Three for the Road

This old earthquake’s gonna leave me in the poorhouse. It seems like this whole town’s insane.

--from the Flying Burrito Brothers song, “Sin City.”

A McDonald’s in Norwalk seems a strange place to hear about California’s next dance with the Apocalypse, but he picked the spot. He pulls into the parking lot right on time, and the first thing you notice is the “Dig Alert” bumper sticker, warning about the perils of underground power lines. Clearly, a man who takes no chances.

Little time is lost on small talk. He isn’t here for an Egg McMuffin. He is here to discuss a book that interprets the prophecies of Nostradamus in a new way. He is here, in particular, to describe what is supposed to happen at 7:05 p.m., May 8, 1993.

“It says there is going to be an earthquake in California of a magnitude of 10 or more,” he starts out in an even voice.

“San Diego will not be a city anymore; it will sink,” he says.

“The Central Valley will be underwater,” he says.

“The mountains in Southern California--the San Gabriels, the Anaheim Hills and places like that--they will be islands, like Catalina,” he says.

It gets worse. Disease. Social upheaval. Economic collapse. “Eventually,” he says, “this will bring America to its knees.” You ask where he will be May 8. The plan is to pack up the motor home and head northeast--maybe to Montana. He put in for vacation time weeks ago. You ask where to purchase a copy of the book. “Price Club,” he says, drawing a detailed map to the nearest outlet.

He makes but one request: “Don’t use my name.” This seems reasonable, for our prophet of doom hails not from the ranks of the chronically paranoid, those correspondents to newspapers and government agencies who complain in LARGE LETTERS about CIA radios implanted in their inner ears. No, he is a man of responsibility, a holder of several degrees, the father of three children and, true fact, a ranking official in a prominent state regulatory agency. Now if that doesn’t scare you out of California, nothing will.

*

It is Earth Day, a day set aside for corporate fibs about good deeds, shrill polemics from people who live in trees and other eco-silliness. I am seated in the Oakland Airport, staring at a pay telephone that refuses to ring. Signals have been crossed, connections missed: I have been stood up by a man who travels California passing out flower seeds and picking up trash, a man who, the day before, answered his telephone this way:

“Hello, Johnny Poppyseed!”

Now all I can do is dial Poppyseed’s pager number and hope he hears the beep. As I wait, I imagine Johnny Poppyseed. I see a young man in green felt, long yellow locks braided with wildflowers. I see him flying down the highway, singing happily about bowers of flowers and all that. A flute is involved, maybe a unicycle.

I am about to call it a day when a miracle happens. Johnny Poppyseed has appeared at the airport in his Chevy van. He is a middle-age man with a slight paunch. He is dressed in a black-striped shirt, black slacks and a bolo tie.

“Where’s your costume?” I ask.

“This is my costume,” he says. “This is what Johnny Poppyseed wears wherever he goes. I’m a high-tech professional career person, and I’m into solving a problem, and the problem is litter, and the goal is to trash the trash. Besides, who wants to look like Ronald McDonald?”

*

The ad ran Monday, Page A8. Pictured under a large headline--” BULLET PROOF “--is a woman in a flowered muumuu standing beside a Rolls-Royce. She looks happy, safe. Her car windows, the text explains, are equipped with “bullet resistant Polycarbonate Laminate,” guaranteed to “stop repeated shots from a 9 mm or 38 special handgun.”

It was inevitable. Carjackings, the latest made-for-TV-news crime wave, have given rise to a carjacking entrepreneur. Hayden Hamilton, self-described “rich guy” from Sherman Oaks, opened a bulletproofing business in his six-car garage 10 days ago. He said he is aiming for “people who are afraid to go to Ralph’s market.” He’s been on almost all the newscasts, but so far business has been slow.

“My only customer has been my mother and her Mercedes,” Hamilton said. “I wish you could come see my video. It starts out with my wife--she’s the one in the ad--walking to our Rolls-Royce. This black guy is coming the other way. She gets in the car and the black guy hits the window with a 2-by-4. Then he backs up and pulls a .38 Special out of his pants and fires five rounds into the window. . . . I’m in back filming the whole thing.

“It was,” he said merrily, “quite a bang in there.”

Lock us all up, I say.