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    Golden State Blues
    Golden State Blues
    Golden State Blues
    Ebook313 pages4 hours

    Golden State Blues

    By Scott Skipper

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In the mood for a little political incorrectness? How could a conservative ever get elected governor of America’s most liberal state? Is it possible to run the world’s eighth largest economy from a barstool? Governor Jim West makes it look easy as he fixes the crooked cesspool that is California politics. Police chiefs weep, presidents threaten, union bosses quiver as Jim rides roughshod over all of them. It really looks like California might be back on the right track until a twenty-something, blond secret from his past emerges from the shadows.

    In this lightning-paced jaunt through all that ails the Golden State, Governor Jim and his secret handler rout the illegal aliens, slash the welfare system, lower taxes and even solve the traffic nightmare. All the while the liberals in the legislature are trying to crucify him. Can even the California National Guard protect him from assassination? Then it really gets personal when the Islamic terrorists decide to get even. Golden State Blues has something to offend just about everyone.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScott Skipper
    Release dateApr 11, 2014
    ISBN9781310276859
    Golden State Blues
    Author

    Scott Skipper

    Scott Skipper is a California fiction writer with a broad range of interests, including history, genealogy, travel, science and current events. His wry outlook on life infects his novels with biting sarcasm. Prisoners are never taken. Political correctness is taboo. His work includes historical fiction, alternative history, novelized biography, science fiction and political satire. He is a voracious reader and habitual and highly opinionated reviewer.

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      Book preview

      Golden State Blues - Scott Skipper

      Golden State Blues

      By

      Scott Skipper

      Copyright 2014

      All rights reserved

      Smashwords edition

      ISBN 9781310276859

      License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

      It may not be re-sold or given to other people.

      Image credits

      Golden Gate Bridge by Sandy Skipper

      Cover figures courtesy of www.FreeImages.net

      Wanna Have Some Fun image by Stockimages

      Man Posing in Casuals by Photostock

      Cover design by Scott Skipper

      Regional map courtesy of the Web Oak Mutual Water Company

      Fleurons courtesy of Carterart

      This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. The public places described are real and generally well known. The private commercial establishments may be based on actual places but the names are changed in all cases.

      Acknowledgement

      I wish to thank my beta reader Laurence French for his encouragement and suggestions.

      Table of Contents

      Author’s Notes

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Author’s Notes

      For those not familiar with California politics and its recent history, a few things should be clarified before embarking on this tale of troubled times in the Golden State. Toward the end of Pete Wilson’s term as governor, in the late nineties, an ambitious state legislator named Brulte attempted to gain political capital, with a run for governor in mind, by proposing the deregulation of California’s power industry. This was the most wrongheaded case of fixing something that wasn’t broken since Coca Cola replaced their flagship product with New Coke. Governor Pete Wilson, who was a Republican with a reputation somewhat tarnished during his time as mayor of San Diego, signed it into law just before leaving office.

      The voters in their predictable wisdom next elected Democrat Grey Davis who was profoundly over his head in dealing with the energy crisis that was sparked by deregulation, the result of which was the takeover of most of the state’s generating stations by out-of-state power companies that manipulated supply to increase prices. All during Davis’s truncated term consumers went without air conditioning in the blistering summers and industry had to shift production away from peak electrical usage hours. Blackouts and brownouts were common, costly and destructive. Davis attempted to solve the problem by signing contracts with out-of-state power companies to buy electricity at usurious prices, so while local power plants sat idle, Davis was letting the ratepayers be gouged by opportunists in Texas and Nevada.

      In a rare show of good judgment, the voters recalled Grey Davis before the end of his first term which forced a special election that turned into a circus. Under California law anybody willing to pay a filing fee could run for governor in a special election, and everybody did. There were actors, porn stars, psychos and fortunetellers on the ballot. Remarkably, Austrian born movie star, body builder and former nude model, Republican with a Kennedy-clan wife, Arnold Schwarzenegger, triumphed. Arnold had good ideas and fought the good fight, but the Democrat packed legislature stymied everything he tried to do.

      At the end of Schwarzenegger’s second term, in the vacuum of viable candidates, voters reelected Jerry Brown who had served two terms as governor in the seventies and eighties. This astounded most common folk who thought they had passed a ballot measure setting term limits, specifically two terms for governor. However, shortsighted authors of the term limit law saw fit to add to it the codicil that it only applied to persons elected after November 6, 1990, which they placed far away from the main body of the text of the law under miscellaneous.

      A word on ballot measures—California allows anyone who can gather sufficient signatures in support of their agenda to put a proposed new law on the ballot. This very democratic practice is a two edged sword. It gave us Proposition 13 that halted runaway property taxes and effectively preserved home ownership for millions—a law that has been vainly fought by Democrats for over thirty years—but it also gave illegal aliens drivers’ licenses. A ballot measure is also responsible for authorizing the construction of a high-speed train from Southern to Northern California via the desert that nobody believes can stay within its multi-billion dollar budget, operate in the black or even attract passengers.

