Lawrence Osborne - Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel

Just below the old Spanish mission, a few miles north of Ensenada in Baja, I have the house that I bought from Larry Danish in 1984. There I live as an old gumshoe or jelly bean should, with my middle-aged maid, Maria, and a stray dog rescued from the garbage. Out at sea, the porpoises that never sleep. La Misin had been Larrys exile for decades. He built a Spanish-style villa perched on the rocks within sight of the old La Fonda Hotel and Bar, where, it is rumored by the staff, the margarita was invented during Rita Hayworths many fiestas at that same establishment. It doesnt matter if it isnt true. But I too had known La Fonda, La Misins only hotel, for years. I used to drive down here in the 50s, when it was still beautiful, before the world was turned into a silo of unsatisfactory teenage fantasies and a garbage dumpster of schemes. Before the SunCor corporation littered the coast with golf resorts and there was any such thing as spring break in Rosarito Beach. Back then Id go there to lie on a bed in a dark room and dry out. By the 70s, I was still drying out and no longer noticed whole decades passing in the night.

The cliffs of teddy bear cholla remain. The lonely hot roads in the interior and the little churches with their tin-painted retablos of car accidents and death by cancer. The Pacific with lines of kelp, chilling waves rolling in to a beach between rock headlands shrouded with mist and spray. This is what all of California once looked like. Close your eyes and wonder. I often do. How easy it was to destroy, easier than destroying a cherry cake with a plastic fork. All for a bit of tin.

But its a good place for an old man. A sanctuary of clean wind and two hundred days of sun. On weekends I played the casinos in Ensenada. There was a bar there called Porfirios, I think, which had a machine on the counter called El Electrucador. It was a kind of Van de Graaff generator with two finger pads. You put your fingers on the pads and the barman, with some noise and fuss, gave you a stiff shock. If you could withstand it, you got a free shot of mescal. I didnt need to get it free, but I got it free all the same. I figured the shocks were doing my intestines and hair roots some good. People said I looked much younger when I came back from my weekends. They said I looked returned from the dead. At my age, Ill take any compliment.

We, the old guard, go to the terrace of La Fonda at night to eat its roast suckling pig and often stay there all day playing cards among ourselves under the palapas and running up our tabs. Alive is a relative word.

They play Los Tres Ases and Los Panchos tracks on the sound system, and there are some of us who can dream backward to the splendid years. There is still an occasional glimpse of the old times here, and maybe its the last glimpse well ever enjoy. Has there ever in history been a time when four decades could turn everything upside down in such a conclusive way? I can remember the summer of 1950 in this very same place. Men in flannel suits and the women dressed like movie stars to go to the supermarket in the daytime. Thirty-eight years onnot a great amount of time when you think about itthe gentle sound of swing has given way to Guns N Roses. Back then, the old Mexico was still there, hanging on to life with style. Pedro Infante was on the screens and Maria Flix was in the air. They were destroyed to make way for Madonna.

Then one day, after a low near-decade of sloth and decay and Ronald Reagan, two men from the Pacific Mutual insurance company walked into the terrace bar of La Fonda Hotel. They were dressed like undertakers and had sauntered down from the main road above the hotel, finding me seated alone with my pitcher of sangria and my silver-tipped cane as if they had known I would be there unaccompanied within sight of my home on the Baja cliffs. They knew which house it was, too, because their eyes rose to take it in, and they smiled with the small contempt of company men.

Theyd heard I was retired, but a man they trusted in La Jolla had said I was the best that money couldnt buy. That was, of course, the best joke of the afternoon. They offered to buy me an early dinner and bared the teeth of friendly hyenas who have done their killing for the day. The older one held out a card that gave his name, Michael D. Kalb, and the other simply told me his: OKane. Kalb had at least twenty years over his colleague, but both of them were lean enough to carry the undertaker look. When I had put down the habanero and they had settled down into their chairs, the older one spoke with a voice that made me think of a father telling a bedtime tale to a child with attention-deficit problems. He glanced with distaste at the Baja beach and his eyes were dead. Boys sat there under palapas, selling cattle skulls and lumps of floating kelp hacked out of the waves, yet it was clear that Kalb didnt know their world, or mine, and that he had probably never ventured so far south before. Was he surprised that the sun still shone so gently?

Its a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Marlowe. Sandy and I werent sure wed be able to find you down here. You bought that house on the cliff?

Its called Danish Mansion. A lifetime of beating people up went into buying it.

They laughed, but there was surprisingly little sound.

Lets get some margaritas, Kalb went on loudly. I like the frosted glasses with the salt around the rim.

They were invented at this hotel, I said. Rita Hayworth used to come here. Margarita Hayworth.