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Jack Dallas* stands behind the homemade and heavily bamboo’d bar in his 400-square-foot Hollywood efficiency. Pours a drink.

“The Shipwreck: Banana, coconut, papaya, rum," Dallas says. "You won’t know what hit you, but you’ll suddenly find yourself ashore.”

This is Dallas’ joint. Booze mecca. No charge. Open bar. No secret knocks. No passwords.

Calls it Joss Bar, after the paper polyurethaned to the flat drink mantle. Joss, the same paper burned at Chinese funerals.

The place is twenty by twenty feet. Bathroom and closet to one side, with a partial wall. Kitchen on other side. In the greater middle plane, a rectangle. One corner clipped off for computer, phone and drawing table. Most obscured by bamboo and brocade three-panel Chinese folding screen. More of the panda produce throughout. Blow-dart-gun-thin reeds.

Up above the bar is a thatched hut roof that looks like brown sunkist blonde layered hair of a surfer. A seaside shack in Mexico. Shuffleboard court in Florida.

“I wanted to design a space where I would feel comfortable,” Dallas says. “I chose bamboo. Everything else just filtered in.”

Fish nets hang from ceiling, cast shadows like topographic maps.

The wall behind the bar is covered with cross-hatched grass matting, squishy to the touch. Like a bird’s nest, from egg’s view.

Here are two skulls. Plastic. One flips open, mango candies inside. An alligator head, from a Bayou curio shop. Theosophy poster. Kreskin’s ESP, a parlor game. An accupuncture model, diagramming pressure points.

Oh yeah, the bed. Folded up into futon sofa. The desk, computer, telephone. Pads and sketchbooks. Easel.

Dallas lives here, paints here. Hosts and bartends here.

And this is Dallas. White dude. Clean shaven. Thirty? Thirty-five? Maybe younger. Ex-military. Okinawa, six months. Won’t ever say more. Has family connections with the secrets and sauce. Great-grandma was a moonshiner, made bathtub gin in Prohibition-era Chicago. Po’s raided once, saw poverty, winked mercy. Said kill the still but made no arrest. Great-grandma went right on cooking.

Dallas, at his joint. Holds court. Murray’s Pomade in brown hair. Apply with two palms, push strands up, then smooth back. Wears shortsleeved shirts, silks or blends. Most gatherings, flies the Guayabera, flame red gear, popular in warm-weather locales. The Philippines. Made in Korea. Dallas removed the pockets. Nothing to hide.

**

“The Icy Tarmac: Frosted vodka plus licorice. One or two of those, you’ll be happy to slide into somebody.”

Dallas makes calls. Invites twenty over, female and male. That’s what the room can hold. Animators. Crafters. Writers. Treats them to concoctions. Guests sit on two bar stools, pair of other chairs, and on his futon, the one with the furry gray cover that feels like a rabbit’s hide and looks like an elephant’s.

The visitors chat. His age and younger. Look down, on the old steamer trunk with the buckles and snaps. See Hush-Hush. Gossip rag from the `40s. Sample headlines:

“Exposed: The $300,000,000 Davy Crockett Racket.”

“The Naked Truth about Terry Moore’s Fantastic Antics.”

“The Lowdown: Hedy Lamar’s Strange Bout with the Lie Detector.”

Mag’s a reminder of Dallas’ day job. He fields calls, tracks tales for a celebrity journalist. That’s new way to say gossip columnist.

Dallas is discrete. Dummies up until publication. Then repeats. The big screen ingenue using the butt double. The `70s singer with such a midnight jones for crack that he smashes the glass stem and smokes the shards.

“It can drive you mad,” the barkeep says. “I’ve heard things that would make your eyes spin.”

**
“The Monkey’s Paw: Blended drink. Frothy banana pleasure. You couldn’t ask for more, except for an opposable thumb.”

Dallas takes the silver mixing tin and the clear glass mixing cup and shakes them back and forth, elbows wide, like Houdini trying to escape a straightjacket.

He pours a green drink into a martini glass. Call’s it a Headhunter’s Honey. Stirs it with a chopstick held loose like a jazz drummer’s brush. Keeps time. Cracks his knuckles, sounds like felled redwood.

Full set list:

Mildred Bailey, throaty jazz singer from the `40s. Charles Trénet, “The Singing Madman,” bald, wore a monocle. Famed for acting, looking like a chicken. Tampa Red. Mexican Go-Go tunes. Blues. Rockabilly. Curtis Mayfield. Tom Waits. Trance and electronica.

**

“The Grassy Knoll: A vodka absinthe equivalent. Kind of like Dallas, 1963 – you wonder where the shot is coming from.”

You’d never know from the outside. Dallas resides in, pours out of, a three-story brick apartment house thrown up eighty-years-ago. Brick building, ivy covered, some nice in-laid ornamentation. Now on a dead-end cul-de-sac overlooking a freeway.

Dial digits to be buzzed through the metal gate. The wood door, heavy, paint peeling, unlocked. Sign over trough for mail packages reads, “This is not a trash basket.” Nearby notice: “Caution, Broken Tile.” Big middle chunk of the third step up out of four has crumbled.

The public interior is covered with gray shag. Carpet bespotted, stained like a rummy’s liver.

“The only thing that’s really notable in this building, besides myself,” Dallas says, chuckles, “Is that Elizabeth Short stayed here when it was a residence hotel.”

She: The Black Dahlia. Murder. Infamy.

More recently, more trouble. Ten years ago, Dallas hears, the place was a drive-up crack den. Autos pulled up to street level panes, made buys.

These days, there’s a senior citizen home across the street.

**

“Seven Seas Regret. A special mix. Like Malibu dirt – it slides, baby.”

Dallas never charges his guests, blows his own sleight dough. Accepts food donations, sometimes hard stuff. Has a candy-color collection, mouthwash-looking menagerie of syrups and mixers and the Sherlock Holmes stuff – the proof.

Cherry Flavor brandy. Crème de Noyeaux. Crème de Banana. Blue Curacao. Sour Apple Schnapps. Lychee Punch. Vermouth. Compari. Drambuie. Midori Melon Liquor.
Joss is about the soft stuff. That’s what pleases the crowd.

Toughest guests walk in grizzled. Ask for martinis. See surroundings. Smile. Chips cascade from shoulders.

“You can have the biggest bruiser in the world and he’s not going to just want beer,” Dallas says. “Sooner or later he’s going to back down and he’s going to want some foofy little apple drink. When you get right down to it, people want to look forward to their drink. They don’t want to be punished by it.”

Exception:

Has Phoenix brand Gao Ling Chiu, two peacocks on the bottle and an emblem of a monkey. Basically a rice brandy, 112 proof, 56% alcohol. Yellow-clear hue, a la industrial cleaner. Just barely on the edge of blinding, barkeep says.

“Drink it straight, it’s a lot like drinking paint thinner. It’s powerful stuff. It will make you hurt. It’ll make it seem like grappa is a soft drink.”

And Dallas drinks Macallan scotch when he’s alone.

The habit starts to cost. Fifty bottles of exotic booze, always, on a crank job’s wages.

Dallas thinks maybe sometimes to come full circle. Open Joss Bar up to strangers with cash, tapping secret knocks on his door. Be like great-grandma with her still. Maybe build bamboo cages for go-go dancers. Hope the po’s don’t raid. Hope the neighbors keep leaving him alone.

For now, he won’t even accept private bartending gigs. Just Joss, free and clear, that’s all. Whether it makes any sense or not.

“There are moments,” the man says, “When I look around and say, ‘What the hell?’ Couldn’t I just go out and buy a six pack like everybody else?”

*=Jack Dallas is the legal doing business as, but not given name, of a Los Angeles resident.

Jeremy Rosenberg lives in Los Angeles, California. He writes The Secret City column for latimes.com.

* * *

     Jeff Brown is a 33-year-old resident of Manchester, England. A schoolmate got him started planespotting when he was 13, and since then he's been to more than 30 airports in Europe, America and Asia. Over the years Brown has gathered a wealth of information. Like all planespotters, he knows that this is the more cosmopolitan cousin to trainspotting. He knows that the Southland is home to a variety of Asian and Latin American carriers that don't often fly to Europe. He'll tell you that Miami International Airport and LAX are good spots to spot, yet New York's JFK is not. He'll also tell you that the airports in Frankfurt and Amsterdam are good spotting locales, but police hassle spotters at Charles de Gaulles airport in Paris. Get him reminiscing and Brown'll tell you that Hong Kong was ideal for spotting back when the airport was downtown and there was a pub at the end of a runway.
     On an April afternoon, Brown is finishing up a four-and-a-half-week journey that's brought him through New Zealand and Australia. He carries a small notebook. In it, he's handwritten, among other lists, serial numbers of the 44 remaining Delta 737s (down from 66 that morning) he needs to spot in order to close out that particular category in his personal files--that is, until the airline retires old planes and replaces them with new ones. It's pretty much a perpetual cycle, one that ensures no planespotter can ever finish what they've started.   
     "You got to keep up with it, yeah," Brown says. "So you get to a point sometime when you're very close--you've seen every aircraft in one fleet, you don't come back for 12 months and they've added another 60 or 70."

