The Big Kahuna

I must admit that, from an early stage of my life, I have been obscenely rich. I grew up in San Diego, and spent my youth doing whatever I wished. I had my own rock and roll band. I grew my hair long, bleached it blond, and surfed all summer. I rarely wore a shirt. I had several classic Ford "woodies," a bungalow for my personal use on the beach, and partied endlessly. My parents were largely absent. They enjoyed traveling a lot.

My father owned farms in the Imperial Valley, but he never went there. He had an office in our house, where he sometimes worked. You could tell he was working,because he would put on a business suit, when he worked at the house.Maybe it was something he did out of habit. I went to college at UCLA, where I intended to learn cinematography. But I changed my mind, and started studying architecture. My friends and I would spend months at a number of ski resorts, where we built oversized log cabins, from very large cedar logs that I was able to obtain in Montana. We scribed each log to fit the one below it. I also learned the craft of masonry using large river rocks, made smooth by the action of water. I made money, quite a bit actually, with these activities. I was able to build a cabin at Tahoe for myself, and I furnished it with wicker furniture from the old Hotel Coronado. I stashed most of the stuff that I had accumulated from high school there, like the drumset I used in the band.

I first met Rodney at UCLA. He wasn't in any way like me-- he had recently graduated with a degree in Accounting, and was working for a large concern which my father patronized. He was assigned to my trust fund. His office was in a nondescript building near the campus. My father had spoken to me about him, in glowing terms. At our first meeting, I was a little disappointed-- he wasn't at all athletic, and a definitely eccentric. He was a bit shifty-eyed, but he didn't seem like he actually could be a crook. He had the same enthusiasm, which bordered on altruism, about finance, that I had seen in some of my MBA friends. I went to see him, that summer, to withdraw a large sum of money to finance one of my projects. It had to do with solar energy-- I wanted to add active solar to some of my spec houses.

Rodney was very interested in what I had been doing with my trust fund, and he was impressed that I had not really depleted it, despite my constant borrowing. He asked me what I liked about the real estate that I was dealing in. I didn't really think of it as real estate, although the profits that I was making may have come from the forces of the market, and not entirely from my creative activities. He asked if he could see a few of my investments sometime. I readily assented to this. As a result, Rodney ended up spending an entire winter in Tahoe with me, skiing, meeting girls, and consuming a lot of cocaine. I started calling him Rhody, a pun on his name, which sounds like Rhododendron. Most of my friends thought I meant Roadie, as if he was a hanger-on, which in a way he was.

The last thing we did together was form a small business, packaging mountain water, and selling it in San Francisco. This project was mostly Rodney's work, and I have to thank him for that. We called it Tahoe Snow, and it sold well all over California. I still receive a substantial profit, just from this operation. If I wanted nothing else than to live in some place in Mexico, and spend the rest of my life surfing, I could live off of that income, as a kind of surfing monk.

After the season at Tahoe, I didn't hear from him for years. I heard he moved to Washington, DC where he was doing legal work. He had learned a lot while he was at UCLA, that I never did. I was too easy going, and I studied carelessly, only bothering to learn the things that I wanted to know, back in those days, which were often short-lived enthusiasms.

After many years, I now work as an architect. Recently I spent a few weeks in Eureka, California, supervising the construction of a building for artists. I designed spaces where they could work, and still be able to live in apartments adjacent to their art studios. This involved a simple change in occupancy, which basically consists of a firewall between the two sections of an apartment, not a complicated thing to do. But I am an architect who would like to specialize in design work more than anything. I liked the idea of creating an artistic community, for this project.

While lingering at the Arcata airport, I was about to buy a ticket to return to Los Angeles, when I bumped into an old friend of mine, a fellow who used to do carpentry work with me. His name was Woody, short for Woodward, and I remembered how he had taken flight lessons in the evenings while he worked on a construction crew I was supervising in Los Altos. He complained about how he had to take tests on a flight simulator, that it made him go through scenarios where the plane was about to crash. He said it made him feel as bad as it would if he actually crashed a real airliner. He was learning to fly big planes, like 747s. We all thought it was terribly funny, as if he was playing a video game, but Woody became increasingly grim, as the days went by. We saw that it was very real, the psychological stress of that responsibility, even if it was only a computerized simulation, and we stopped making jokes about it.

