland Hills.” The author has written extensively about the plight of the homeless in this neighborhood of Los Angeles.
“Let that be a lesson to these bums!” Abacus said smiling, fingering his tie — it was dark red with golden scales of justice stitched in a repetitive, characterless pattern.
From the second-floor window in the break room at Woodland Hills Realty — a newly renovated business but nevertheless drab and squat — Abacus Frinch turned and winked lasciviously at Irma as she stood making coffee near the sink. At least that’s how it seemed to Irma who’d been employed as Woodland Hills Realty’s sole administrative assistant for five months, and still hadn’t gotten used to being ogled and grossly and inappropriately talked to by Abacus.
This happened whenever Abacus stopped by the office to use the copier, color printer, his office computer, and to pick up “open house” and “for sale” — much more rarely “sold” — signs, which he stuffed into his red Porsche with minor front-end damage and personalized plates: “YOUR ESQ.”
Like an overstuffed peacock, Abacus was staring at Irma as if he’d slapped cuffs on a criminal himself, or, was accepting an Oscar and she was his dotting, adoring wife, blowing him kisses from the crowd.
Energized, Abacus had been narrating the police scene that had, until moments earlier, been unfolding 50 feet below them on Providence Street. He was bobbing about like the tubby, eggplant-shaped toy Irma once enjoyed punching as a kid — at least that’s what Irma was thinking as she listened to his self-important patter.
At 24, Abacus was stocky going on fat, with dark, unruly, curly hair. He had a constantly frumpy way about him even in expensive suits, which he wore during business hours, even when he wasn’t hocking real-estate off of Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. Abacus had graduated from UCLA, and then, UCLA Law School, a fact he wiggled into every conversation he could. “Bruins” and its mascot — and all sorts of various depictions and derivatives thereof — marked all his personal effects and casual clothes.
Most of the time, however, Abacus dressed in the bland, conservative, country club way of the Southern prosecutors his dad used to drink with on their back porch, back when things were much simpler, when Abacus was still in grade school, spoke with a twang and sported a hairdo that can only be described as the feathered shag so often seen scrupulously combed over the severely scrubbed foreheads of genteel men in the South.
“I’m gonna be a prosecutor like my dad was,” Abacus told everyone, even people trying to buy a house who smiled at him pleasantly but could have cared less. “This real-estate thing is only until I pass the bar,” Abacus would say, stroking his tie.
What Abacus didn’t tell anyone, especially not Irma nor any of the other 20 or so employees of Woodland Hills Realty: his father was threatening to cut him off completely — luxury apartment, Porsche rental money, his monthly pocket money, all of it — if he didn’t pass the bar exam this time around, now just a few months away, his third attempt.
Buster Frinch, Abacus’s dad and managing partner of multinational corporate law firm “Pay The Piper, LLC,” had initially been supportive, even kind of understanding the first time Abacus failed, because “everyone knows how brutal the California Bar is,” he said.
It was Buster’s wife, a high school math teacher, who’d insisted on the ridiculous name “Abacus” for their only child. Buster reluctantly agreed one night after too much drink, and being moved by the even more ludicrous proposition that “Abacus Frinch” would be a universally obvious and charming nod to their mutually favorite book: “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
With money that soon far began to exceed what he’d made as a D.A., Buster jettisoned Alabama and his first wife for a jet-setting lifestyle in Los Angeles.
Unsurprisingly perhaps then, Buster wasn’t so understanding the second time Abacus failed the bar and his son’s once welcoming law firm — where not long before he’d been feted as the firm’s new hot-shot “Alabama to L.A.” associate — showed Abacus the door. “You better figure this out; shape up or ship out — all the way to backwater Tuscaloosa where you can live with your mama, boy,” Buster said.
Abacus had moved to L.A. for school in an attempt to finally win if not his dad’s love, at least his approval. Then the bar exam — specifically his inability to pass it — had derailed what was already an ill-conceived, misguided plan to begin with.
Stepping back from the window and closer to Irma — close enough for her to smell his “Cool Water” cologne — Abacus said: “We can’t have this army of no-good homeless people pushing shopping carts all around Woodland Hills! I mean they’re pushing everything in these carts: bedding, tents, clothes, food. Hell, one guy I saw yesterday was rambling around Ventura Boulevard talking to himself pushing one of them carts.”
Again Abacus looked over at Irma to see if he’d drawn a reaction from her where she was standing over the sink now, washing the carafe of the office’s outdated and cheap 4-cup coffee-maker.
“And you know, I’ve seen that one they just locked up before,” continued Abacus. “He’s always rolling up and down in his wheelchair — on the Boulevard or on Providence Street — like he owns the place. I heard him once even tell some guy over near the ATM by the Whole Foods that he’s “The Mayor of Woodland Hills” or some stuff-a-nonsense. That old crippled coot is just ‘King of the Bums’ if you ask me.”
“Well, I didn’t,” Irma said, turning from the sink to look at Abacus icily with her almond-shaped-and-colored eyes. Putting the coffee maker on the drying rack, she turned her back on him and her long, brown — sensibly and tightly — braided ponytail swished angrily behind her.
“What, hey Irma, you like seeing these dirty vagabonds and deadbeats trouncing around the neighborhood? You think that’s good for business? For any business? You know, today, when I came in, some guy’s out smoking next to a ratty old couch someone just tossed out on the sidewalk. Hell, last week there was a broken old commode sitting out there on the sidewalk, too, and I swear I even saw one of these bums lift the lid and use it—right there on the street!”
Irma turned back around and eyed Abacus stonily: “Why are you like this?” she said, shaking her head in disgust. She moved to leave the room, but Abacus blocked her way.
“Don’t get mad, Irma. Soon the Supreme Court’s gonna rule: these lazy bastards can’t sleep out on the street like life’s a constantly cavalier camping trip. You just wait and see,” Abacus sneered.
But Irma wasn’t listening to him anymore. She was looking past Abacus, out of the window, at a lone cloud sauntering by.
Irma was thinking how when she’d locked the door to the office the day before and turned to leave, she’d seen a matronly Latina woman in her 60s clutching the hand of a doe-eyed, melancholy looking teenage girl. Both wore blue maid outfits, carried cleaning supplies, and were about to enter the Society for Risk Assessment & Analysis — just a few doors down from Woodland Hills Realty.
Right at that same moment an old woman with silver-grey hair pushing an overly full shopping cart — a familiar sight on Providence Street — had been passing by, too. And when a bag of the old woman’s plastic recyclables — which she hoped would amount to enough money for at least a meal — toppled over onto the street, Irma pictured in her mind how the young girl put her stuff down, smiled broadly at the old woman, and bent down in the street to help her pick up her bottles.
Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public. defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Follow him on “X”/Twitter @SteveCooperEsq