* * *

     Lupe Burke sits at the reception desk in the lobby of the Theme Building. She's been employed by the city's Department of Aviation for more than 22 years. She says the planespotters started turning up around 15 years ago.
     "When they first came here, they had telescopes and all this garbage. I had them checked out," Burke says. "Visitors would come down and say 'Do you know they have telescopes?'" Burke says she called security, who questioned the planespotters and departed, satisfied. Word of mouth soon spread that LAX was both planespotter-friendly and had an observation deck with a panoramic view, not to mention a deli on the first floor.
     "They've been to every airport in the world and they have not found one better than this," Burke says with pride.
     The planespotters are a tiny minority of the visitors to the observation deck. According to Burke, they number roughly 125 out of upwards of 50,000 visitors annually. But they are nothing if not focused and determined. What if--knock on wood, the city employee is asked--disaster struck and an earthquake wrecked the concrete ground beneath the spotters' feet?
     "They'd stand on the arches," Burke says. "They're not going to miss a plane."

* * *

     Es Robinson can barely break away from his planespotting to join his traveling partner Terry Button to chat with an onlooker. Robinson, 35-ish, and Button, 43, have been engaged in this post-modern bird watching for about three decades each. Button says he's tracked some 40,000 civil and military planes. Robinson trumps him: "About 71,000," he says.
     The pair arrived in L.A. a week ago. It's Robinson's first trip to the city and Button's maiden voyage to the U.S. They have their luggage with them and their flight home departs in two hours. This is their first and only trip to the observation deck. The pair say they prefer to be mobile, so they rented a car and each morning from 8-9 a.m. they parked along the northern perimeter of a runway, spotting. Then they drove to half a dozen or so regional airports.
     Robinson's writing a reference book in the manner of the hardcover ones so many of the spotters carry, the books with tissue-thin paper that list the serial numbers of every plane in every fleet. All in all, he says, Miami offers a better selection of aircraft than Southern California. Button, though, praises the Southland for sheer volume. "I think we've seen two and a half thousand aircraft in a week," he says.
     After Robinson speaks yet again into his tape recorder, he walks back over to Button to point out something incidental he's just noticed, something that the typical Los Angeles tourist tends to seek out much sooner. Robinson points out the "Hollywood" sign--visible, by the way, to the naked eye.
     "We've been here a week now, and we hadn't seen it," Button says. "So we can go over and say we did see it. We never got into the center (of the city) at all."
     Ian Marr and his wife have just arrived on the observation deck. Marr breaks the planespotting mold a bit. First, he's here with his wife. Second, at age 54, he's just resumed planespotting after a 30-year break. He's also less intense than some of the others here. Marr seems like the ideal person to ask the question of the day: What's the appeal of planespotting?
     "It's illogical, it's totally illogical," Marr says. "I mean, grown blokes doing this? But if you go to Heathrow, you'll see far more people than you do here. You can't really explain it.
     "It's just a harmless diversion," he adds. "You're out in the air, you're not kicking in doors, you're not smashing up bars. You know, you go to work 50-odd weeks a year, you come out on holiday you try to enjoy it. I do work fairly hard, so this is time off. I make the most of it."
     Then Marr says something so blasphemous that the other planespotters would probably throw him off the deck if they heard. "If I was younger," Marr concludes cheerfully, "I'd probably go surfing."

-end-

"This is your old pal Retlaw Kedzu. We really on top of the mountain. We up here in the Cedar Country and Peter's Creek."

Somewhere in Echo Park. Dec. 12, 2001. The 100th anniversary of Marconi's debut transatlantic radio broadcast. A drummer's duplex. High up on a hillside, with a view of downtown. A rickety porch. An 8-foot-tall antenna, raised higher, mounted where iron railings corner.

Follow the cable inside. See a contraption made of blonde wood. Compartments filled with electronics, wires, a meter.

This is a portable radio station.

An unlicensed, illegal radio station.

Ahoy, a pirate radio station.

Broadcasting an old-timer's voice, like William Burroughs reciting "A Junky's Christmas," crackling, avuncular, charismatic, shaky. Goes by the enigmatic name, Retlaw Kedzu. Commemorating Marconi's feat with a three-hour broadcast.

Kedzu speaks. Marconi explains radio history. Negativeland clips play. Listeners never hear a deejay's voice.

"Say I never told you about, last night I had a dream. I had a dream I was right on top of the mountain. And when I opened my eyes, I was right here in Peter's Creek. Right on top of the mountain, right here in good ole Peter Crik [sic]. Now really if you wanna be dreaming, or if you're gonna dream, where else would you rather dream that you would be other than on top of the mountain?"

There are other found sounds and music blends. The old man again:

"Now it's a 10-second station break. But you know old Kedzu and I'm gonna tell you just where we're at. Because we 170 miles north of Vegas, we 120 miles south of Ely, Nev., we 84 miles west of Cedar City, we 11 miles south of Pioche, we 14 miles north of Caliente. About eight and a half miles southeast of Mrs. Wah's Cantina."

Locals within a range of up to 20 miles tune to 104.7 FM--the old call numbers of Silver Lake's legendary pirate station KBLT. Three hours. Not enough for the FCC, even if aware and interested, to triangulate.

Tune in again, then, a minute after the broadcast ends. Hear static. Or maybe entrails of a hip-hop station in Riverside.

* * *

"We've got a lot friends here who are old standbys. We've got oh, Mrs. Wah, Hop Sing, Peter Dowsky, Jimmy Dean. I don't know how long this station is going to keep on. But we don't seem to have as much support as we gonna need."

The two men behind the broadcasts--and nine others like it during the past 10 months--call themselves Ray Rug and Peter Crik, after names and geographic locations mentioned in the tapes.

Mountain Radio, the station name itself, comes from the constant references the old man makes to his own elevated geographical location.

Rug and Crik are in their early to mid-30s. They have art school educations. Hold day and freelance jobs. One lives in Pasadena. The other in Eagle Rock.

A decade or so ago, Rug was a deejay at a college radio station in the Southwest. Did an experimental sonic collage sort of set.

Crik had no experience in radio, save maybe for listening to KFI-AM's (640) Phil Hendrie and Art Bell; and little with recording save for documenting birds as a 7-year-old with a tape deck and built-in mike.

Rug and Crik didn't set out, then, to be pirates; it just happened.

In July 1999, Rug found an old Wallensak brand reel-to-reel deck at an estate sale. A reel was still inside. He plugged it in, dug what he heard, paid $15 to bring the player and its contents home. The sellers threw in some polka and religious reels.

The attraction, though, was Kedzu. His voice. His age. His habit of giving out mileage markers like signposts at a military base. How he sometimes sounded drunk, sometimes inspired. And most of all, how he pretended to be making a radio broadcast when likely he was recording himself in a ghost of a town in rural Nevada.

"The guy's name is Retlaw Kedzu, which we figure is Walter Uzdek backwards," Crik says, sitting on a sofa at Rug's place. "And when you listen to these tapes, it makes sense that he would be doing this to his name because ... it's difficult to tell what's real and what's fiction when he's talking about the people he knows, who live in his town."

Rug says that Kedzu was probably in his 80s when he made the recordings. "And this was like 1972, so he's long dead by now," Rug adds. "The people he mentions are pretty much all buried in Panaca, Nev."

In November 2000, Rug had some time on his hands; he'd recently been laid off from a dot-com job, so he decided to follow Kedzu's map coordinates and investigate further.

Rug headed to Panaca; population 800; elevation 4,700 feet. Started asking questions. Anybody heard of Kedzu? No? How about some of these other names mentioned on the reel?

Rug visited the local post office, where he met the postmaster, a descendant of a town founder. The man pointed Rug to a nursing home and a cemetery, where Rug found some familiar names, but not the name he was looking for.

Rug corresponded with a local historian. She didn't know Kedzu, wondered if perhaps he was a drifter.

Lately, Rug's come to believe he knows more about the man. The broadcaster found a web page that lists World War I draft dates. Only one Walter from Lincoln County is mentioned. Another man from the tape is listed, too. It's a long shot.

Somewhere along the way, Crik and Rug also came up with a way to honor the man, whatever his real name. The pair would build a pirate radio station and actually broadcast over the airwaves Kedzu's original recordings.

* * *

"This is the station that gives you the best of everything, when we're operating. But now we're crippled up and we're not working real good."

The pair take a visitor out back to a garage free of cars. Metal hopper with tennis balls. Spare tires.

Rug and Crik carry the station--weight: 35 pounds--outdoors. Set it down under a stout tree and the telltale dirt of a gopher hole. They attach an extension cord to the station, plug it in. Show a visitor the components; try to explain the technology behind it. Speak proudly of the case, built conceptually by an art center graduate to resemble a cityscape.

The unit, made of a blonde, strong wood, is 3 1/2 feet long by 18 inches wide and rests eight inches off the ground. Inside sits a long tube of fluorescent light, which shines through a narrow yellow Plexiglas cut-out.

Rug and Crik kneel behind the station, both wearing dark, solid colors. They cover their faces with the reels in order to maintain anonymity, pose for photographs bathed in the yellow florescent glow.

"[We] just had some kind of blind confidence that we could pull it off," Rug says. "We don't have any experience in electronics at all."

The radio station has cost Rug and Crik about $1,000 so far. Depending on a variety of factors, it is able to power up to 150 watts.

Rug and Crik searched online for schematics. Sought advice from recent pirate The Monkey Man, who at the time operated a 24-hour-a-day station from a fixed location in Hollywood.

Rug and Crik also checked in with a suspicious staffer at a local ham radio outlet.

