“You’re kidding,” I said.
“She was just being safe and sensible,” Ambrose said.
“She should have let you stay in your own bed,” I said, “where you felt comfortable, safe, and secure, not confined to the basement like you were some kind of leper.”
“That’s exactly what he was,” Monk said.
“She was being prudent,” Ambrose said.
“But not very loving,” I said.
Whenever Julie got sick, I cared for her myself without worrying about my own health. All that mattered to me was making her feel better. It’s part of being a parent. Of course, half the time I ended up catching the same cold or flu that she had, but I didn’t see any need to mention that to the Monks.
“After I got over the flu, I realized I felt much, much better than I ever did before,” Ambrose said. “So I decided I should just stay home for good. Mom agreed.”
“What did the school think about that?”
“The administrators sent some people over who diagnosed me as agoraphobic. So I was educated at home by a teacher sent by the school district and by my mother. Those were happy times.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror again at Monk, who had a sour look on his face. Apparently, he didn’t agree with Ambrose’s take on the past.
“Did your mother ever try to get you treatment?”
Ambrose shook his head. “No, but it all worked out for the best.”
“I don’t see how,” Monk said.
“I am living more sensibly and safely than everybody else. I never get sick. I never get hurt. The world would be a safer place if everybody lived like me.”
I didn’t bother arguing with him because I knew that nothing I could say would cure him of his phobia. I was betting instead that what he’d see on our trip would make him begin to rethink his life of isolation.
Then again, if we didn’t manage his trip very carefully, we could end up scaring him right back into his house. Taking him to the scene of a homicide on day one probably hadn’t worked in our favor, not that it was our fault.
I would just have to try to steer clear of any trouble as best I could, which wouldn’t be easy with Adrian Monk along for the ride.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mr. Monk and the Gum
T
he high point, literally and figuratively, of our drive that day was when we crossed the Bixby Creek Bridge, an arched span that stretches 700 feet across a 260-foot-deep canyon on the jagged edge of the California coast.
The bridge is breathtaking and heart-stopping to look at, an architectural and engineering marvel of concrete and reinforced steel that seems to dare the forces of nature and gravity to knock it down.
My fear was that nature and gravity would team up to take that dare as I was driving over the bridge.
I imagined that the Big One would finally hit when we were halfway across or that some engineering flaw, hidden for eighty years, would suddenly express itself and the bridge would disintegrate as if it were made of sugar and we were a drop of water rolling across the top of it.
It was a tense few minutes. We all held our breath as we crossed, and I don’t think the Monk brothers started breathing again for another mile or two after that.
But then Ambrose startled me by letting out a victorious whoop, like a kid who’d just taken a ride on a roller coaster. I half expected him to ask me to turn around and drive over the bridge again.
“It feels good to be alive,” he said.
“Yes, it does,” Monk said.
“I’m not sure I ever noticed that before,” Ambrose said. “Do you have to face death to feel grateful for living?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I felt it this morning just walking on the beach. But sometimes, when you get caught up in the fast pace of daily life, you have to make a conscious effort to, if I may use a cliché, stop and smell the roses.”
“And inhale an excessive amount of pollen, which could provoke a deadly sinus reaction that could cause you to drown in your own mucus,” Monk said. “So for God’s sake, don’t stop and smell the roses.”
“It’s always nice to hear your cheerful point of view,” I said.
“I wouldn’t sniff a flower anyway,” Ambrose said. “I might inhale a bee.”
“And the good cheer continues,” I said.
“To be absolutely honest, I should tell you that we weren’t really in any danger on that bridge,” Ambrose said. “It just felt that way.”
“Good to know,” I said. “But fear is often irrational. Knowing on an intellectual level that something is safe doesn’t mean you will believe that it is. You, of all people, should understand that.”
He scribbled something on a piece of paper and held it out for me to see. It was some sort of mathematical equation. Anything more complex than two plus two equals four is beyond my comprehension.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“The equations that express the vertical and horizontal forces on the bridge and whether it can sustain them,” Ambrose said. “The supporting arch carries the combined mass of all the concrete and the vehicular traffic, which comes to a load of about 28,700 pounds per foot.”
“How do you know that?”
“I did some research on the Internet last night on our probable route while you and Adrian were having cocktails with Dub Clemens,” Ambrose said. “The ingenuity of arch construction is that it actually shifts the load on the bridge to the sides of the canyon that it’s anchored in. If we know the length and width of the span, and we do, we can determine the horizontal and vertical force, which I have, and from that we can determine the stress. And if you know that the breaking point of concrete is three thousand psi, which I do, you can easily calculate the stress on the arch and the safety factor of the bridge.”
“Oh yes, very easily,” I said. “I’d do it myself if I wasn’t busy driving. So what have you come up with?”
He tapped the equation on the paper. “If SF is the safety factor, FC is the breaking stress of concrete, and F is the stress on the arch, the equation is SF equals FC equals 3,000 equals 6.35 F472.4. Alas, the bridge can support six times the weight it was designed to support, which I find to be within acceptable limits. I wouldn’t have let you drive over it otherwise. But it was exhilarating nonetheless.”
“Have you done this calculation for all the bridges and overpasses we might drive over?”
“No, but I can,” he said.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “Uncertainty is even more exhilarating.”
“Uncertainty is ignorance,” Monk said.
“Ignorance is bliss,” I said.
“Only for the ignorant,” he said. “Didn’t we already have this argument yesterday? Didn’t I win it?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I’m blissfully ignorant.”
I was also enjoying the scenery too much to continue arguing with him.
Big Sur is one of the most beautiful places in California, the combination of cliffs, coastline, and forests creating what Robert Louis Stevenson called the “greatest meeting of land and sea in the world,” which is quite an observation coming from a guy who liked to hang around the forest of Fontainebleau in his youth and who traveled throughout the South Pacific later in life.