      Lame politicians breed lame laws and lame, redundant bureaucracies. One of the lamest is the Air Quality Management District (AQMD). No one can deny that smog has been drastically reduced in California since the seventies despite the unfortunate population explosion, but the targets of the AQMD defy comprehension. It is patently obvious that the primary cause of smog is cars and emissions have decreased dramatically over the decades due to improved automotive technology, although there continues to exist enormous inertia against scrapping gasoline as a fuel in favor of cleaner and domestically abundant natural gas. That aside, the micro-managing of the AQMD has principally had the effect of driving all major industry out of California and hamstringing minor industry with ineffective and often comical regulations, such as demanding automotive body shops only use water base paint that crazes when left in the sun.

      California prides itself on being environmentally cutting edge. This can be seen firsthand in the Standard Urban Storm Water Mitigation Plan, which aims to prevent contaminants from flowing into the ocean during our infrequent rainstorms. At first glance the concept appears noble but we should step backwards. Southern California is a desert. It is chronically starved for water and imports almost all of what it consumes. It is also prone to flash flooding during those rare rainy spells, and therefore, has an elaborate system of dams, drains and flood control channels to shunt excess water into the sea. Excess water? In Southern California there is no such thing as excess water, so why do we allow any of it to flow into the sea? That story would fill a book much longer than the one you are poised on the brink of reading, but the short answer is greed. In the early twentieth century control of water in the greater Los Angeles area meant wealth and short supply meant more wealth, so free water from heaven was not a popular notion.

      Back to storm water mitigation: since the rain should not be allowed to flow into the ocean in the first place, let alone be channeled there, would it not make more sense to correct that issue rather than worry about the inevitable pollutants that water absorbs as it flows across streets and parking lots? If you plan to argue that we don’t want those pollutants entering the water table, don’t. Water becomes purified by travelling through soil for only a matter of feet. However, my logic belies the brilliance of the Standard Urban Storm Water Mitigation Plan. It is nothing less than a way to tax the rain. Businesses are required to prepare a plan to prevent storm water from entering the storm drains in accordance with typically obtuse regulations—thus creating a cottage industry of plan writing consultants—and then to pay the county an annual fee to peruse said plan and monitor conformance. During storms water samples must also be collected and analyzed, and lucrative fines paid for contaminants that are found therein.

      Caltrans is, of course, the bloated, inefficient, inept transportation system responsible for the crumbling highways in California. In order to preserve its budget, it is common practice to order mandatory overtime for the overpaid workers even when their only task is to sit in the break room. Typically when Caltrans orders fabricated materials they specify that the steel must be of domestic origin knowing full well that American made steel is rarer than a Republican in Hollywood. One of Caltrans’ best gambits was going metric. Presumably due to an overabundance of Asian engineers, it was decided that all drawings were to be dimensioned in millimeters. Consider the wisdom of this. The first thing manufacturers had to do was convert all the numbers to inches thereby adding cost to the project. Next the steel had to be purchased to the nearest U.S. equivalent meaning that nothing was ever made exactly to the specs. If anybody had actually found metric steel it sure as hell would not have been made in America.

      Caltrans is deeply devoted to Affirmative Action. What I am about to tell I personally witnessed. When Caltrans was building the Los Angeles light rail system I was operating a metal fabrication business. The projects were large and major contractors were needed to successfully execute them but those contractors were required to include a large percentage of minority participation. Businesses known as Minority Fronts blossomed. My company was asked to bid on some steel work for a train station by a Woman Owned Business. That business consisted entirely of one woman who had no equipment or even an office. She would take our price, add twenty or thirty percent and quote it to the contractors who were then bidding to Caltrans. The supposed winner of the contract was required to attend a pre-award meeting to demonstrate compliance with the minority participation rule. My customer asked me to go along pretending to be her employee in case they asked technical questions. The meeting was chaired by four Caltrans purchasing managers—one was in a wheelchair, one was black, one stammered and the other was blind. The guy with the speech impediment naturally conducted the meeting. He recited a list of products and services and asked the general contractor to identify the minority owned business that was going to provide them and at what price. In each case a person ran up and down the aisle whispering to the minority business owner before he answered the questioner. When they got to the steel project that I had quoted, my customer rose, and before she could respond, the little man in the aisle said, We put you in for three times what you quoted. At the end of the meeting it was announced that all the minorities could go to the plan room and receive a free set of plans that normally cost five-hundred dollars. In the plan room, while the clerk wrestled a massive roll of paper, I browsed documents on the counter and found the bid results for the train station. The contractor awarded the job based on minority participation had bid seven-million dollars—the low bid was four-million.

