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The San Diego County Building Permits office sits on a very nondescript street in a nondescript suburban neighborhood in North County, and is generally known not by its name but by its location.
“Ruffin Road.”
Ruffin Road is limbo. Building plans have been held up for
by the bureaucrats at Ruffin Road, or just been lost, misplaced, or misfiled, never to be seen again. Contractors will explain interminable delays by simply saying, “I’ve been at Ruffin Road,” or “It’s held up at Ruffin Road,” and those excuses will be accepted.
San Diegans have opined that Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Holy Grail are all to be found at Ruffin Road, if only you could get a clerk to search, and the more waggish insist that Osama bin Laden is not hiding in Tora Bora or Waziristan, but is safely filed as “vin Laden, Osama” somewhere in the bowels of Ruffin Road.
Ruffin Road makes the DMV look like the drive-through window at In-N-Out Burger. Anyone who has ever built a new home, remodeled an old one, or rebuilt after a fire or landslide pronounces “Ruffin Road” in the same hushed tone that was once used for the Bridge of Sighs, the Tower of London, the Inquisition.
“I have to go to Ruffin Road” is a statement met with sympathy not unmixed with relief that it’s the other guy, not you.
Burly roofing contractors—hard-drinking brawlers who work the highest buildings with a scornful laugh—stand trembling before the counter at Ruffin Road, metaphorical hat in hand, waiting hopefully, plaintively, for an inspector to give their plans, literally, the stamp of approval. Desperate homeowners on their fifth or sixth try to get that addition approved stand in tortured suspense as one of the bureaucratic Torquemadas pores over the latest version of their proposed plans.
It is to this dire place that Boone repairs to get the names of the contractors who built the homes that now sit at the bottom of the La Jolla sinkhole. He goes up to the inaptly named “Reception Counter,” where a middle- aged woman, her hair dyed a color not found in nature, her glasses actually hanging from her neck on a beaded chain, sits on guard.
“Shirley.”
“Oh, God, what the cat dragged in?”
“How’s your daughter, Shirley?”
“Out again,” Shirley says. “Third time.”
“Is a charm,” Boone answers.
“Your lips, God’s ears,” Shirley says. “Anyway, thanks for what you did.”
Elise had a meth problem and missed a court date, to boot. Shirley called Boone to try to find her before the bail bondsman or police could take her into jail. Boone did and took her to the hospital so at least she could detox in a bed instead of a cell, and the judge ended up suspending sentence and allowing her to go directly into rehab.
“No worries. Is Monkey in?”
“Where else would he be?”
Nowhere, Boone thinks, it was a rhetorical question. Monkey Monroe ran the records room of Ruffin Road and rarely came out. The records were his personal treasure that he hoarded and protected like Gollum. Some people thought that Monkey was part vampire because he never came out in the light of day.
“You think he’d see me?”
Shirley shrugs. “He’s in one of his moods.”
“Just ask?”
She gets on the phone. “Marvin? Boone Daniels would like to see you. . . . I don’t know what for, he just wants to see you. . . . Act like an actual human being for a change, would you, Marvin?” She holds the receiver into her bosom and says, “He wants to know if you brought anything.”
“Cupcakes.”
“Cupcakes, Marvin.” She listens for a second, then says to Boone, “He wants to know if they’re the good kind or some cheap supermarket shit.”
“The good stuff,” Boone says. “I went to Griswald’s.”
He holds up the bag to show her.
“He went to
, Marvin. . . . Okay. Okay.” She smiles at Boone. “You can go down.”
“You want a cupcake?”
“You brought extra?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you, Boone.”
He takes a cupcake—chocolate frosting—out of the bag and sets it on her desk. “Tell Elise I said hi.”
“Why don’t you date her?”
“No.”
He gets in the elevator and goes down to the records room.
As usual, it’s colder than a loan shark’s blood—Monkey keeps the AC cranked up because it’s better for the computers. And noisy—the air conditioners are blasting, the bank of computers humming. Monkey crouches on one of those weird, posture-improving chairs that you half-kneel on, rolls toward Boone, and reaches for the Griswald’s bag.
“Vanilla. Did you get me vanilla?”
“Is the pope German?”
One look at Monkey, you know why he’s called Monkey. His arms are unnaturally long, especially next to his short-waisted, small body, and he’s quite possibly the most hirsute human being in the world: tendrils of curly hair popping up over his shirt collar and around the back, thick hair on his arms, and hairy knuckles. The scraggly hair on his head is starting to thin and show a few unkempt strands of silver, but his eyebrows are thick, and his beard, which comes up high on his cheekbones, almost to his deep-set simian eye sockets shaded by bottle-thick glasses, is black.
He grabs at the bag like a monkey reaching through the bars and snatching popcorn from a kid at the zoo, and his hands dig greedily into it. Within seconds his mouth is full of cupcake, his lips crusted with white frosting and crumbs.
Another reason he’s called Monkey is that he’s a true computer monkey. What Monkey’s hairy little fingers can’t do on a keyboard can’t be done. They can make his bank of computers cough up data about any part of any building ever constructed (legally, anyway) in San Diego County.
But the real reason he’s called Monkey stems from an unfortunate incident when the director of Ruffin Road urgently needed a copy of an old building permit, couldn’t remember Marvin’s name, and asked Shirley to summon “That guy in the basement, you know, the records monkey.” Monkey has tried many times to get his nickname shortened to “Monk,” which he thinks is more distinguished and more apt, given his role as a scribe of sorts, but it ain’t gonna happen.
“What do you want, Boone?” Monkey asks. Gratitude or expressions of simple courtesy aren’t in Monkey’s nature—he sees the world pretty much as a constant quid pro quo, so why say “Thank you” for the quo when the request for the quid is doubtless on the way?
Boone hands him the list of properties. “I need to know who built these houses.”
“
do.
don’t.”
“All right, Monkey, how much?”
“There are eighteen properties listed here,” Monkey says. “Twenty each.”
“No, cat turds, you moron. Yes, dollars.”
“I’ll give you ten.”
