 
CHAPTER ONE

HE HUFFED AND HE PUFFED AND HE BLEW

It was the catastrophe Los Angeles had been expecting, the catastrophe those of us who lived there knew was going to happen eventually: rain. You could see it through a scrim separating the patio from the bar, splashing onto metal tables, shrunken umbrellas and concrete. The bartender had been craning his neck up at a wall-affixed television stuck on Channel Two, where a crawl was scrolling across the bottom of the screen that read: STORM ALERT. The anchor, sitting alongside his female co-anchor said to the camera, "We're updating you on the current conditions, as rain begins to move into southern California." The bartender turned his head almost imperceptibly and said, "Lookout folks, lock up the women and children, water is going to fall from the sky."

I returned to my car parked at the curb on Yucca Street and started in the direction of Vine. Near a stoplight a panel truck ahead of me slammed into the car in front of it just before the light. I got out of the car, walked toward the wreck, and stood there drunkenly in the rain. A large, bald black man had gotten out of his truck, and approached a thirty-something white woman with clipped brown hair in a long skirt, who'd stepped out of the three-story SUV, smashed against by the truck.

"It ain't ice lady," the man said. "Can't you drive on water?"

"Excuse me? I was driving cautiously. You were following too close."

"Why the fuck you stop half a mile before a goddamn stoplight? You planning on sleddin' the rest of the way? Look at this motherfuckin' shit."

"I don't need any advice from you, sir."

"You sure as shit do. Stay in your motherfuckin' house if it rains. Stay in the motherfucker all the time. You're dangerous...silly-ass bitch."

Onlookers and accident victims alike took to their cell phones, presumably to summon police. Whether the sound of sirens was indicative of patrol cars racing their way toward Yucca Street, or only part of the permanent ambience of Los Angeles to which normally I would give no specific attention, the sound of them ringing through the air caused me to assume help was on the way. As others returned to their cars, so did I. In my case, the eventual destination was the Westside.

As soon as I got out of the car in front of the house I saw Bob walking across the roof. The skinny ladder was propped against the porch. Watching Bob negotiating roof terrain was not an unfamiliar sight. The earthquake, the big one of a few years back had knocked his chimney off his roof and left a hole above his living room. An allotment of money from FEMA he'd got to make repairs hadn't been nearly enough to fix the roof, since he'd been advised the roof couldn't be merely patched but would need to be replaced. I was more or less certain the money long since had gone up in smoke of a pungent nature.

Seven dry months of the year in Los Angeles this hole in the roof was of no particular inconvenience. During the rainy season it needed attention. In the years following the quake Bob had used a large black tarp to cover this perforated section of roof, though the tarp, prone to blowing out of position in a mild wind needed to be clamped down at the corners with rocks bearing a familial resemblance to boulders. It wasn't a flat roof, so the rocks periodically would roll out of position, a rolling thunderous to behold inside the house, as well as in the houses of neighbors if reports were to be believed.

Shaggy, and already wet enough to be the proverbial drowned rat I didn't stop to offer help. The tarp appeared to have been accurately re-located, and effectively restrained. I at least waved as I passed the house on my way to his guesthouse, which was my residence du jour. Lila was there already. She'd been happily alone there for the entire night, being as the song says, "not a girl who misses much."

Fortunately for the both of us Lila didn't mind the customary modicum of post-bar soliloquizing on my part. It would only last until I passed out or reached a plateau of devastated memory, and cerebration that brought me bliss and made me lie still. I fished the Stoli bottle out and foraged for a communal spliff, and after discovering one flopped out on the couch. Tonight I enunciated my thesis that all of life is a fairy tale, and a vicious one, not merely our immediate surroundings, or some template of American life, but every single thing. Everybody was a liar I told her, even me, though unlike the others I lied only for fun, not for advantage or gain, for vanity, self-enhancement, or cruelty. This fucking Hall of Mirrors was wearying, I took pains to explain, even if the pains might principally be afflicting her; though as I declared, I paradoxically felt energized with avenging homicidal zeal. Inconsistently as it may have seemed I discussed my manifesto with its personal call to arms to myself not to care. I saw through to the essence of it all with an acuity only Stoli affords. I couldn't have said if it was entirely Stoli talking, or also downward mobility, but I was easily as awash in insights as in vodka.

