Checking In With a Few Special Friends : One of the best things about this job, apart from the fact that it pays the bills, is the people I get to meet. The last couple of days, I caught up with a few.
Linda Victor seizes the day, one by one. Geri Spagnoli still pens light verse. Dr. Paul Hackmeyer is back on the job delivering babies.
Christopher Sylbert keeps making people laugh. My softball teammate “Hank” is still in jail. His wife, “Julie,” meanwhile, wants everyone to know she’s sober.
Today is Christmas. The holiday season has always been a time of catching up, of reading those family newsletters and checking in with friends. One of the best things about this job, apart from the fact that it pays the bills, is the people I get to meet. The last couple of days, I caught up with a few.
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Quick: Where were you at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17? What did you do?
Linda Victor, a seventh-grade English teacher at San Fernando Middle School, was asleep in her ground-floor apartment in a complex known as Northridge Meadows. She doesn’t know how, but a violent jolt pitched her from a bed out a nearby window, just as the building started to collapse. Several neighbors were killed. Linda was barely scratched.
When I met Linda, she was marveling about the richness of life. The quake happened to hit after a rough year in which she had endured the breakup of a long romance and had counseled suicidal students. Today, Linda stills seems to marvel. Every sunset is beautiful.
“I’m doing good. I really have a rejuvenated sense of life . . . but I’m kind of dreading coming back to the date,” she said of the upcoming anniversary.
When we met, Linda was pondering a change of careers. People who read about her, or saw her describe her experience on TV, wrote and called, urging her to continue teaching. “A lot of people sent things to school. One lady donated books to my classroom, which is really nice. We’re reading them. That gives me hope, because people were so wonderful.”
At a recent education seminar, Linda and fellow teachers engaged in a “quick write” exercise, then were asked to read their prose aloud. Linda described her quake experience. “To me it was just matter-of-fact,” she recalled. “A few people were in tears when I finished, and a couple people left the room.”
Northridge Meadows is now gone. Since the quake, Linda has been living at her parents’ home a few blocks away.
“I don’t think it’s every day I say a prayer to God,” Linda says. “It’s like every other day: Thank you for letting me be here. Thank you for everything, the good and the bad.
“I feel like I’m so much wiser. Maybe I’m not. But I feel like it.”
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Methinks there is no bigger cheater
Than the guy who fixed my water heater
Geri Spagnoli’s post-quake couplet still makes people grin. Moments of levity have helped Los Angeles’ recovery, and Geri, a “60-something” resident of Calabasas, provided more than a few by self-publishing a thin volume of light verse titled “In the Wake of the Quake.” Nine hundred copies are in circulation. Now she’s put out a quake-free collection, optimistically title “A Glass Half Full.”
Here’s one titled “Slander,” and subtitled “So what else is new?”
There’s something happening
It seems like a race
As to whom we can slander most
Whom we can disgrace
Who can come up with the best piece of dirt
Whom can we denigrate
Whom can we hurt
Let’s go for the jugular
Let’s make them crawl
The higher they are
The harder they fall
How far do we go for that almighty scoop?
Well, we all pay to read it
We’re not out of the loop
A self-published poet doesn’t expect big royalties. “I really don’t care,” Geri says. “I’m getting the accolades. It’s just been wonderful. I have a little following.”
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The Sherman Oaks home of Dr. Paul Hackmeyer and his wife, Nancy, was hit so hard Jan. 17 that they had to move themselves and their three young children into a rented home in Valley Village. But for them, 1994 will not be remembered so much for the quake as for their encounter with evil shortly after midnight on March 20.
Hackmeyer, the associate chief of obstetrics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was arriving home after a successful delivery when he was confronted by two men, apparently intent on robbery. He was shot three times, and the third shot nearly killed him, tearing through his lungs and liver before exiting near his heart. To date, no arrests have been made.
His recovery was extraordinary. A week after the shooting, Hackmeyer was home from the hospital, discussing his experience amid the bonsai collection in his back yard. Within two months, he was bringing more babies into the world. Today he feels no pain. “I can probably predict when the rain’s coming. But other than that, it’s pretty well back to normal.”