I mentioned that to Ambrose and figured the recommendation from a fellow scribe would convince him that we should spend a night or two at a campsite nestled in the dense forest, enjoying the solitude and the salty sea breezes wafting through the ancient redwoods.
But my suggestion was immediately, and vehemently, rejected by both of the Monks.
“If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all,” Monk said.
“I don’t like trees,” Ambrose said. “They are swarming with ants, birds, snakes, squirrels, centipedes, lizards, termites, spiders, caterpillars, and sticky sap.”
“Dogs frequently urinate on them, too,” Monk said. “And if you get too close to a tree, an acorn or a pine cone or a branch or even the tree itself could fall on you. Even worse, a bird could defecate on you from above and you’d have to take your own life.”
“Nature can be so dangerous,” Ambrose said.
“That’s why it should be avoided,” Monk said. “The other thing about nature is that it’s not just dangerous, it’s filthy. There is dirt everywhere, some of it wet.”
“When Jack Kerouac wrote about Big Sur, he concluded that ‘to be afraid of nature is to be afraid of yourself,’” I said, making another blatant attempt to play to Ambrose’s literary sensibilities and sway him to my side.
“Kerouac was a beatnik hippy alcoholic who drank himself to death,” Ambrose said.
“He probably made that insane observation while he was delirious with booze,” Monk said.
“That would be the only explanation I can think of for saying something as crazy as that,” Ambrose said. “Unless he was being deliberately provocative.”
I dropped the argument because the Monks were right. It was a bad idea to park for a few days in Big Sur, but it wasn’t any of their bizarre reasoning that convinced me.
Nature is something wonderful to see and experience, but that’s hard to do from the confines of a motor home. We were probably already experiencing the best of Big Sur from that point of view. Stuck inside the RV, Ambrose wouldn’t see much in a campsite besides the trunks of trees.
I realized that I had to start thinking about our trip exclusively from the perspective of what Ambrose could see, hear, touch, taste, and smell from within our RV.
That fact ruled out a lot of amazing places and attractions ahead of us, like the Hearst Castle and Disneyland, that would require him to get out of the RV to enjoy them.
It was going to make this trip a challenge, but that was always the case with anything involving the Monks.
As we drove down the coast, Ambrose watched the scenery go by in silent fascination, gradually relaxing enough to take his hands off the dashboard to consult the guidebooks for more information about what he was seeing.
Monk kept quiet, too, until we passed Morro Bay and the giant landmark rock in the water, which he loudly criticized as an “unconscionable monument to bird excrement” that was the “scourge of the California coastline.”
“Imagine looking at that out your window every day,” Monk said.
“It’s a wonder that anyone lives in that town at all,” Ambrose agreed.
We continued along Highway 1 as it curved inland, taking us past the college town of San Luis Obispo, which unofficially marked the midpoint between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was also home to the California Polytechnic State University.
I took the Monks on a scenic drive through town, past the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, supposedly the inspiration for the ubiquitous red-tile roofs throughout the state, and then we meandered into downtown, where most of the quaint Spanish Revival storefronts had been occupied by national chains the way ugly hermit crabs move into pretty seashells.
I stopped at a downtown gas station to fill up the tank, stretch my legs, and, as a courtesy to the Monks, use the Chevron restroom instead of the one in our motor home.
The first thing I noticed when I came back to the RV from the restroom was that Monk was gone and Ambrose was sitting at the dinette table, looking out the window.
“Where’s Mr. Monk?”
Ambrose gestured out the window. “He saw a scofflaw stick a piece of gum on a wall in the alley across the street, so he’s gone after him to make a citizen’s arrest.”
I peered out the window and, sure enough, I saw Monk running into the alley between two shops.
“Unbelievable,” I said.
I got into the driver’s seat, drove the motor home into a parking spot, then jumped out and ran across the street to bring Monk back before he got into trouble.
I was approaching the mouth of the alley when Monk yelled at me, “Stay where you are!”
I didn’t, of course.
I stepped forward and saw that the alley was actually a narrow walkway leading to the other side of the block.
Monk stood absolutely still in the center of the walkway, his back to me. He was obviously afraid to move, as if his foot were resting on a land mine and the slightest twitch would blow us both to bits.
But it wasn’t what was under his feet that had made him freeze, or even the homeless person who was sleeping on the ground under a ratty Cal Poly logo blanket a few yards away from him.
It was what was on the walls.
There were gobs upon gobs, layer upon layer, of multicolored gum, spit from the mouths of thousands of people and stuck to both walls, from one end of the walkway to the other.
From a distance, it looked like two long, abstract expressionist murals, something Jackson Pollock might have done if he’d worked with bubble gum instead of dripping paint.
Up close, it was truly disgusting.
The gum was mostly stuck in simple globs, but some people tried to be creative with their moist contributions. They stretched their gum and looped it around other dried gobs like silly string. They formed gumballs into gooey graffiti, spelling out words, symbols, and names. They molded wads into Dentyne flowers, Juicy Fruit faces, Bazooka stick figures, and Doublemint snowmen.
The layers of gum were several inches thick. And there was more of it stuck to the pavement, without the same artistic flair, probably blobs that dripped from the walls or dropped accidentally from the mouths and hands of would-be artists.
I don’t know whether people used the walkway as a toilet, or if years of dried sugar and drool smell just like urine. But the place reeked.
I walked up to Monk, careful not to step on any gum.
“I saw a man stick his gum on the wall. I ran over here to apprehend him,” Monk said. “I didn’t see what I was getting into until it was too late.”
“Is that him?” I motioned to the vagrant sleeping on the ground.
Monk shook his head. “No, he got away.”
“Okay, then let’s go. There’s nothing more you can do here.”