"He realized right away that we weren't the usual ham radio characters," Rug says. "Because we weren't 45 years old and driving a Lincoln Town Car with our 'Ham Radio' [license] plates, like the rest of these guys."

Crik and Rug ordered an amplifier from England. The transmitter came from Slovenia, by way of a web auction site and a seller in Maine. Some components were purchased at local electronics stores, but the pair was nervous about leaving behind a paper trail.

The first confirmed broadcast emanated from Rug's living room floor via a transmitter and TV antenna. Three watts was the most they could conjure. They bumped Joe Meek, the pioneering British producer of stereophonic songs. Crik possesses a collection of Meek's home recordings.

"It really hit home," Crik says. "We fired it up and walked out to the car in front of the house. And tuned to the frequency. And there it was. So we had officially broadcast like I don't know, 50 to 100 feet."

Since then, the two have done a Halloween show, playing digital music backwards. Using a quirk in QuickTime computer software, they were able to play scary Hollywood movie trailers in reverse sequence, so the words were recognizable, but the order of the words was reversed.

They've broadcast from the Mt. Washington hilltop home of a prominent artist--he wasn't home. The first mobile broadcast took place north of Altadena, on a hiking trail, the station plugged into the cigarette lighter of Rug's car. A hiker made an inquiry; the broadcasters lied, said they were Cal Tech students receiving signals.

They've explored several frequencies, eventually settling on 104.7-FM.

Then there was the Aug. 4, 2001, broadcast of a Disneyland-themed show. Rug and Crik circumnavigated the happiest place on earth the week prior, driving around with a scanner, picking up and recording two and a half hours worth of transmissions emanating from inside the theme park.

They captured such dialogue such as: "I have some guests inquiring to the status of Space Mountain, please."

And: "That's affirmative. They're not released because the carpet has been cleaned. Can you check to see if it's dry?"

Mountain Radio's creators are starting to get bolder, think grander. They are pondering what Rug labels a "high-concept idea"--setting up near a drive-in movie theater and culture jamming their own soundtrack over that of the film's. In the more benign version of this plan, a moment of an action film's score would be replaced seamlessly by a different snippet of score.

Rug also relates a real reel vision. One that would return to the station's estate sale roots.

"The ultimate would be to go back to Panaca to broadcast the Retlaw Kedzu [recordings] in their entirety, unadulterated," Rug says.

He's scouted out the rural Nevada dial and found only a single automated classic rock station the whole span of the FM spectrum. Almost too good to be true, the pirates figure.

"That would almost be like an exercise in not just going back to the source of the recording," Rug says, "but having a place where we could broadcast wherever the hell we wanted to."

When Wright arrived at his post, Fire Station 21, just behind the Glendale Galleria, he and a few colleagues watched the television coverage of the attacks. Soon enough, he would have the time to react the same way so many of us did, filled with shock and horror, anger and sorrow. But right then, with the twin towers still standing, Wright pictured himself at ground zero.

He noted where the fire and rescue staging area was set up. He counted the number of emergency vehicles on the scene. He estimated how many personnel were being sent inside and how many people were wounded or trapped. This, Wright observed, was a textbook example of a fire-and-rescue operation.

And then the first tower collapsed.

"We all just sat there and looked at that, and looked at each other," Wright says, 11 days after the hijackings. He's taking a short break from flipping pancakes at a department-organized community breakfast fundraiser for New York Fire Department orphans and widows that would raise $62,000.

"And we didn't say it, but we realized that every guy that we had hypothetically--and that they had actually--put in that building, just disappeared. All those people had been wiped off the face of the earth," Wright says.

"We thought about it and thought about it and said, 'We would have done exactly the same thing.' And we would probably do exactly the same thing tomorrow, depending on the circumstances. It's what we do."

* * *
Glendale's Fire Station 21 is a large, clean and new facility. It has a brick façade, cloudy-glass ornamentation and even a small museum. Seven bay doors house a small fleet of distinctly pear-colored rescue ambulances and firefighting vehicles. There are nine stations in this city of more than 200,000; this one is the flagship.

Teams of 12 men--Glendale has one woman firefighter, but she's based at a different station--work three 24-hour shifts per week. Today is Monday, two days after the pancake breakfast. The "C Platoon" that Wright oversees arrives for a briefing at 7:30 a.m. These men won't be relieved until 7:30 the next day. And they repeat that schedule Wednesday and Saturday.

The men say they work as firefighters and paramedics because they like the action. They say they do it because they like to help people. They say they do it because that's what they are paid to do.

And when they work the extra shifts they invariably seem to do, the extra money comes in handy on a municipal salary.

During any given shift, calls can come at any time. Three tones and flashing white lights provide the "go" signal, followed by the crackling voice of dispatch from the intercoms on the ceilings.

The day's first call, at 8 a.m., is for a gas smell at an apartment house. It turns out to be nothing major.

"You've got to treat each one like it's the big one," Captain Dan Nichols says. He's the commander of Truck 21--the big rig with the 100-foot ladder. He's 33 years old, and Sept. 11 was his first-ever shift as a captain.

"I'll always remember the day," he says, "for the wrong reason."

Engineer Zach Story is second-in-command on the truck. He drives and is in charge of the ladder. If this were a roaring fire, he'd go to the top of the building, stand directly over the hottest spot of the blaze and cut a hole in the roof, a dangerous yet standard procedure called ventilating.

Brian Dewhirst and Dwayne Carlton are the other members of the crew. Like Nichols, Dewhirst wears a mustache. He sits in the far back and handles the second steering wheel. The baby-faced Carlton sits in the cabin, an ax at his side.

Carlton's in his first year in Glendale and his first as a firefighter, so the others tag him "rookie" even though he's been a paramedic elsewhere for 11 years. There's not a single conflagration the entire shift. That means no brush fires for which special trucks, training and equipment are required. No indoor fires for which the crew members don their hoods and oxygen tanks amidst thick, black smoke and the orange glow of crackling flames.

If it had gotten hot like that today, the hoses and pumps of Engine 21 would have been required. The Engine is the smaller vehicle, the one with the 500-gallon H2O tank in back and the valves that connect to hydrants on the side. Its crew members extinguish fires, while the Engine crew does search and rescue.

Captain Jack Morrison is in charge of the Engine this shift. His engineer is Mark Callejo, subbing in from another station. The two swap mock jests up front. In back, square-jawed firefighter John Kearns wears a light blue headset and wraparound sunglasses. Later, he'll help train cadets in ladder techniques. Scott McMahon is the fourth member. Fifteen hours from now, he'll still have enough stamina and brainpower to effectively play a video football strategy game on the big-screen television that the men chipped in to purchase.

When the mood strikes and time permits, the firefighters and paramedics sit on the rows of recliners housed in their lounge. That's where the video game and television are, as well as trophies and other memorabilia. There's no point in getting too comfortable, though. When a call comes, they go, whether they are in the lounge, the shower or as has happened, seated around the table in the industrial-sized kitchen, having Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner with their families.

The modern-day minutemen of Fire Station 21 are so conditioned to leave immediately that they keep their boots in the garage, right next to the doors of their respective rides. Trousers, those familiar yellow, flame-retardant ones, are drooped over the boots.

Firefighters and paramedics are not like the rest of us. They put their pants on two legs at a time.
* * *
Terry Williamson is 48 years old and was a firefighter for nearly two decades before making the switch to paramedic in 1999. Williamson is mostly bald with outcrops of hair that look like rocks on a smooth night sea; Robert Duvall would play him in a biopic. His partner, Ed Marquez, is everybody's all-American, 30 years old with large muscles and a short, spiky coif.

Today, Williamson is the designated driver and radio operator; Marquez rides in back with the patients. Williamson is working his third straight day. He's 54 hours into a 72-hour stretch during which he'll get a total of eight hours sleep.

Marquez is en route to 120 hours of consecutive work. Impossibly, he doesn't appear tired. Throughout his shift, he displays enough charm to tease king cobras from wicker baskets.

On one run, a call about breathing difficulties, the caregivers of an elderly woman tell the paramedics that the woman doesn't speak. Marquez has her talking within minutes.

During another run, Marquez soothes a teenage girl with cuts on her face from a minor traffic accident by chattering with her about school, cheerleading, skateboarding and career choices. The girl's little sister rides along in a seat at the head of the gurney. Marquez makes sure she's calm, too.

The shift's most haunting calls occur after dark. A woman with a physically debilitating terminal illness is feeling unwell. Williamson and a colleague attempt to determine if she has a do-not-resuscitate order. Her family doesn't seem to understand the question. Or perhaps they don't want to understand.

The next call scrambles the entire platoon. A car collision has left a young woman's driver's-side door mangled, with her stuck inside.

Paramedics and firefighters swarm the car, climbing in through the passenger's-side door, sunroof, broken window--seemingly everywhere but the tailpipe. Truck 21 shows up and the firefighters break out a "jaws-of-life" cutting tool.

Meanwhile, a crowd of 100 has gathered to watch. One young man sits on a short wall and eats ice cream from a plastic cup.

The young woman's mother comes forward. Her daughter is in much better condition than the scene would make it appear. The mother doesn't know that. She is hysterical. "Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?" she screams, over and over again.

Eventually, firefighters and others in the crowd calm her down. The woman is extricated from the car and taken to LAC/USC Medical Center. That's the fifth hospital to which Marquez and Williamson have delivered patients. It's also their 16th call today; two more were yet to come. Marquez says his personal record is 19 or 20 in a single shift. Williamson has had 21.