Looking through the flame in front of my eyes while I tried to light a cigarette in the prone position, more accurately, an acrobatically bastardized version of the supine position, my eyes raked over the spines of books, trying to read the titles sideways, as well as the words on CD's teeming there in stacks, and looked at the tiny pieces of art: all standard issue for the artistically inclined, and all you got with genteel poverty. Something other than nausea made me want to throw up. A song by My Bloody Valentine began to ricochet around my brain. Lila retained her position at the computer, smiling occasionally at me, while clicking and typing. A nearly psychotically intense whirling of lust took command, though before I could do any damage to Lila, or to myself, a lullaby of palm fronds banging against the house and rain strafing the windows sent me away to Dream Land.

The sun pierced the morning malaise with a revivifying effulgence beyond the prophylactic capability of Ray Bans to repel, and I noted as I passed the house on my way to the car, that Bob was standing face to face in the driveway with the self-appointed representative of gentry living next door. He looked like all of them: wire-rimmed glasses, trimmed beard, sweater. Bob, his stringy hair grown halfway down his back wasn't doing any of the talking. If the past was any indication the homunculus was discoursing to Bob on property values and grooming of the lawn; probably the unsightliness of tarps; and without a doubt the hellzapoppin' rumbling of roof-rocks after midnight.

I was back at the bar at Joseph's by late in the evening. Kurt came out of the bathroom, walked up behind me and smacked me across the back. "Ready for the next one?"

"Surprise. Yes."

"Well it's your birthday."

"That was two days ago. But this still counts."

The bartender tried to take advantage of my drunkenness by asking, "How old are you Donovan?"

"I'm over. That's how old I am." The other two folded themselves in half with belly laughs of schadenfreude.

"You're not an actor or a person who goes in front of a camera for a living," the bartender told me. "Are you?"

"No."

"So what's over?"

"It's just a birthday thing," Kurt interjected. "Who gives a fuck about aging?"

"Listen," I said with plastered rancorousness, "anybody who says aging should be allowed to happen naturally...people who get older and say, "Oh, this is the best time of your life," can suck my moldering prick. What a handful of unmitigated shit from the ass of a dead mule that is. What a fucking lie."

A man sitting with a woman at the opposite end of the bar yelled, "Hey, hey...do you mind?" I gave a little salute to the forehead and yelled back, "Sorry."

"Not exactly enhancing the atmosphere in here," the guy added, though not as loudly.

"Don't ruin the man's atmosphere," the bartender said.

"He's going to need all the atmosphere he can scare up," I answered, staring in the man's direction. The bartender reached over to the shelf behind the bar, picked up a bottle of Stoli and refilled my glass to the rim. Kurt looked down and said, "I'm getting a little bit of a belly. If I look in the mirror when I'm naked I wonder, who the fuck is that?" Just as he said it, a tall, pretty willowy woman stepped up to the jukebox on the other side of the room.

"Nevertheless," he amended.

"I didn't say I had glaucoma," I added, looking too. Another supernaturally beautiful woman, presumably friends with the woman already at the jukebox, came over, put an arm around the waist of the first woman and as music began to play, swayed with her in unison.

"I don't need to see this while the pain is still fresh from a birthday," I bitched.

"I do," Kurt said. "I need it a lot. I'm willing to take as much as there is to offer."

Apropos of nothing recent the bartender said to Kurt, "My gut kind of bloats out after I eat...is that what you're talking about?"

Kurt looked at him like the annoyance he was at the moment, and said, "If it blocks your view of your dick you've got a problem."

