Two blocks closer to Wilshire and work I find the most remarkable stash ‘hidden’ on top of a phone company transfer box. There’s a half-empty jar of “Goobers” (which appears to be peanut butter and jelly packaged in the same jar), the alternating ribbons of peanut butter and jelly rising up to the mid-point of the jar where they become a crudely smeared mass of goo. Under the jar is a Signet Classic edition of Treasure Island with a narrow piece of ribbon for a bookmark (set just less than halfway through). On top of the jar rests a round hairbrush, a handful of plastic hair-clips shaped like butterflies, and an unopened condom. Somebody has tucked the hair clips and the condom between the brush’s teeth, and the brush handle points directly down La Jolla toward Wilshire. It’s the condom, of course, that startles me, a sharp-edged foil wafer reflecting the morning sun, but I’m also curious because the stash has been carefully piled on the transfer box. The book is on the bottom, supporting the Goobers, which holds the brush, hairclips, and condom. Except for the Goobers, all the items appear new, or nearly so, and the jar of Goobers doesn’t look as though it’s been off the store shelf for very long. I think whoever ate from the jar did so last night. The whole construction appeared sometime after 6:45 pm, because it wasn’t there when I last walked by after work on the way to my Ford.
While I’m standing there puzzling over my discovery a young woman who works on the same floor as I do approaches from the Block of Unlimited Free Parking. She drives an almost new silver VW Jetta, which I can just make out several spaces beyond my truck. She’s blond and attractive and I think she’s from South Africa. She just got married. Back when I was smoking we’d occasionally run into each other on the roof, stealing a cigarette break. She’s told me her name several times, but I can’t remember it by the time she’s standing beside me.
“Good Morning, Norman,” she says. She works for El Al, the Israeli airline, which is right down the hall from us, and frankly, the security camera, the heavy steel door, and the intercom make me nervous. My co-workers and I agree that Jeff chose the location as part of his relentless war on operating costs. He’s only risk-averse when money’s on the line.
“Oh, hey there. Get a look at this,” and it comes to me, “Mel.” Short for Melanie. The ex Van der something.
“Oh? What is it?” Her accent, not quite English, not quite German, makes her curiosity sound especially genuine to me. If I weren’t married myself, I’d think it is a shame and a waste that she herself is married.
“I’ve been trying to parse it,” I say. “But it doesn’t add up.”
“All that wouldn’t, would it? Somebody’s playing a trick, I think.” She turns away and continues on her way to work. Then from over her shoulder she says, “You’re going to be late, aren’t you?”
I am late already. I’m late every day of the week, though Jeff cuts me some slack here, because of my commute. “I guess,” I say and join her on the sidewalk. “But aren’t you even curious?”
“Not really. It’s just trash.”
“That’s a theory.”
My theory, developing as I transition into work alongside nice-sounding Melanie, is that it is a message sent from a prankster whose goal is to spoof the order and control of a well-maintained Beverly Hills Post Office district neighborhood. The hairbrush and clips imply parental order (though the few strands of blonde hair wound into the teeth continue to rebel while also demonstrating order’s cost), and the Goobers contain wholesomeness and sweetness in a single jar, “contained” literally within the jar and figuratively “contained” in well-ordered columns (though the alternating ranks of peanut butter and jelly were defiled in their consumption). Beneath these rest the parental lie at the heart of Treasure Island (though the novel itself represents every parent’s idea of what constitutes healthy nourishment of childhood imagination). And tucked into the brush is the condom, a threat and a promise to break free of the neighborhood and its stifling rules (though the clean lines and sharp marketing of the packaging speak to increasingly dense layers of control located elsewhere). To sum up the prankster’s message: “Control is weaker than you think. Freedom has boundaries you don’t expect.”
I don’t tell any of this to Mel.