"It's still early," Marquez says shortly before midnight, after the 17th call. Or as Williamson had put it earlier, activating his siren during a string of calls that sent the paramedics pinballing around the city: "Welcome to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride."
* * *
As luck, or the "Call Gods" that Williamson laughs about, or just plain chance would have it, the final assignment of the shift arrives extremely early, at about 1:30 a.m. Minutes later, the paramedics arrive at an apartment building, the scene of an alleged assault. The engine crew from nearby Fire Station 22 has arrived already. One of them waves Marquez away before he can make it to the door.

Without breaking stride, Marquez and Williamson continue on. They go down the back stairs, back into their ride, and back to their dorm rooms, the seminary student-style sleepers, upstairs near the fire pole, often adorned with "A Fireman's Prayer" hanging on the walls. Williamson will emerge Tuesday, at 6 a.m.; Marquez will follow a short time later. Both will have a much-deserved day off.

But back to that final call. On the apartment balcony, a worried woman wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, smoking a cigarette, had heard the commotion and opened her door. "Tell me," she said, "Is everything all right?"

In this case, at least, the answer was yes.

Mark Brown comes from a family that’s well known in local baseball circles. Some say his older brother, Frank, was a better pitcher than Mark. “I was always in his shadow,” said Mark, “and up there I probably m always will be.” Dave, the youngest of the three brothers, was drafted in 1988 by the Baltimore Orioles and pitched one year in the New York-Penn League for Erie, where his pitching coach was Mark. “Dave was wild,” observed his coach. “When he came into the game, everybody would see me go for the Tums.” Mom was their number one fan and dad their first pitching coach (his philosophy was “grip it and rip it,” according to Mark.) Even Mark’s uncles were involved in baseball, serving as umpires.

Mark Brown followed the precedent of Carlton Fisk – born in Bellows Falls, raised in New Hampshire. And in the small world of Vermont baseball, it should come as no surprise that the two players had a connection before they took their games to the highest level.

It was clear from the start that Mark Brown would turn out to be an exceptional baseball player. While he was still a teenager his fastball was clocked at eighty-eight m.p.h. During the first of his two seasons playing for American Legion Post Five (the same team he’d served as batboy), the team would have won a state championship, claims Mark, if his brother Frank hadn’t hurt his arm. After two years at Fall Mountain High School, Mark spent his junior and senior years at the Loomis-Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. In two seasons in the New England Prep School League, Brown pitched eighty innings, allowed thirty hits, struck out 157 batters, and was 8-2 with a school record 1.3 5 ERA. He also pitched a no-hitter during his senior year of 1977.

Following his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts, Mark joined the semipro Saxtons River [Vermont] Pirates. The team compiled a 33-6 record in the Twin-State League during the summer of 1978, then went 38-11 after jumping to the newly revived Northern League in ’79. Brown pitched some gems for the Pirates: a non-hitter and fifteen strikeouts against the Burlington A’s; a one-hitter against Hartford, New York; a seventeen-strikeout performance against the Burlington Expos; eighteen more strikeouts in a win over Essex; and seventeen k’s again, this time against the A’s. Two-thirds of the way through the ’78 season, Brown’s numbers were an impressive as his prep school stats: a 7-2 record and 108 strikeouts in fifty-five innings pitched.

In Brown’s two losses he allowed a grand total of one earned run, and even that he did with style. The date was July 11, 1978, and the Pirates were taking on the Brattleboro Maples in a night game at Brattleboro’s Stolte Field. Pitted against Brown was Dave Klenda, a former Tidewater Tide who’d joined the Maples the previous week after seven years in the minors, and for eight innings the two pitchers matched zeroes. Saxtons River had managed a couple of singles, but Brown was no-hitting the Maples. Three outs later, Klenda closed out his line: nine innings, two hits, zero runs, twelve strikeouts, and four walks. In the bottom half of the inning, Brattleboro’s Pete Campbell stepped to the plate with one out and hit a towering home run to win the game.

As time passed, the legend of that night grew, and so, according to Mark Brown, did its legacy: a revival of interest in the local hardball circuit. “It was such a big night for baseball,” Brown said. “[The fans] saw that it was really good baseball, not some beer league, with good pitching, good hitting, and good fielding. And the game was such a thriller.” The Rutland Herald called Campbell’s game-winner a “story-book finish to a fine bal game.” Officially, the Brattleboro Reformer spoke in more muted prose, citing a “dramatic end to a well-played contest.” Off the record, though, reporter Ken Campbell took on a more excitable tone, according to Saxtons River coach Dave Moore. “He told me it was the best game he’d ever seen,” Moore said. Of course Campbell would say that – it was his own son who hit the home run.

Other Brown memories revolve around places. The man may have played in major league ballparks, but he still speaks reverently about Burlington’s Centennial Field, and the Brattleboro field where chickenwire screens protect the dugouts still makes him chuckle. Brown has also constructed a hypothetical ballpark in his mind, a catch-all place to capture memories of baseball in Vermont:

“I remember, in the summer time, just playing. There’d be one piece of fence in center field, then there’d be a cow pasture in right, then where you warmed up off the bench there’d be another cow pasture, there’d be cow corn growing. Or, behind the backstop, if you lost the ball, it was probably in a tree pit.

“All those fields, all those places. Everybody was into it. Even if there were only fifty people there and they had to pass the hat to pay the umpire, they were into it. It was such a good time, such a good bunch of guys to play with. It would be neat to get all those old guys together, maybe play some old men’s softball.”

Despite finishing his junior year at UMass with a disappointing 4-6 record, Brown was selecte6d early in the sixth round of the 1980 record, Brown was selected early in the sixth round of the 1980 draft. He met with scouts at his home in North Walpole and took all of five minutes to accept Baltimore’s initial offer of $7,500. Then it was off to a rookie league in Bluefield, West Virginia, and soon thereafter to Class-A ball in Miami. After ten appearances, all starts, his ERA stood at 4.73 – almost a full run higher than it would be at any other stop in his minor league career.

Eventually Brown returned to New Hampshire after the Orioles shut him down for the rest of the season due to a sore shoulder. The injury – tendonitis, officially – was slow to heal, forcing him to miss the first part of the 1981 season. “It’s kind of a bummer,” Brown said, looking back. “You’re twenty-one years old, it’s your first full year of pro ball, and you’re on the disabled list.” The injury taught him to be a better all-around pitcher, even if it tempered his velocity. His newfound knowledge helped him rise rapidly through the minors.

Each time Brown was promoted he lowered his ERA. The best example is 1982, when Brown went from A to AA to AAA while his ERA dipped from 3.10 to 2.09 to 1.42. By 1983 he’d earned a spot on Baltimore’s forty-man roster and his first invitation to major league spring training. After being assigned to the Orioles’ top farm team in Rochester, New York, Brown suffered a torn labrum and missed parts of June, July, and August. The next year he returned to Rochester and enjoyed an eventful summer. First he got engaged. He also pitched well in forty-four games. Then on August 9, 1984, Mark Anthony Brown became the thirty-fourth and, to this date, last Vermonter to play in the major leagues.

The first big league batter faced, Julio Franco, smashed a line drive off his knee. To add insult to injury, the hit went for an infield single, and, worst of all, it came on what Brown thought was a good pitch. “I threw him a real nasty slider on the outside corner and he took it right off my kneecap. [The ball] trickled over to first base. I hobbled over there and just watched him run to first, and he was safe.” Brown pitched on and was hit hard. He gave up another knock, Cal Ripken made an error, and a 4-4 tie was suddenly a 6-4 deficit. “I had my first appearance, my first loss, and my first sore knee,” Brown said. “I finished the inning, then [manager] Joe Altobelli took me out. He thought I might hurt my knee more by throwing for another few innings.”

“It was alright, it wasn’t really hurt bad,” Brown said. “It was funny, I got to the clubhouse and I remember Mike Flanagan coming up to me, patting me on the back, saying, ‘Oh yeah, welcome to the big leagues, even the outs here are hard.’” Brown says those words from a fellow New Hampshire resident meant a lows to him, as did the treatment he received during each of his five summers in the Baltimore chain. “They were a great organization,” he says. “When I went well, they promoted me: when I was hurt, they put me on the disabled list; when I got to the big leagues they were good to me, they gave me a shot.”

Mark Brown pitched well for Baltimore over the last couple months of the ’84 season. In nine games he gave up fewer hits than innings pitched and struck out more batters than he walked. To cap it off, he picked up his first – and, as it turned out, only – big league win on the last day of the season, striking out Red Sox slugger Jim Rice for his final out. Then Brown and his teammates set off on a three-week, fifteen-game barnstorming tour of Japan, playing five games against the Yomiuri Giants, another five against the Hiroshima Carp, and four more against regional all-star teams. “In Japan we played on a couple of skin fields,” Brown said, referring to all-dirt, no-grass infields. “It was just like Vermont – you could pick up boulders.”

The following spring the Orioles, satisfied that they’d seen what Brown could do and in need of more balance in their bullpen, traded him to the Minnesota Twins for lefthander Brad Havens. Baltimore’s pitching staff was talented (second in the A.L. in ERA in 1984) and extravagantly deep, whereas Minnesota’s bullpen had closer Ron Davis and a lot of problems. Best of all for Brown, the Twin’s new manager, Ray Miller, had been the Orioles’ pitching coach. Here was a chance to establish himself with an emerging team with good hitting, good defense, and little pitching.