"I don't have that problem," the bartender answered tersely.

"I'm starting to see dead people," I conveyed to them, talking past the bartender's defensiveness. "That's the sign I'm achieving the well above average buzz. "

"You may be seeing the LAPD before too long," Kurt warned, " birthday boy or not."

Sipping a kamikaze from a glass the size of a sink, the bartender looked at me and said, "Women don't care about your age. They only care about your money."

"That's a relief," Kurt answered in my place. "Old age won't put me any more out of the running for gold diggers than I ever was."

"On the other hand, there are women attracted to brains," the bartender told him authoritatively.

"How would you know?" Kurt mocked.

"Not from watching you," the bartender mocked back. "But there ARE women attracted mainly to intelligence."

"You're such a child," Kurt answered, throwing in some gestures linked forever with pompous grandiosity.

"I may look like a child compared to you, pops, but I'm right about some women preferring men with a lot of intelligence."

"It ain't never gonna trump looks, Gomer," Kurt told him with a convincing air of iron-fisted certainty. With a tone of equanimity that belied the alcoholic stew floating my synapses, I said, "It's natural to be magnetized by beauty, vitality and all that. WE are, right? It is awful...to contemplate that women assess our attractiveness the same as we assess theirs. Woe is mankind, and who gives a fuck?" I said, forfeiting the tone of equanimity pretended before.

"How old did you say you were?" the bartender asked me, deluded about his capacity for slyness.

"Piss off," I reiterated.

"You'd think you were a male stripper."

"Naturally," I said, "that's what most people assume when they first see me."

Kurt asked, "What the fuck DO you do for a living? I know you told me one time, but for whatever reason I can't remember it."

"I guess it wasn't memorable."

"No, seems like it was something kind of unusual. But I can't remember. Christ, I only know you from down the street...and this place every once in a while."

"It's amazing," the bartender contributed, "how little drinking buddies know about each other sometimes."

"Thank God." I said. "It's already too late for me to keep from knowing what he does."

"Everybody knows what I do."

"If you feel like it," the bartender resumed, "tell us what you do. I'll live if you don't, I promise."

"I didn't know anybody cared. But since you care, you really care..."

"Fuck it then."

"I work for a publication called, 'The Encyclopedia of American Political History.' The company that writes the checks is called Pyramid Publishing. But, 'The Encyclopedia of American Political History' is the book I'm assigned to at the moment."

"Hmmm, SORT of unusual. You mean you go in there everyday and write this book?"

"Not all by myself."

"It's a reference book," Kurt informed him. "Like a history of American politics in the form of an encyclopedia. Right?" looking at me for confirmation.

"Right. A bunch of editor-writers make decisions in collaboration about the content of it...what should and shouldn't be included. There's a group, including me, who write up the actual entries. It's not a forty-hour a week job; but enough of a regular job for me to classify it as one, if that's all right."

"All right by me. So," Kurt declared, "basically, you're a writer."

"Very basically. Very, very basically, in this case."

"Hmmm," the bartender mooed again with a look comprised of perplexity and suspicion.

"Look," I said to him, "hand me a few of those blank bar checks."

"What for?"

"I'm going to write on the backs. I'll give you an example of what I do."

"That isn't necessary, " he said.

"C'mon." He didn't say anything, but slid a small stack of the checks across the bar. I took a pen out of the inside pocket of my coat and immediately began to write.

Kurt left me alone, returning to the bathroom, before temporarily taking his conversation to two unfortunate women at a nearby table. He came back about the time the bartender showed back up after a turn restocking, and tending to ignored customers.

"Okay," I said. "Here we go. I'll read it to you."

"What is it?" the bartender asked, no better at recollection than at sly deception.

"It's a sample of an entry in the Encyclopedia. The only difference is that this is my own version of an entry...the kind I do for myself, for my own amusement. But it gives you a general idea of the kinds of entries that make up the content of the volume."