In the airport, Woody was wearing a pilot's outfit, and I shook his hand, and asked him what airline he was working for. He said that he was a private pilot, but he still had to wear a uniform. Part of the FAA rules, I guess. I completely freaked out when I found out that his boss was Rod Addendum. I told him that I knew Rodney quite well, and that I hadn't seen him for a very long time. Woody offered to have me meet Rodney as soon as he arrived at the airport.

We went over to a hanger close to the main terminal, and waited. Finally, Mr. Addendum drove up in a small compact car driven by his wife, who dropped him off and left. He was carrying a few suitcases, and wearing vacation clothes, which seemed a bit comical. He wore almost a caricature of a fishing outfit, I thought. He was smoking cigars, very expensive ones, I quickly realized, as if he was rating them. He was no longer as slim and malnourished as he was, back in my college days. He looked rather well-fed. He owned a Lear jet, and he leased a private hanger, to keep it in.

I told him that I was about to fly back to Los Angeles. Don't bother to buy a ticket, he said, that he would fly me back. I was terribly flattered, and didn't think I should accept, but he said he was flying that way, anyway. After we were in the air, and sampling his superb scotch, he convinced me to accompany him to San Diego, and then to the Baja, to do a little fishing. It was an offer I could not refuse.

Rodney Addendum was a well known name in business circles, but as I am not very up to date with Wall Street news or people, I had been unaware, all that time, of his enormous wealth and power. Ron had created his fortune with the takeover of a failing bank, which he salvaged and restored to financial health. He leveraged this wealth into holdings in commercial real estate. He was behind a lot of enterprises in Los Angeles and San Jose, often gentrifying commercial properties. He owned theme parks, slum apartments, a few small towns, coastal residences, and a vineyard. He lived in an old mansion, perched dramatically on a small hill, that was once owned by a lumber baron. He said that the last owner was a former child star, a recluse, and just as nutty as Edward Scissorhands. Rodney completely renovated it, and improved the stone masonry, which now resembled my old ski resort work. He said it used to have a dungeon, which was now his wine cellar. In a way, he reminded me of myself, as a young man. People used to say that I had every status symbol that a person could possibly have, for a Beach Boy. But this guy was the real big kahuna, I had no doubt.

After a short stop in San Diego, we flew to El Centro, and then drove over the border and down to San Filipe, where Ron kept his boat.It wasn't as luxurious as his Lear jet, but it was large enough. Woody joined us for this trip. One of the benefits of working for Rod was that he frequently was able to hunt and fish with the man. On the road, we were stopped by Mexican military officers, who made sure that motorists would be safe from rip tides on the lower reaches of the Colorado. There were so many exotic birds to be seen, that it made the San Diego zoo seem ordinary. Flamingos, roseate spoonbills,egrets, ibis, were all in profusion in the delta of the Colorado River. It made me think, maybe everything is actually okay with the planet Earth.I expressed this sentiment several times, but Ron wanted to talk about one of his projects in Eureka, where he hoped to create an artificial wetlands, around a shopping and residential project. Our fishing trip was a great success. I hooked a few really big fish, for the first time in my life. We also stopped at a little island in the Sea of Cortez, where there were artifacts left by pirates, long ago, and still laying undisturbed on the ground.

Rodney told me the history of his wetlands project. He said that he bought it from the railroad, that it was a large natural area close to the center of Eureka, that had been abandoned for years. A few old diesel engines and cargo cars rust away on the weedy railroad tracks there, covered with graffiti. He wanted me to look at the property. He had made plans to develop it, but he had a lot of resistance from the townspeople. He said that almost every new waterfront project in Eureka has been shot down, due to political infighting, ever since World War II. He said that what annoyed them the most was his proposal to put a big box store there. He too, was having second thoughts about that. The town had only so much to spend on retail, and he was willing to concede that a big box store would suck a lot of money out of the area. He wanted to know what I would do with it. I agreed to return to Eureka, after taking care of a few matters of my own back in Los Angeles.