Brown pitched well at Triple-A Toledo, where the Twins first assigned him. The parent club, meanwhile, continued to get shelled. By late June, when Brown was called up, Minnesota’s team ERA was a league-worst 4.84.

Brown drove all night to get to Minneapolis and the Twins’ infamous indoor stadium. “I couldn’t wait to get there. ‘Gotta get to the Metrodome,’ I kept saying.” This time the Bellows Falls native decided to take some serious stock of his situation. “It kind of struck me: small town boy makes it to the big leagues. Here I am again.”

Brown got bombed in his first outing and after two weeks his ERA stood at 11.57. By August he’d almost halved it to 6.89, but by then it was too late. Brown was sent back to Toledo, his roster spot taken by the talented but oft-suspended drug offender, Steve Howe. Back with the Mudhens, Brown was united with Len Whitehouse, the two Green Mountain Boys of Summer playing together for the first time. To his credit, Brown pitched admirably. His ERA was 2.94, he reduced his walks-to-innings pitched ration to an all-time low, and his arm felt great. Unfortunately, no one seemed to. care.

Brown went to spring training in 1986 hoping to get one more shot, but he was immediately sent down to Toledo. Then he got released. Brown went home, thinking, who’s going to pick up a twenty-seven-year-old reliever three weeks into the season? The surprising answer was Baltimore. Brown played out the year at Double-A Charlotte, where he’d pitched so well five years earlier as an up-and-coming prospect. Now he was heading the other direction. “My low point came when I got put on the disabled list and I wasn’t even hurt,” Brown said.

He returned to Rochester and played in a adult league for a couple of seasons, intending to lay first base exclusively but eventually giving in and pitching a few games. Mark enjoyed playing with his brother Dave for the first time but ended up hurting his shoulder.

Today Brown lives in the Kansas City, Missouri area with his wife and three daughters. He remains an active instructor and mentor for young ball players as the youth pastor and athletic director for his church. He also instructs at Mac-N-Seitz, an indoor facility run by fellow major leaguers Mike McFarlane and Kevin Seitzer. He talks about wanting to share his love for the game, and about how maybe he can help kids realize their dreams, or better yet, get a good education thanks to sports.

In the end, Total Baseball shows that Mark Brown had but a single major league win. To some that may seem sad, but a dozen years later it doesn’t seem to bother the man himself. “I only got a couple cups of coffee,” the Vermonter said, breaking into a wide smile. “But they were good cups.”

-end-

SIDEBAR: ‘Border Vermonters’ Meet

Back in 1965, when Mark Brown was in grammar school, he served as Carlton Fisk’s batboy for the championship Bellows Falls American Legion team. Mark’s uncles umpired Fisk’s games, so they brought the six-year-old to the field with them and charged him with retrieving the bats. Did the two future major leaguers ever speak? Brown doesn’t think so. “I was a little kid,” he said. “To me [Fisk] looked’ d like a giant.”

Brown does credit Fisk for opening doors. “It all started with Pudge Fisk,” Brown said. “Here he was, some big old hick from the Twin States, playing for Bellows Falls Legion Post Five. Then he gets to the Vermont State Championship, and everyone saw the guy and said, ‘Wow! There are actually some guys who can play.’ That gave guys like myself an opportunity.”

But did the two Bellows Falls “natives” ever meet in the majors? Their careers overlapped chronologically, after all, and bother were in the American League. The answer, as Brown tells it, is yes and no. Yes,, Brown was with the Twins in 1985 when they played Fisk’s White Sox at Comiskey Park. And no, he couldn’t get up the courage to approach Fisk.

“Logistics got in the way,” Brown said. “[Fisk] wouldn’t come out of batting practice until late, so it was hard to see him. He was always king of touch to approach – kind of standoffish and a very tough guy. A nice guy once you get a chance to know him, but he won’t let you in, that type of guy. A typical New Englander. I should have tried to break down the barrier and say hi, but I didn’t do it.”

-end

SIDEBAR II: A Conspiracy Against Vermonters?

In a cruel twist of baseball fate, when the Minnesota Twins recalled Mark Brown from the minors in 1985, the pitcher he replaced was fellow Vermonter Len Whitehouse. It was a remarkable coincidence, especially considering that only three of the close to 1,000 players active in 1985 hailed from the Green Mountains. Was there some quota on Green Mountain Boys in the major leagues?

Brown remembers the circumstances clearly. “Lenny Whitehouse met me at the clubhouse, and he told me he was being sent down, and it would be really helpful if didn’t have to close out the lease and lose all this money if I would just move into his apartment,” Brown said. “So that’s how I got the chance to meet him. I said, ‘I hate to meet you under these circumstances,’ and Whitehouse said, “That’s all right.”

For his part, Whitehouse has blocked it out of his memory: “I don’t remember anything from ’85 except giving up a grand slam. It was a bad year fro me. But the way I understand it, the guy who replaced me when I wasn’t down was Mark Brown, and not only did he take my job, he also took my apartment. I was only there for a week so I don’t even remember where I was living.”

-end-

But Jerry Lewis is still kicking, Private Jessica Lynch made it out of Iraq, and Rudolph Giuliani, once the scourge of squeegee men, has turned Sept. 11 into a profession.

Each of the above, as well as retired General Tommy Franks and something billed as "Zig Ziglar, America’s No. 1 Motivator" were among the featured speakers at the touring "Get Motivated" seminar that hit the Arrowhead Pond Nov. 15-16.

The Tuesday show sold out; I attended Monday, when attendance was estimated at 12,000. Police stood at intersections near the arena, directing traffic. Indoors, long lines for nachos and soda prevailed at the "Franks-a-Lot" concession stand.

The event was part salon, part self-help session, part infomercial. Get Motivated Seminars Inc., the sponsors, make more money from selling associated products than from the gate, a spokeswoman said.

Realtors and Christian-church representatives appeared to make up a significant portion of the Pond crowd. Tour buses carried "Re/Max" placards. Embroidered sweaters read, "Century 21." Administrators from St. John’s Lutheran Church of Orange commandeered a bloc of seats. A man looking for a lost watch wore a large crucifix tattoo. A younger man wearing a "Kerry/Edwards" pin sported a dangling cross necklace. The realtors said they’d been marketed to, that two of the speakers were real-estate experts. The church folks just knew to come.

Standing on a stage beneath the arena’s video scoreboards, center ice if the Mighty Ducks weren’t locked out, the speakers played to the room.

"If man can take moldy bread and make penicillin out of it," Ziglar said, "just imagine what God can do for you."

Ziglar, it turns out, is the avuncular, 78-year-old front man of Dallas-based Ziglar Training Systems. He looks like Bob Barker and sounds like Dan Rather on crystal—of course, so does Dan Rather.

"You were born to win!" he said, "I’m in the life-changing business!"

Ziglar’s an acrostics junkie. If some kid tells your child he’s ugly, Ziglar says, inform li’l gullible that the word stands for "unusually good-looking youngster."

Ziglar’s other advice includes exercise regularly, avoid stress and have a sense of humor.

After Ziglar spoke, Giuliani took the stage. Confetti dropped and a Sinatra cut bellowed. Ostensibly, the former mayor was present to lecture about management. He stayed on message, regurgitating the principles identified in his 2002 book, Leadership.

Given the Pond demographics, perhaps presumed 2008 presidential contender Giuliani was also looking to widen his voter base. If so, he hit mostly the right notes.

He praised Ronald Reagan. He talked about Israel. He said, "God bless you." He told a Ground Zero story about construction workers embracing George W. Bush. Giuliani’s sole foible was telling an anecdote about Pope John Paul II. Better save that story for the Feast of San Gennaro.

Falon Paraso, a Get Motivated volunteer from the Master’s Commission—an immersive Christian-youth program—said she’d been looking forward to seeing Giuliani. I asked the spike-haired, purple-shawled young woman what she thought of his having once shacked up with a gay couple?

"I believe gossip is wrong," the Rancho Cucamonga resident replied.

Paraso said that in addition to her fellow Master’s volunteers, there were other free laborers on hand from Teen Reach and Mary Kay Cosmetics.

"Peter Lowe, he’s a Christian," Paraso said, referring to the Get Motivated founder. "He wants all his volunteers to have the same joy, to have the same purpose in life: to serve the people."

Lowe’s bio says he was born to missionaries living in Pakistan. He grew up in Canada and, combined with a lisp, carries the maple leaf accent. He resembles an orange-haired Gray Davis.

Lowe sat down to interview Private Lynch.

The 21-year-old West Virginian discussed her life-and-death misadventures in Iraq. Knowing what you know now, Lowe asked her, would you have enlisted?

"Oh, definitely," Lynch said. "I still miss it today."

Lynch walks with a limp and uses a silver orthopedic cane. Her legs are filled with rods and screws. She exited the stage to a standing ovation and a recording of Lee Greenwood’s "God Bless the USA."

Next, Lowe spoke. He said it would be "unprofessional" of him to talk about success without talking about spirituality. He showed a video of himself jumping, with a springy rope affixed, at a waterfall.

"Do you think it takes a little faith to bungee jump?" Lowe asked. "And I had to put a lot of faith in that bungee cord."

He said that what you believe is more important than just that you believe.

Meaning, Christ.

"Lord Jesus," Lowe said a little later, "I need you. I want you to come to my life."

A longer version of that affirmation was available on compact disc in the lobby.