"Read away, dude."

Kurt asked, most astutely, "What's the subject here? What would we be looking up?"

"You'd be looking up, The American Incursion into Cambodia."

He chuckled. "You're the man for the job."

"All right. Here we go: _The American Incursion into Cambodia_." I took a little pause then began to read. _"Nixon, aka Dracula, surely at the urging of his Rasputinish enabler, Henry 'The Aphrodisiac' Kissinger, sent troops across the border into Cambodia in an illegal pursuit of troops of the North Vietnamese_ _Army...known for short at the time as the NVA. Despite vociferous objections from the overwhelmingly popular leader of Cambodia, Prince Sihanouk, Dracula authorized continuing incursions. Eventually, demonstrating the character of a corroded dipstick for which he became famous, Dracula tired of merely stiffing the Cambodians, and destabilized the government of their popular leader; an ass-backward initiative resulting in the slaughter of three million Cambodians in the killing fields, at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Score another touchdown for Dick, and Henry, the Angel of Death_." I let another pause intrude, then declared, "There you go." The two of them looked pie-eyed at me, until Kurt, who had guffawed periodically while I read, broke into full-blown laughter. The bartender simply smiled and said, "Fuck."

"What little I could understand of that," Kurt said, "what I know anything about, I mean...that's funny. Dracula...the character of a corroded dipstick," and he rattled off another series of chuckles.

The bartender smiled wanly and said, "I guess it was pretty good. I get the idea about the encapsulated thing."

"It would help getting the jokes," Kurt went on, "if I knew more about politics and... history I guess. But I hate politics. I have no interest, NO goddamn interest in politics AT ALL. It's just endless, pointlessly argumentative bullshit. They all lie, cheat and steal...all of 'em...ALL blow. Fuck politics, and the horse it rode in on."

"I don't think I understood a word of it," the bartender confessed, "except Nixon, and I guess Cambodia. I can understand what the North Vietnamese Army is."

I wagged my head and told them, "You two...typical southern California; like the STORM ALERT."

"Huh?" replied the bartender; and he meant it.

I drove home in another shower of gentle but persistent rain. I scraped the tires against the curb when I pulled in front of the house. Though my walking, due to drunkenness, not to savvy under sniper fire, was in accordance with the Peter Falk admonition, "Serpentine," I could see well enough between palms to determine Bob wasn't surfing the rooftop. Rocks and tarp appeared to be secure for the night.

When I got inside Lila was drawing. She liked to read; she liked to draw; she liked to be left alone. Her ambition wasn't nonexistent, only it didn't rise to the modern scale of envisioning a career comprised of remorseless self-promotion and ceaseless accolades. She told me Bob had been on the roof earlier in the night, and that the little aristocrat adjacent to us had been shouting up at him from the drive. In the past she had been exposed to some of the Bob biography, if far from all. She knew his grandfather had built the house, and that Bob had lived in it his entire life. She knew the arriviste next door nagged at him incessantly about the height of the grass, the appearance of the shrubbery, the dullness of the paint, the decrepitude of all things, living or mechanical on his lawful premises.

I never would have hesitated to call Bob my friend. Lila and I gladly paid the monthly pittance of rent. He was noteworthy in at least a couple of respects: Bob, who at the time was in the neighborhood of forty years of age, had never in the entirety of those forty years held a job. The reasons for this good or bad fortune, good or bad depending completely on one's perspective naturally, were threefold: inheritance, myriad afflictions, and government assistance. These reasons in aggregate were coupled with the lack of inclination, and any need to be employed. The afflictions, which conveniently had been diagnosed in the waning days of youth, existed in a muddled realm somewhere between what one guesses would properly be described as emotional and physical afflictions. They had rendered him just unfit enough to avoid the burden of work, and authentically disabled enough for government aid. His inheritance, upon the death of his mother was nothing grand: a roomy, shambling house with middle-class deportment; inheritance funds from which he could withdraw stipends, and live on for many years, if he lived frugally, which he did.