The first time we talked, he discussed the outpouring of sympathy from colleagues, friends, patients and total strangers--and how he felt like Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” When we talked last week, Hackmeyer said he still felt much the same, and that he has experienced “a renewal” at home and at work.
“Since the shooting, I’ve had a fire lit under me in terms of needing to do better what I do.” He attributes this, in part, to the support he received. “It was almost embarrassing, and I felt that it wasn’t deserved,” he says. “And I felt I had to make it deserved. I felt I needed to be a better doctor and needed to be a better surgeon.”
He said much more, but there isn’t the space today. I’ll try to catch up with Dr. Hackmeyer again in a few months--around March 20.
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The first time I saw Christopher Sylbert, he was being helped to the stage of a Ventura Boulevard nightclub. He leaned against a metal walker, struggling to the microphone. And then he spoke:
“Larry Parker got me $2.1 million!”
Chris, a North Hollywood resident, has been certified as The Funniest Person in the Valley. On that October night, he won the final round of the L.A. Cabaret’s annual contest, winning over a crowd of judges that included Milton Berle.
Only when he was announced as winner did Chris discuss his struggle with multiple sclerosis. Making people laugh, he said, is what he lives for.
He still hasn’t broken into the big comedy clubs--not yet, anyway. His manager, Victoria Dushoff, says: “All I want for him for Christmas is a chance to audition for the Improv and the Ice House.” In the meantime, Chris is honing his craft and developing new material, working two, three or four nights a week at such venues as Igby’s, the L.A. Cabaret and Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza near LAX.
The Holiday Inn crowd, he says, forces him to reach beyond his tried and true “California stuff”--the references to Larry Parker, Medflies and Mike Huffington. (“Tell you what: If I got $35 million, I’m not spending it trying to get work.”)
A recovering heroin addict, Chris gets by with help from his friends in a rehab fellowship. They often chauffeur him to performances.
Chris tries to help others overcome their problems. When we spoke, he was anticipating performing on Christmas Eve for the folks at Cry Help Inc., a residential drug abuse recovery program.
He’s got a routine just for addicts--a routine the rest of us won’t get. One joke, for example, concerns heroin and one of its little-known side effects--constipation.
You really don’t want to hear it. Especially not on Christmas.
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Julie answered the phone this time, and what she told me was good to hear.
Julie told me that, contrary to what her ex-husband’s lawyer told the judge, she hasn’t fallen off the wagon. Julie says she’s still sober, and the kids--12-year-old Anna and 6-year-old Mark-- “are doing fine.” (These names, for the record, are pseudonyms.)
Only a few weeks have passed since I wrote about Hank, a teammate who wound up with a year in jail after a traffic accident in which Mark suffered the loss of two baby teeth and a cut mouth. The fact that Mark’s seat belt wasn’t buckled resulted in a child endangerment charge. Hank’s use of a fraudulent driver’s license resulted in additional charges.
When Hank first called from jail, he wanted me to write about how he’d been screwed by the system. The punishment, he said, did not fit the crime--especially for a single father who had full custody of his kids and was struggling to get by.
A year in jail still seems harsh, especially since so many felonies are plea-bargained down to the identical sentence. At the same time, the more I looked into Hank’s case, the more it was obvious that Hank was his own worst enemy. He compounded minor violations with ever larger deceptions; the bogus driver’s license was typical.
Hank’s public defender asked the judge to grant a hardship release because he’d heard that Julie was drinking again. The column left that question hanging: I called Julie four times, but nobody answered.
She wasn’t pleased with the article. There were no inaccuracies, “but that doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she told me. Hank hasn’t volunteered his reaction. My guess is that he wasn’t pleased either.
He’s expected to be out in a few weeks, after having served a total of more than four months, thanks to good behavior and the need to make room for more prisoners in the overcrowded jails. He missed both Anna’s and Mark’s birthdays, and now he’ll miss Christmas.
The tree in Julie’s Canoga Park apartment is trimmed with popcorn. They’re trying to make the best of the circumstances, she says.
“We’re trying to look at it as an old-fashioned Christmas where it’s not about expensive gifts,” she said. “It’s about being together.”
Merry Christmas everybody. And that includes you, Hank.
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