Tamara Lowe, Peter’s wife, emceed. After a lunch break, she hosted a beach party. Inflatable balls were batted about. "Surfin’ Safari" blasted. And an insurance agent who looked like Peter O’Toole in My Favorite Year won a trip to Disneyworld by dancing with abandon.

Next up was Jerry Lewis. Pyrotechnics went off, and it was like the Lynch welcome all over again. Lewis, his voice still strong, opened with a joke and then kept them coming:

"Do you know why a cow wears a bell? Because her horns don’t work."

"This firefighter had twins. He named one José and the other, Hose B."

And then the jokes came so quickly I’ll have to paraphrase: How do Chinese parents name their children? They throw silverware up in the air, and when it lands, it makes sounds—chung, ching, wang, wong.

Big laugh.

I’m riding the subway, and there’s a young guy sitting across from me with blue, red and yellow hair. I’m looking at him, and he says, "What? You’ve never done anything wild?" I tell him, "Twenty years ago, I had sex with a parrot. I thought you were my son."

Pastor John McFarland of the Fountain Valley Methodist Church sat in the front row, just 15 feet from where Lewis and the other celebrities performed.

"I like to soak up the presence of successful people," McFarland said.

McFarland has been a pastor for 25 years, has five children, cares deeply about Third World poverty and never thought much about his own finances, he said.

Phil Town changed that. Following that stock-market investor’s midmorning presentation, the pastor walked to a table, filled out paperwork and signed up—no commitment, he said—to attend a follow-up class.

"There’s more in the scriptures about finances than about heaven and hell," McFarland said.

Ophelia Robles was also pumped up about the investing class. The Upland-based realtor leapt out of her seat in the first row of the regular Pond stands, hurrying to reach the nearby sign-up table.

"I just wanted to be the first," she said later.

Instead, the black-leather-jacket-clad Robles caught her three-and-a-half-inch high heels on the top of the Pond boards—like Sergei Fedorov catching a skate during a late line change. Robles tumbled to the carpet, and her cell phone went flying. She got right up and raced to the table.

"I was very excited," Robles said. "And motivated."

     Another member of the group is baby-faced and soft-spoken. And he is strong. When he does five consecutive back-flips because someone challenges
him to, his muscles flex, revealing a physique that's more developed than a roll of film. He is Svetoslav Binev--Svet to his friends--a recent immigrant to Los Angeles from Bulgaria and among the baddest lightweight world champions contemporary sumo has known.

     Of course, to casual sumo enthusiasts, the words "lightweight" and "sumo" probably make as much sense as sake with a Diet Coke chaser. But since the 1991 founding of the International Sumo Federation and subsequent creation of three weight classes and two gender divisions, the ancient national sport of Japan is no longer exclusively for behemoths.

     "We have to change the mentality of the people about sumo," Binev says, not fully confident in his English. "We have to explain that it's a very attractive sport and [that there] should be weight classes so everybody [can] compete. Because now people [say] 'It's for fat guys. Why [should] I try?'"

     That said, this is still Los Angeles. Celebrity equals currency. So Freund has pulled off something of a coup. The CSA's inaugural USA Sumo Open on Aug. 4 at UCLA will include an appearance by Konishiki, the most famous name in professional sumo; recently retired, he's the 628-pound American-born champion, who became the first foreigner to dominate the Japanese pro league.

     "It's amazing," Freund says. "I'm actually shocked Konishiki is coming. I've been talking to Japan night and day for weeks."

     Freund hopes the grappler's monumental presence will result in a crowd of 2,000 for the event. Binev will be there. And Freund will be there,hustling, promoting and exhorting his team members, but not competing as he often does. The CSA president has lost 20 pounds of muscle during the past 12 months, which he says is the result of trying to get Binev acclimated, helping him obtain a green card (it's still pending) and getting him permission to travel to Brazil for the most recent world championship event.

     "We sacrificed everything," Freund says. "I sacrificed all of my time (and) he spent all of his time training. No matter what money [either of them made], everything went toward getting ready."

     And it all went for naught. Freund says Binev's immigration lawyer failed to file some papers until after the deadline and therefore Binev didn't get to go for his third consecutive crown.

     "That's the tip of the iceberg. There were a million nightmares. I'm about to scream just thinking about it," Freund says.

     Both men came to sumo in roundabout manners. Freund went to Japan in 1990 to teach English. He attended sumo matches and was enthralled. A few years after he returned to America, he wandered into a sumo demonstration. His friend challenged him to go up on stage, which he did, and he was hooked.

     Binev, on the other hand, was practically born to be a top athlete. His father was a professional soccer player; Binev was wrestling by age 7. He went on to win national championships in four sports: power-lifting, handball, freestyle wrestling and, as a youth, sprinting. He took up sumo in 1997, when an instructor at the National Sports Academy in Sofia offered him carte blanche to use his own training methods. Binev, who has little patience for things he finds ineffective, had clashed with some of the coaches in other sports. The sumo offer was one he couldn't refuse.

     According to Freund, in the four years that have followed, Binev has lost only three matches. Two were on questionable calls by the referees, the third, when Binev wrestled with a broken ankle.

     "Svet doesn't have any weaknesses," Freund says. "Because he's at least as fast as everyone, at least as strong as everyone (else), at least as balanced as everyone (else) with at least as many techniques as everyone (else). So there isn't anything you can do against him."

     Except maybe ignore him.

     When Konishiki arrives, he'll be the grand marshal of Los Angeles' Nisei Week Japanese Festival parade. Yet when Binev walks down the street near his
West Los Angeles home, nobody recognizes him, let alone applauds.

     "I'm trying [to get] an athlete like this recognition," Freund says. "It's hard to do something unless your sport is watched. So he was the national champion of Bulgarian freestyle wrestling. How many people watch freestyle wrestling?"

     For his part, Binev has adapted to life in the U.S. He has a beefcake head shot, he's had two roles in films and he's appeared on a made-for-television gladiator show. The Bulgarian expatriate says it's all thanks to his pal Freund.

     "I thank god I met him. Otherwise I don't know what I would have done," Binev says. "You know, maybe I would be in Chicago driving a truck or something."

True story. New Year’s Eve. Aisle 12 at the supermarket. Me, scanning the canned and bagged legumes, searching like Hans Blix in Baghdad. I was trying to peep some black-eyed peas, that humble triptych of monosyllabic words that most nights just means a fine side dish, but which on the debut day of each Año Nuevo is the traditional must-have food to ring in a happy, healthy and wealthy fresh spin around the sun.

Anyway, it wasn’t happening. No black-eyed peas in the supermarket. And there were others seeking. A woman pushing a cart and trailing a child called out to a store clerk. "’Scuse me," the woman said. "Don’t you have any black-eyed peas?"

I told the woman, hey, that’s what I’m looking for, too. Told her my girlfriend sent me out to purchase the lucky legumes.

"Is your girlfriend black?" the woman asked, totally out of left field.

"Um, she’s southern," I said.

"A lot of black people come from the South," she said.

The common black-eyed peace, scientific name Vigna Unguiculata, is a protein-rich, vine-born foodstuff of central African origin. The tasties are also known as "cowpeas" because of their historic prevalence as cattle chow. A lesser-known name is "catjang," which sounds like something from a litter box I’d rather not think about.

Either way, I went home empty-handed on Dick Clark’s Ball night. The next morning, my girlfriend went to a different supermarket and bought a supply of cans bearing the name and legend of the famous Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem.

Too soon, Sylvia’s catjang was a mere memory. Out of canned product and craving the fresh-cooked stuff, it was time for a restaurant jaunt.

I hopped into the two-door and eased the ride over to the tiny, beloved Ruth’s Place in Santa Ana. The eatery, open here for 11 years, carries a tough-to-read sign out front advertising Southern-style soul food. The joint stands between vinyl haven Ghetto Records and the Casa de Antonio Barber Shop—complete with old-fashioned swirling pole.

Inside, as ever, Ruth herself was cooking, taking orders, and holding court behind the long black-and-white, diamond-shaped tile counter cluttered with everything from a half-dozen plants to copies of the Tri-County Bulletin.

Ruth is diminutive and distinctly redheaded. Everybody seems to call her Mom, and though she’s not one to complain, she did thank me for walking up to the counter to pick up my pink lemonade refill. Seems Ruth’s feet were a bit tired, owing to how she’d been up since real early, cooking for her booth at a cultural event.

While I was waiting in line to order my black-eyed peas—along with a side of yams and cornbread, plus a catfish entrée—one of the five fellas crammed into the larger of Ruth’s Place’s two tables got up to pay and turned to ask a playful question.

"What you gonna have today," he said, grinning. "Oxtail?"

"Do I look like I’m gonna have oxtail?" I answered, cheshiring back.

"Hey, you wouldn’t believe it," he said. "But some white folk—no offense—come in and are real adventurous."

Me, I’d just come to dine. And eatin’ at Ruth’s Place is like dinin’ and goin’ to heaven. The catfish were steaming and piled fist-high. The yams were as sweet as Sade’s taboo. The cornbread was as greasy as Dave Garofalo’s palms. And the black-eyed peas were soft and plump and just the proper earthen hue. Their "eyes" resembled a solar eclipse’s umbra—and I didn’t need to build one of those pinhole contraptions in order to enjoy ’em. A sufficient quantity of Ruth’s Place’s peas had been squished during preparations to leave a grand, clabbered paste for the survivors to luxuriate in.