The guesthouse had been added after the building of the house itself, for reasons forgotten...by Bob at least. For Bob's father the house had become at some point, a home away from home, if only barely away, being in the back of the yard. Eventually though, he had moved himself entirely into the guesthouse. According to Bob, there had been no discord between his mother and father, or between the father and his wife and children. It was simply that his father at last required his sanctum.

Bob was noteworthy also for the quantity of mood-altering substances, prescription and otherwise, it was his wont and his need to consume on a daily basis in order to retain a continuous state of enervation. The expense of Prozac, Valium and marijuana, a powerful and odoriferous Chronic, exceeded the budget enforcement demanded by the funds from which he withdrew his scheduled stipends. In this regard, the paltry rent we were able to give him was useful.

I was more than happy to assist Bob occasionally with matters such as driving, or the devising of grocery lists, which he did not manage well under the circumstances. His only zeal was reserved for music: studying it, and listening to it in an almost rigorously meditative fashion. To describe his enthusiasm for his preoccupation with music as "zeal" perhaps could be classified as hyperbole; but it was music alone that would keep him busy, if busy would be the accurate term for a man sunk low in an armchair, listening to headphones with a fatty burning between his fingers.

There was no sign of zeal in him when Bob, who had been waiting for me on the back steps of the "big house" early one evening asked me inside for "a word." I followed him into the kitchen, where on the table among sections of the LA Times, and cans of butane, and loose flints there for the purpose of lighter maintenance, Zig Zag papers, and soup and cereal bowls with cigarette butts bobbing in their mush, was an official looking pink form. Sitting across from me, Bob nodded at the piece of paper and said, "This is some shit." The shit was a citation from a city housing inspector requiring the roof to be repaired or else the house condemned. According to Bob, the inspector evinced regret at the action he was "forced to take," saying to Bob it was "unavoidable when a complaint is brought to our attention."

"Guy next door?" I asked. He slowly rocked his head up and down.

"Little prick," I said.

"Scheer," he muttered, Scheer being the name of the man next door with a bug-inhabited rectum.

"For this house, between fifteen and twenty thousand to do the whole roof," he said, ruefully and softly.

"Man. Amazing."

"Yeah."

"When did this happen? When did the guy from the city come?"

"This morning."

"When I see that little pissant next door I'm going to seriously fuck him up."

Bob just waved the declaration off with his hand, and said, "He'd go wee wee wee to the cops and a lawyer."

Knowing this was true I frowned and said, "Then I'm going to talk to the little shit."

"I don't see any point," Bob answered mildly. His shrug seemed to suggest he wouldn't give the man the satisfaction of trying to placate him ever again, adding, "Ahhh...I'm cooked."

"Then I'll do it just to make myself feel good. He definitely will feel worse after I finish dicing his brain."

"I know what he'll say. I know what he wants."

"Yeah, he wants a lot. He wants the yard mowed once a week. So you're just going to have to cough up fifteen grand, is that it?"

"No. He'll get his wish."

"Which wish?"

"No choice...selling the house." So it was...we were all cooked: Bob, Lila and me, cooked.

He began to explain to me how the extraction of twenty thousand dollars from his nest egg would leave it so reduced, make the stipends in the future so measly, it no longer would be possible for him, even with government checks to subsist at all. If he sold the house he could protect the money in the kitty and use the proceeds from the house to find another place, "maybe a condo or an apartment," he said; in which case he could actually pad the kitty some. As he was telling me all this he abruptly cocked his head up and stared at the ceiling. "Listen," he said.

"Here we go," I muttered to myself.

"Hear?" he asked. All I did was slowly shake my head.