A few weeks later I joined Rob for an evening meal, back in Eureka. The first thing that Rodney asked me to do, while we dined on an elegant seafood meal, was to make sure the property was secure. I was to have a chain wire fence installed around the entire area, and see that most of the tall vegetation was removed. Rodney was afraid of the liability from people camping in the area. He said they might get sick from the pollution from the old railway yard, and try to sue. It didn't really bother him that the property was polluted. You could just cover it all with a concrete slab or something, as far as he was concerned. He told me, when we were back in Baja California, that it's too late to care about the environment. After Fukushima, he said, everything we know faces a death sentence. He gives the human race about five hundred years,before we are extinct.

I was a bit taken aback that he asked me, at the outset, to supervise such a mundane task. And the knowledge that the pollution might make people sick from camping there for a few days, to my mind, raised a huge red flag. Without revealing what I was doing to Mr.Addendum, I contacted the people who had conducted tests on the soil and groundwater. They were not willing to make any official reports, for fear of Addendum's wrath, but they told me, basically, that Rodney was screwed. It was potentially a Superfund site. Every toxic chemical known to man was in the groundwater, slowly leaching into the Bay. Apparently, he bought the property when Bush was President,and at the time, the local politics were extremely conservative.Several properties adjacent to the site had been developed, using faked environmental reports. But the politics of the area had changed dramatically, in recent years. There was huge support for efforts top reserve and protect the natural beauty of the region and the health of its wildlife, which had not been well cared for, ever since white settlers came to the area. By proposing to develop this plot of land, Addendum had set in motion a public awareness of the danger that was lurking in the soil there.

I contacted a friend of mine, now living in Colorado, that I used to know in San Jose. He is an environmental engineer, and knows a lot about groundwater problems. He told me about a woman who used to own groves of citrus trees in Silicon Valley, before it was built up. He said that he had gone to her house back then, to do some remodeling work, and she personally told him all about the farm that her family had once owned. After selling off most of her land to developers, she was, for a while, extremely rich. But there remained a single lot where there used to be a gas station, and the occupant,now bankrupt, had a leaky tank that he had allowed to rust away for years. The City of San Jose is very aggressive about groundwater pollution, because that is what they use for drinking water. The lady agreed to take care of it. Huge pumps had to be installed. The yearly cost is so enormous that she still lives in the same tract house that she had occupied before the building boom.

This obviously didn't encourage me at all. But I still felt there had to be a way to deal with it. My friend said that he would fly to Eureka, and give me a few figures to work with, and just call it a vacation. We contacted all the parties in the know, and together came up with a plan. It wasn't pretty. The government would not completely cover the mitigation costs. We finally decided that Addendum could donate a lot on the edge of the property to a nonprofit entity, clean it up, and build a multi story residential building there, with a view of the bay, and use the proceeds to pay for the years that it would take, to restore the environmental damage. It could be twenty years, or more, to rectify the environmental degradation left under the old railroad yard. I wrote up a proposal, and spent a lot of time creating a design which would attract people willing to pay that kind of rent. Rodney would probably have to spend more than a million dollars, just to do the cleanup. I gave the report to one of the secretaries at his office. She said he was in Alaska.

For several days, then a week after that, I attempted to contact Rodney. I had no response. I finally decided that he wasn't content with the proposal, and wasn't willing to discuss other options, at least with me. I sent a final statement of my fees and expenses, went to the airport, and flew back to Los Angeles.A year went by, and I didn't hear anything at all from Rodney, except for a pay check. It didn't really surprise me that much. What did surprise me, was a report that I read in the news, that Rodney, that is, a corporation run by him, was declaring bankruptcy in the State of Texas, citing a loss of the value of numerous real estate properties, due to the latest recession. I called around to find out about it-- I learned that he was pulling up all of his roots in Eureka, and moving to Louisiana. Apparently, he had threatened to do this several times in the past, when he had any resistance from the City of Eureka. An old plantation which he bought there several years ago, which he had used only for Republican fundraisers, was now going to be his new home. He was vacating the hangar at the airport,and selling his Lear jet.

Rodney has about forty shell corporations, so I imagine he still has a lot of booty squirreled away, where the IRS can't find it. I wasn't able to get in touch with Woody. Hope he finds another situation, if Rodney lets him go. It still bothers me, that piece of land, with the underground pollution. The railway that used to own it doesn't exist anymore. As far as all the problems that this planet has, I guess Rodney also doesn't exist, either.