Sated, I finished my feast, paid and exited. I returned home in a fine mood that soon got finer. When I arrived, my legume-loving girlfriend greeted me particularly affectionately. Seems noshing black-eyed peas can bring good luck on more than just the first day of the year.

Ruth’s Place, 1236 Civic Center Dr. W., Santa Ana, (714) 953-9454. Open Wed., 11 a.m.-2 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., noon-8 p.m.; Sun., 1-6 p.m. No alcohol. Dinner for two, $15, food only. All major credit cards accepted.

I was kickin’ it with Maus author and New Yorker comics editor Art Spiegelman the other day. “Sandow Birk be big,” Spiegelman told me, right after I gave him the beat down on Sega Madden 2000. “He sumo-ass big.”

“I feel ya,” I replied. “He as big as O.D.B.’s rap sheet.”

“Bigger,” Spiegeman said. “He as big as a Laird Hamilton-ridden wave.”

Okay, so that chat never occurred. I bring it up in the context of digging the faux history fictions that Long Beach, Calif. -based artist Birk is, among so many other things, known for. And after checking out Birk’s latest show, “Prisonation,” I’m more convinced than ever that Daniel Clowes-and Chris Ware-backer Spiegelman ought to make getting Birk a graphic novel book deal his absolute next priority.

Not that our man Birk needs any assistance, thank you. Supercurator Tyler Stallings just took down his Laguna Art Museum survey show of Birk’s fake war between Northern and Southern California (“Fog Town vs. Smog Town”). Birk’s past series -- each one more clever, conceptual and documentarian than the next -- included sets about a trip to Mexico and portraits of Brazilian street kids. Coming soon are said to be four canvases about the L.A.P.D.’s Rampart Division dirty cops scandal. The first work is already on display in an office at Koplin, and it features typically doughy, almost boneless characters that, even while not being entirely representational, capture the feel of contemporary city life better than any artist this side of, damn, maybe Honore Daumier? Check it: Birk’s that good, that wise, that socially aware, and when the mood strikes, that satirical.

Which brings us to “Prisonation,” the 24 works that Birk executed about California penetentaries. Most of the pokeys are in the deep background, serving as distant scenery, often hidden amidst buccolic Central and coastal California settings. Rows of crops and a tractor dominate a beutifully composed print of “California State Prison, Corcoran, Ca.” A desert scene with hills and cactus is the true focus of “Pleasant Valley State Prison, Coalinga, Ca.” Cows and bulls lounge and flowering shurbs bloom against barb wire in “Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Atascadero, Ca.” The oil-on-canvas works are done in the California Plein Aire style that peaked in popularity about 75 years ago; but iconoclastic Birk has proved time and time again that he’s the anti-hack, and his works compare favorably with the older school plein aire works for sale at a trio of galleries around the corner. Of course, the Cali landscape has changed a bit since the days of Maynard Dixon et al., and Birk’s works include the occasional crushed beer can, Toyota 4-Runner, rusted shopping cart or hand-painted sign such as “White Local Jumbo Sweet Peaches Nectarines.”

Birk’s a pure storyteller, and whether he’s doing fact or fiction, he gets the feel right, the mood right, and the lesson right. In the prison series, he’s the subtlest of preachers; his S.F. v. L.A. martial stuff went for the over-the-top approach. The truth is, whatever choices Birk has made, they are always ideal. Next time we meet up, I’m gonna tell my homeboy Art Spiegelman that.

-- Jeremy Rosenberg

For this, Scott left Paris, where he was even recognized by cabdrivers?

“L.A. is an inspiring, inspirational, magic city,” says the Kansas city-born and New York City-schooled clothier, his words as unrestrained as his semiannual outré women’s clothing collections. “It’s like no other place. It’s a fantasy world. It’s like dreamland. It’s a paradise on earth.” In other words, anything goes here, and Jeremy Scott likes it that way.

“Scott, who is known for his avant-garde women’s clothing, is sitting on a small couch in a back corner of his narrow white-walled studio, which as concrete floors and exposed wood ceiling beams. He curls one of his white, unlaced Nike Air Force high-top basketball sneakers up under his opposite leg. He wears silver jogging pants, white sport socks, a gray T-shirt and a white martial arts jacket. He hasn’t been exercising.

Scott’s handiwork is equally ironic. Having shown 10 largely unconventional collections in Paris, he gained an international reputation for his wild imagination and for the spectacular theatrical elements of his runway shows, which he often concluded by yelling, ”vive l’avant garde!”

One of Scott’s recent collections of women’s clothing paid homage to skyscrapers. Another season’s exhibition was based on game shows, complete with household items as prop prizes and fake cash scattered to the crowd. While he has a solid following, he’s also been knocked by the fashion press for a lack on consistency, and his clothes have been panned for being impractical – quite a feat in the anything-goes realm of haute couture.

SO now he’s arrived in a city where leading executives can legitimately pass large portions of their careers pondering, say, the size of a giant robot or the color of a sea monster’s scales. Sounds like prime Scott turf.

“L.A. is such a gorgeous city for fashion and people really love fashion here…”Scott says. “Oh, it’s the most futuristic city in the United States, and maybe even the world.”

**

Scott isn’t the first designer to answer Southern California’s siren call. Bob Mackie, James Galanos and Richard Tyler, to name a few, have made their names as L.A. designers. Perhaps the most memorable was Austria native Rudi Gernreich, who fled the Nazis for L.A. in 1938,and went on to invent the “monokini,” a topless bathing suit made famous in the ‘60s by model Peggy Moffit. (Like Gernreich before him, Scott draws inspiration from Moffit. The two were introduced several years ago at a dinner party given in Scott’s honor by hair-care impresario Vidal Sassoon.)

Unlike Gernreich, Scott – whom even the fickle French embraced and who was the only American designer to be included in the Louvre’s 2002 Couture Superstar exhibition – wasn’t forced out of Europe. He split voluntarily while still in his preternaturally early prime.

Two years ago at the Pacific Design Center, Scott made his L.A. debut, presenting a Spring 2001 collection reminiscent of the nighttime television soap opera “Dynasty.”

Rita Watnick, owner of the prominent Beverly Hills vintage boutique Lily Et Cie, was in the crowd that night. She’s become such a Scott supporters that Rose Apodaca-Jones, the West Coast bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily, calls Watnick the designer’s “Fairy godmother.”

Watnick invited Scott back to L.A. to work with her on a charity event, this time putting him up at L’Ermiatage and renting him a convertible.

When it came time for Scott to return to Paris after that second stay, the then-expat bawled.

“He drove away from my store, and he had to come back and say ‘bye’ again,” Watnick says. “He was crying, crying, crying, crying. [It was] really cute.”

Scott adds, “I just was insane. I was crying at the airport. I was like a baby. I didn’t want to leave because it felt so right.”

Back in France, Scott pondered his status as an independent designer, wondering in part where he should work and live. He’d been offered jobs in established fashion houses but turned them down.

“Since I'm not in this blown-out company with eyeglasses in every airport, I don’t have to [cede control],” Scotts says. “My goal is to forward my vision of crea5tivity to popular, mainstream culture.”

Toward that end, Scott hopes to break though another high-fashion barrier – working with the runway crowd while also doing entertainment industry costume design.

He’s off to a decent start, having scored the gig costuming Madonna’s latest major music video, for the James Bond film “Die Another Day.” Earlier this year, he was selected to costume models for the Andy Warhol Retrospective opening night gala at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Scot also participated in the Otis College of Art and Design’s mentoring program for junior and senior students, for which he asked his seniors students to design an outfit from two different time periods. “Getting Scott to participate was just the most miraculous thing on earth,” says Rosemary Brantley, founding chair of the Otis School of Fashion Design.

Scott’s also designed looks for musical acts, including the performance art band Fischerspooner and randy rapper Peaches. Contemporary and filmmaker Harmony Korine has asked the designer to costume and art-direct his next movie, which is about nuns, and to co-write and co-direct the picture following that.

“I have tons of goals,” Scott says. “I want to win an Oscar.”

But even Scott’s staunchest supporters acknowledge that in the long run, it isn’t easy to please both Hollywood producers and the fashion elite.

“I think it’s very hard,” boutique owner Watnick says. “And I don’t think anybody has ever succeeded at it.”

Still, if Scott fails, it won’t be from a lack of connections.

He remains acquainted with Bjork, for whom he designed a surreal white leather “angel” dress with diaphanous fan-like wings affixed from sleeves to hips. His mentor in Paris was Karl Lagerfeled, who remains a close friend. He calls model Devon Aoki “My muse” and keeps a stylized photograph taken by Lagerfeld of himself and Aoki up on his studio wall. And Sassoon adds, “The more great designers we have here the better. I’m very happy that he decided to come.”

**

On a chilly Saturday night last month, Scott showed his spring 2003 collection – which made its debut in September at New York fashion week – In Little Tokyo at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. Outdoors, a large turnout and a poorly organized check-in scrum left dozens of would-be attendees stranded, peasants-at-the-castle-gate-style, on the wrong side of a lowered museum garage door. Nearby, a security guard told invited guests to halt or face arrest for trespassing.

Indoors, though, on Scott’s runway and among the 300-some admitted designers, stylists and others, all went smoothly.

Thee works that Scott presented, including hand-painted silk dresses, metallic microdresses and revealing suede beachwear never intended to be worn in water, had received mediocre reviews when they debuted in New York. But unlike his cool welcome back east, L.A.’s fashion cognoscenti seemed to get the joke.