      These issues and other self-inflicted problems that bedevil the Once Great State of California will be confronted in the ensuing pages, but I must clarify one more thing before allowing you to proceed. Some things simply cannot be invented. One of the characters in this story has an unbelievably colorful name, which is not a product of my cynical imagination, it is borrowed from life. During the term of Méxican President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), the Attorney General of México was David Cabeza de Vaca whose name, if translated literally, means David Cow Head.

      Chapter 1

      That’s a crock of shit. he said watching the ticker running below Fox News on the flat screen TV hanging above the bar at Caffè Veneto.

      What is?

      The news.

      What news?

      The budget's late again.

      So? It’s always late.

      The controller refuses to dock the Assembly’s salaries.

      You wouldn't expect one politician to shit on another.

      Oh, hell no.

      That rascal in the Governor's Mansion says he won't sign nothing ‘til he gets a big bump for education.

      "The first refuge of a politician, behind a kid.

      Yep. How did we ever learn to read and write with over thirty kids in the class?

      And without iPads.

      Oh, Lordy, weren’t we under privileged.

      Did you hear that all those iPads the L.A. school district bought, for twice what they were worth, are only licensed for three years?

      No shit?

      Yep. They have to earmark sixty-five million a year to renew the licenses.

      And how many of them iPads are gonna be around in three years?

      Most of them wound up in pawn shops in three weeks.

      Jim West’s contagious laugh was a nearly silent wheeze that he finished with a knee slap. The older man did not consider Adam Peyton a close friend, just a kindred spirit who was good for a laugh over a drink or two. Ain’t nothing anybody can do about it on account of the unions.

      Here’s some stats for you: the number of administrators in the L.A. Unified grew twenty percent while the number of teachers dropped and enrollment shrank by six percent.

      Yeah?

      And the average—average mind you—salary for those administrators and their assistants is over ninety grand while the average teacher gets seventy.

      Don’t that beat all?

      On top of that, the union that represents the useless bastards grew by two-thousand employees over the same period of time.

      And they just sit around staring at their secretaries’ big titties.

      And those secretaries are making eighty plus, Adam said.

      Big titties don’t come cheap. Jim’s face lit into a smile that revealed mischievous wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

      Adam raised his glass toward Jenifer, the blond barmaid adored for her feisty smile and biting wit, as much as for her shapely ass. Jim and I need another round. We’re getting depressed.

      Make Adam’s a double. He’s about to solve the budget crisis.

      Jenifer refilled Jim’s glass from a bottle of Mondavi cab before she started working on a Tanqueray and tonic for Adam. You two could solve the budget crisis with what you pay in liquor tax. She placed the glass on a fresh napkin in front of Adam.

      He took a long sip and held it in his mouth savoring the juniper scent before he swallowed. Ah, I love the taste of your fingers that lingers on the lime.

      Yeah, right.

      Jim, you know, you ought to run for governor.

      Shit. You’re the lawyer-boy.

      If you’re going to insult me I’ll leave and stick you with the tab.

      I thought you had a law degree.

      I do, but I never took the bar.

      How come?

      I hate lawyers.

      Jim laughed again and slapped his knee. That don’t matter. You got a good head. I’ll vote for you.

      Me too, Jenifer said. At least you’ve got a cute butt.

      Querida, I didn’t think you cared.

      I didn’t say I care, but I noticed.

      Hmm. Anyway, I’d never get elected due to my checkered past.

      Hell, people in this state don’t remember last night. They elected ol’ Jerry Brown again even after he sprayed us all with Malathion.

      I remember. There were brown spots all over my Gran Prix. Anyway, I project a bad attitude.

      Jim said, You’re a demigod around here.

      I hope you mean ‘demagogue.’

      Yeah, that’s the word. He wheezed and slapped again.

      Ah, but I lack polish. You, on the other hand, ooze charisma and have a clear conscience.

      Don't know how clear my conscience is, but I never got caught at nothing—except by my ex—if that's what you mean.

      See? You're a natural. Seriously, would you take a shot at it if you had backing?

      Who'd back me? Jim made a wry face.

      Me.

      You gotta to be kidding.

      Dead serious.

      It'll cost a fortune.

      Well, I hope we’d get some contributions once you've got momentum.

      You're the lawyer, not me.

      Adam looked indignant. I told you I'm no damned lawyer. I just have a law degree, and as such, after you're elected I'll be your advisor.

      Crazy idea. Anyhow, governor can't do nothing unless the legislature's behind him. Look at ol' Arnold. Had a ton of good ideas and got nowhere.

      One of his best was part-time legislature. But think what a governor like you could do with no legislature at all.

