Tesla

Her dog usually sat in her wheelchair which she used more like a walker. She’d take it on the elevator to the roof and push it to where others were seated at the patio, no doubt drinking themselves silly because that's what they do now and these are many of the same people. There she would congratulate everyone on their good fortune in living at the Castle where there was "free energy". It seems to me that free energy is a given anywhere, but it's all about harnessing it.

Millie had worked that part out. She had harnessed a great deal of energy through the years first working as a maid to the former owners of her apartment, then coming into the apartment herself upon their childless demise. Here she resided with several puppies but it was her favorite who apparently rode the wheelchair. The others travelled alongside the chair, perhaps pulling it or at the very least pulling her along, as wheels do require some momentum.  

To the Capotes, father and daughter, and the Langs, mother and son (and onetime building manager), she would reveal her secrets. They weren't really secrets, they were just information apparently only she was privy to. Perhaps she had learned it from her former employers, now resting in peace in a little makeshift urn in her apartment, shaped like a lamb. It was bad forties' pottery but perhaps she interpreted it as the Lord was their Shepherd, or she just thought it was pretty and a respectful place to keep them. Their ashes no doubt mixed with the ever-present dust swirling around Castle Green from the streets. Then even more than now it was a byway of Fair Oaks, Green and Raymond feeding into and out of Colorado Avenue. The Castle was the only exception to this area's nonresidential status. Perhaps because it too had been a business, a grand hotel.

Anyway, somehow (divinely or through her former employers) news had reached Millie's ears that world famous and way postmortem hip scientist Nikola Tesla had resided at the Castle Green when it was a hotel, perhaps as a very long-term guest. While here he had harnessed the powers of energy at the Castle and channeled them to the utilities so that everyone's energy at the castle was free (I assume like the free internet provided in the San Francisco area surrounding Craig of Craigslist). Millie's proof of this phenomenon was she had never received an electric bill. 

My neighbor Ryan, whom going forward we will refer to as "The King" is the inheritor (one of many) of this free energy and of Millie's story, though the story has come to him through some suspicious grapevines. It's as true as it ever was, but it was probably enhanced when it was told to The King, as it's been learned that he will believe anything, like the tragedy of the hotel maid mistress of Colonel Green who threw herself off the Castle's bridge in despair or perhaps was helped off the bridge in despair, when she became inconvenient. The King has told me this story twice, but the Castle's nonprofits, The Light Bringers and the Friends of Castle Green swear they made it up and told it to him while bored and docent-ing a particularly long tour. But perhaps the story's truer than they know, and came to them through the free energy and the Colonel's mistress's nighttime cries.

The King had his own mistress for a while, the Castle's event coordinator. Apparently they were doing it in the events office, she was still married at the time, and our neighbors, the "Boys from Brazil" caught scent or hew of it and complained, fearing that The King's actions as Home Owners Association president would be affected by his involvement with the events coordinator, though as far as I can tell the HOA has always been in bed with the events office. The King's mistress did not throw herself off the bridge in despair. She did worse. She was let go from her events job and went into porn, to support herself and her young son but perhaps partly to prove to herself that she was pretty.

The King, so named in part due to his fascination with Elvis, resides part time at the castle and part time in Las Vegas (during which a divorced accountant, who looks like Rachel from "Six Feet Under", rents his apartment). The King is, by his own account, the son of a teen age mother. When she and his stepfather, who loved him as much as he slapped him around, took the train to California they landed in Pasadena. The rails were as they are today (but in operation for the Metro line), nearly across from the Castle. And The King, then a little boy, saw it and told his mother he would live here one day. She was disparaging, after a too long train ride with a bossy husband and two fidgety little boys, and told him it would never happen. 

Growing up around Pasadena then conquering in technology sales in Silicon Valley The King became rich enough that he came back here and bought himself an apartment in the Castle, now condos. His mother visits him during tour and proudly hosts his apartment as if were her own. He likes it. He won, so he doesn't have to begrudge her.

In The King's tiny apartment, the same size as ours, is an array of faux baroque furniture and low and high tech gadgetry. He has two ornate wood and velvet chairs from which he rules. They look as much like thrones as something in a fairy tale. It is likely that it’s his mother who is queen, not his ex-mistress though she's resided there.

Nikola Tesla in a similar throne.

The technology pervading his apartment ties us back to Millie and Nikola Tesla. The King knows the tale that Tesla occupied one of the Castle Green apartments and, by applying an equation which he says was Tesla's favorite, he has determined that it was his apartment Tesla stayed in, as he would rest only in a room number divisible with this equation. My math and history aren't good enough to tell you what the equation is; so you'll have to guess the apartment number

While no Tesla coil is visible amongst the technology in The King's apartment there is gear to sail a 17th century galleon, surround sight-and-sound media options, at Christmas a tree that raises and lowers, several art books about Elvis, heaps more velvet and an antique telescope that looks out at the windowless building that oppresses hundreds of Bank of America employees further down on Green Street. The King will never be in a windowless office because he is a self-made man. He home shops, apparently, from the Sharper Image and the wrecks of pirate ships. He even wears a giant ring like a king and says he wears it on the same finger on the same hand with which his stepfather slapped him with his.

Still, The King has sleep issues. He even paid for expensive as-seen-on-TV snore surgery but his snore mechanism grew back; it was his one poor investment. So he wakes himself nightly with his own snoring, or that's what he believes is waking him. But perhaps it’s the sound of wheels on expensive old carpet and the patter of little furry feet as ghostly Millie pushes her wheel chair with her little dogs down his hall, and whispers to him about Nikola Tesla's precious gift of free energy.