Now that Scott’s settling in here, he’s absorbing and incorporating fashion ideas culled from the sun, sand and sea. His current collection has coral and u shell shapes and shoes showy swimsuits built for sunning – a local phenomenon perhaps misunderstood by East Coast critics, who dip in more placid waters.

Soon after the MOCA event, the clothes were shipped to Asia – his biggest market –f or sale.

Back in his studio, Scott’s been spending time with his growing library of art, photography and architecture books. He’s also studying up on West Coast fashion history and continues to pursue his interest in science fiction and futurism, making frequent trips downtown to ogle the Bradbury Building and recall his favorite, movie, “Blade Runner.”

Scott’s fixated on far lesser known landmarks as well, such as Bristol Farms in l West Hollywood – and for reasons that have nothing to do with how fresh the produce is.

“You go in there and you’re seeing major looks at the grocery store,” Scott says. “People are really done to the nines. I love it. It’s sick.”

The man whose work desk brims with a 3-foo-tall fiberglass bust of himself wearing a thick chain with a dangling pistol emblem and who just finished creating a limited-edition series of Adidas sneakers featuring a pattern of his mug on faux currency clearly isn’t worried about being labeled over-the-top. Scott and L.A. are a natural fit.

“L.A.’s about money and excess and sunlight and sunshine, he says. “And it’s not a shameless place to display wealth. It isn’t that way in lots of other places.”

Jeremy Scott Left Paris at the Height of his Popularity to be L.A.’s Designer. But Does the City Share His Vision?

Jeremy Scott’s “lifestyle pod” sits parked in the alley adjacent to the 29-year-old fashion designer’s east Melrose studio. Near the pod – that’s Scott-speak for his black 2002 Jeep Liberty, the first automobile he’s ever owned – a man in a cowboy hat sells spiced corn from a cart. A woman loudly scolds a misbehaving dog. Across the road, portable toilets stand sentry in front of dirt mounds and metal fencing.

For this, Scott left Paris, where he was even recognized by cabdrivers?

“L.A. is an inspiring, inspirational, magic city,” says the Kansas city-born and New York City-schooled clothier, his words as unrestrained as his semiannual outré women’s clothing collections. “It’s like no other place. It’s a fantasy world. It’s like dreamland. It’s a paradise on earth.” In other words, anything goes here, and Jeremy Scott likes it that way.

“Scott, who is known for his avant-garde women’s clothing, is sitting on a small couch in a back corner of his narrow white-walled studio, which as concrete floors and exposed wood ceiling beams. He curls one of his white, unlaced Nike Air Force high-top basketball sneakers up under his opposite leg. He wears silver jogging pants, white sport socks, a gray T-shirt and a white martial arts jacket. He hasn’t been exercising.

Scott’s handiwork is equally ironic. Having shown 10 largely unconventional collections in Paris, he gained an international reputation for his wild imagination and for the spectacular theatrical elements of his runway shows, which he often concluded by yelling, ”vive l’avant garde!”

One of Scott’s recent collections of women’s clothing paid homage to skyscrapers. Another season’s exhibition was based on game shows, complete with household items as prop prizes and fake cash scattered to the crowd. While he has a solid following, he’s also been knocked by the fashion press for a lack on consistency, and his clothes have been panned for being impractical – quite a feat in the anything-goes realm of haute couture.

SO now he’s arrived in a city where leading executives can legitimately pass large portions of their careers pondering, say, the size of a giant robot or the color of a sea monster’s scales. Sounds like prime Scott turf.

“L.A. is such a gorgeous city for fashion and people really love fashion here…”Scott says. “Oh, it’s the most futuristic city in the United States, and maybe even the world.”

**

Scott isn’t the first designer to answer Southern California’s siren call. Bob Mackie, James Galanos and Richard Tyler, to name a few, have made their names as L.A. designers. Perhaps the most memorable was Austria native Rudi Gernreich, who fled the Nazis for L.A. in 1938,and went on to invent the “monokini,” a topless bathing suit made famous in the ‘60s by model Peggy Moffit. (Like Gernreich before him, Scott draws inspiration from Moffit. The two were introduced several years ago at a dinner party given in Scott’s honor by hair-care impresario Vidal Sassoon.)

Unlike Gernreich, Scott – whom even the fickle French embraced and who was the only American designer to be included in the Louvre’s 2002 Couture Superstar exhibition – wasn’t forced out of Europe. He split voluntarily while still in his preternaturally early prime.

Two years ago at the Pacific Design Center, Scott made his L.A. debut, presenting a Spring 2001 collection reminiscent of the nighttime television soap opera “Dynasty.”

Rita Watnick, owner of the prominent Beverly Hills vintage boutique Lily Et Cie, was in the crowd that night. She’s become such a Scott supporters that Rose Apodaca-Jones, the West Coast bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily, calls Watnick the designer’s “Fairy godmother.”

Watnick invited Scott back to L.A. to work with her on a charity event, this time putting him up at L’Ermiatage and renting him a convertible.

When it came time for Scott to return to Paris after that second stay, the then-expat bawled.

“He drove away from my store, and he had to come back and say ‘bye’ again,” Watnick says. “He was crying, crying, crying, crying. [It was] really cute.”

Scott adds, “I just was insane. I was crying at the airport. I was like a baby. I didn’t want to leave because it felt so right.”

Back in France, Scott pondered his status as an independent designer, wondering in part where he should work and live. He’d been offered jobs in established fashion houses but turned them down.

“Since I'm not in this blown-out company with eyeglasses in every airport, I don’t have to [cede control],” Scotts says. “My goal is to forward my vision of crea5tivity to popular, mainstream culture.”

Toward that end, Scott hopes to break though another high-fashion barrier – working with the runway crowd while also doing entertainment industry costume design.

He’s off to a decent start, having scored the gig costuming Madonna’s latest major music video, for the James Bond film “Die Another Day.” Earlier this year, he was selected to costume models for the Andy Warhol Retrospective opening night gala at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Scot also participated in the Otis College of Art and Design’s mentoring program for junior and senior students, for which he asked his seniors students to design an outfit from two different time periods. “Getting Scott to participate was just the most miraculous thing on earth,” says Rosemary Brantley, founding chair of the Otis School of Fashion Design.

Scott’s also designed looks for musical acts, including the performance art band Fischerspooner and randy rapper Peaches. Contemporary and filmmaker Harmony Korine has asked the designer to costume and art-direct his next movie, which is about nuns, and to co-write and co-direct the picture following that.

“I have tons of goals,” Scott says. “I want to win an Oscar.”

But even Scott’s staunchest supporters acknowledge that in the long run, it isn’t easy to please both Hollywood producers and the fashion elite.

“I think it’s very hard,” boutique owner Watnick says. “And I don’t think anybody has ever succeeded at it.”

Still, if Scott fails, it won’t be from a lack of connections.

He remains acquainted with Bjork, for whom he designed a surreal white leather “angel” dress with diaphanous fan-like wings affixed from sleeves to hips. His mentor in Paris was Karl Lagerfeled, who remains a close friend. He calls model Devon Aoki “My muse” and keeps a stylized photograph taken by Lagerfeld of himself and Aoki up on his studio wall. And Sassoon adds, “The more great designers we have here the better. I’m very happy that he decided to come.”

**

On a chilly Saturday night last month, Scott showed his spring 2003 collection – which made its debut in September at New York fashion week – In Little Tokyo at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. Outdoors, a large turnout and a poorly organized check-in scrum left dozens of would-be attendees stranded, peasants-at-the-castle-gate-style, on the wrong side of a lowered museum garage door. Nearby, a security guard told invited guests to halt or face arrest for trespassing.

Indoors, though, on Scott’s runway and among the 300-some admitted designers, stylists and others, all went smoothly.

Thee works that Scott presented, including hand-painted silk dresses, metallic microdresses and revealing suede beachwear never intended to be worn in water, had received mediocre reviews when they debuted in New York. But unlike his cool welcome back east, L.A.’s fashion cognoscenti seemed to get the joke.

Now that Scott’s settling in here, he’s absorbing and incorporating fashion ideas culled from the sun, sand and sea. His current collection has coral and u shell shapes and shoes showy swimsuits built for sunning – a local phenomenon perhaps misunderstood by East Coast critics, who dip in more placid waters.

Soon after the MOCA event, the clothes were shipped to Asia – his biggest market –f or sale.

Back in his studio, Scott’s been spending time with his growing library of art, photography and architecture books. He’s also studying up on West Coast fashion history and continues to pursue his interest in science fiction and futurism, making frequent trips downtown to ogle the Bradbury Building and recall his favorite, movie, “Blade Runner.”

Scott’s fixated on far lesser known landmarks as well, such as Bristol Farms in l West Hollywood – and for reasons that have nothing to do with how fresh the produce is.

“You go in there and you’re seeing major looks at the grocery store,” Scott says. “People are really done to the nines. I love it. It’s sick.”

The man whose work desk brims with a 3-foo-tall fiberglass bust of himself wearing a thick chain with a dangling pistol emblem and who just finished creating a limited-edition series of Adidas sneakers featuring a pattern of his mug on faux currency clearly isn’t worried about being labeled over-the-top. Scott and L.A. are a natural fit.

“L.A.’s about money and excess and sunlight and sunshine, he says. “And it’s not a shameless place to display wealth. It isn’t that way in lots of other places.”