      How do you go about that? Spray 'em with Malathion?

      Amusing as that sounds, I think they could be persuaded to go on strike.

      They’re always on strike but they’re still getting paid.

      So what would you do if you were the king of California?

      Put a bullet through that bullet train.

      But the voters said they wanted it.

      They was hornswoggled! Give the money back to the poor dumbasses. Then get rid of that bullshit about a woman falls over the border, drops her whelp ten minutes later and the little bastard’s a citizen.

      That’s federal. You can’t do that.

      Then make damn sure no more of ‘em fall over the border. Take a pregnancy test before they get in.

      Adam laughed and slopped his drink. That beats TSA for intrusiveness, but most of them are just crawling under the fence.

      Just a matter of will and some manpower. Lord knows we need the jobs.

      A regular in braces and a bow tie, who Adam knew to be an unusually right-minded attorney in the Federal Court, took the stool next to Jim. He craned his neck looking for Jenifer while Adam continued quizzing his candidate. So what will you do about gangs?

      Sealing them borders’ll go a long way to solve that problem.

      Yeah, but plenty of gang members are fourth and fifth generation—they breed quick, you know.

      Tagger tags.

      Huh?

      Every fall plenty of good ol’ boys drop five-hundred for tags to shoot a buck. They’d line up around the block for a tag to shoot a tagger.

      Adam’s mouth was full of gin and he had to slap a cocktail napkin over his face to blot what ran from his nose. See? You’re perfect. All we gotta do is get you on the ticket.

      The attorney in the bow tie said, Where do I apply those tags?

      Adam said, I’d like to see a ballot initiative.

      To do what? the lawyer asked.

      To remove two letters from the state constitution.

      Which two?

      The ‘i’ and the ‘n’ in the phrase that says California is an inseparable part of the United States.

      Why do you want to pull out? Jim asked.

      Because I love my country.

      So you want to leave it?

      Just think how much better the United States would be if California didn’t send representatives to Congress.

      Jim wheezed and slapped his knee.

      Jenifer sauntered to their end of the bar after returning from outside where she checked to see if the meter maid had chalked her tire. Jim's going to be the next governor, Adam said.

      Great! Do something about that parking Nazi. The bitch has chalked me every day this week.

      Jim said, That's the first thing I'll take care of.

      * * *

      Adam Peyton’s industrialist father left him in charge of a substantial trust that he rarely had to touch. In addition to his law degree, that he also rarely touched, he had a PHD in psychology, but he took his daily expenses from the thriving manufacturing business he inherited. Peyton Industries made everything from aircraft components to manhole covers. His staff was superlative, and if he ever lingered in the office past noon, people got nervous.

      On a bright January morning in Southern California, Adam drank coffee in his office and contemplated closing the sixty-year-old business, that employed seventy-five people, due to perennial decline in return on investment and a passionate hatred for all things governmental with which he had to cope on a daily basis. He could never decide who he hated the most: the customers, the vendors, the employees or the bureaucrats. The stars of the bureaucratic zodiac aligned so malignantly as to inflict upon his office manager that day a Workers’ Comp audit and a sales tax audit. Audits by definition were never good. The whole concept implied that you were misleading, evasive or incompetent. Adam’s staff were scrupulously thorough and honest at his insistence, but the tax auditor, he knew from past experience, would find a serious underpayment deserving of crushing interest and penalties. The man was a liar and a cheat. The auditor from the State Fund that wrote virtually all of California’s Workers’ Compensation policies was unknown but it was impossible not to recognize that his agenda aimed at increasing premiums via the dreaded ‘modification rate.’ Nothing could be done, and unlike banking and public utilities, the cost of doing business in a competitive industry could not be passed on to customers. Adam looked forward to lunchtime.

      The receptionist called over the intercom. Boss, some guy from the city is here about rainwater abatement. Do you want me to call José?

      Adam’s temper spiked. He paused to consider how he wanted to handle this unexpected annoyance. No, don’t bother José. I’ll take care of this.

      Adam finished his coffee, looked at the clock and organized his desk before he strolled slowly to the front office. The representative of the city of Montclair wore uniform-service clothes with his name, ‘Don,’ embroidered over the pocket of his gray shirt. What can I do for you, Don? Adam asked.

      I need to do a site inspection today. Adam remembered the man from a previous visit. He was young, zealous and not too bright.

      Why?

      We’re checking businesses for best shop practices.

      What exactly does ‘best shop practices’ mean?

      That you’re doing everything to keep contaminants from running off your property.

      Then why don’t you say that?

      It’s just a thing we say.

      Just something to say that doesn’t mean anything.

      Whatever, I need to inspect your yard.

      Why?

      To check for best shop practices.

      Did you see our environmental report?

      No, those go to the county.

      "Were you sent here because of

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