The Genealogies: Chapter Four, Part Three
Daily bread Marcelo worked for Gumble Communications. It occupied a suite of offices on the 16th floor of what was called a class B office building in downtown Los Angeles real estate patois, just on the border of the Financial District. It wasn’t the prettiest building, a black glass box built sometime in the sixties, just as Los Angeles was beginning to acquire a skyline taller than that of a small Midwestern city. The building didn’t have the amenities that the newer skyscrapers possessed, like a concierge, a food court, a dry cleaner. It did have valet parking, but even run-down norteño clubs in Pico-Union had valets. Valets were ubiquitous, like purple jacaranda buds in the spring; one parked beneath a flowering tree, and, upon returning, found one’s car covered in a blanket of them, violet and sticky. It wasn’t a depressing building--in the clinical definition of depression-- but it didn’t fill him with longing to start the workday, although when he was honest with himself,...