"It's them," he said. The "them" he referred to wasn't mini-mountains bowling across the roof allowing the tarp to sail away from the gash it covered, but Bob's indefatigable pursuers. For a couple of years, I'd been hearing about how they'd been after him. He sometimes heard them crunching against the scant cover of leaves in the yard. Other times, he detected them scaling the exterior walls, using windowsills as footholds, and scooting their way up to the roof. Tonight was one of the nights he heard them tiptoeing across the shingles in preparation for the final ambush.

"Bob. Come on Bob." He looked at me, terrified.

"I can't keep putting off getting a rifle in here...it'll be too late," he said.

"You don't need a gun, Bob. I don't think you could get anybody to sell you a gun, at least a legal gun. Why don't you listen to me Bob? You know I have no reason to lie to you. If I believed people out there were coming after you I'd tell you. Don't you think I'd want to help you protect yourself?" The turn of his head to the right about fifteen degrees indicated to me in a familiar way that he believed me to be speaking the truth.

"There's nobody on the roof, Bob. I don't hear a sound. Nobody is after you; promise."

We'd had this conversation so many times before, Bob no longer would protract his insistence on the presence of assailants, or the existence of pursuers on a mission to cause him harm. He invariably said something along the lines of what he said tonight: "I think you're wrong. But you may be right." Whether humoring me, or whether he had tipped back into uncertainty himself he ceased attentiveness to the roof and to those earlier alleged to be stationed on it. My educated guess was that his heavy pharmaceutical doses, or the combination of them with the strength of stinkweed he bought in hunks that looked like baled hay, and smoked daily in such extraordinary volume were the genesis of his paranoia. One also could suspect his sedentary habits, his heavy on the beef and beer diet were causing some arteries to petrify, or perhaps some places in his head to go numb. Maybe all of these in combination, and an early aging were exacerbating the atrophy of his senses. Acting on the philosophy that one should, and should be allowed to do whatever is possible to ease the pain, the fears, and the sorrows of living; and where applicable, the tribulations of sentience; and even to feel as blissful as it is humanly possible to feel while confined to the mortal coil, I advised him to take a hit, then a sip of Guinness in order to soothe his nerves and succor his foreboding. Using what was at our disposal, each of us in his turn eased his pain. From within the slow to disperse cloud across from me at the table came the dolorous lament, "I grew up in this house."

________________________

The bitterness of the day of departure was nearly counter-balanced by the funny twinges of pain associated with the day coinciding with Thanksgiving. While this may have fallen short as affirmation of the fix being in with modern capitalism, of the humbug of the American Dream, of the self-strangulating contradictions and hypocrisies of Judeo-Christian religions as practiced in modern times, even of the malicious rigging of the universe for the purposes of an unknowable and incomprehensible sadistic entity, it was pretty funny, in a desperate sort of way. After Bob had sprung _l'information miserable_ on the infamous night, I'd steamed into the guesthouse only to find that Lila wasn't yet home from work. In order to subdue my anger, quell my alarm, and fortify myself for the reporting of bad news, I inoculated my nerves with everything in reach, in the end clubbing myself into a coma. Whereas my personal Theory of Auto Mechanics was: When sounds that may be signals of potential malfunction are manifested while driving turn the volume of the radio up; my personal Methodology of Negative News Delivery could have included as its first step, a preparatory alcoholic lapse into thick unconsciousness. So the news was delivered to her on the following morning. Her reaction was embarrassingly redundant in view of mine, given that sometimes people who spend a large amount of time together will behave alike, Lila spitting out, "I'd like to rip the fucking head off that pretentious little puppy-bourgeois fuck."

Bob had preceded us by some four days out into the wilderness, onto the treacherously lubricious footing of the topsy-turvy domain beyond the property, into which all three of us were to be cut loose, expelled from the sanctuary, camaraderie, constancy and affordability of our Westside habitat. After the taxi that would haul Bob away was summoned, the three of us smoked cigarettes, and passed a bottle around, flopped on the steps of the front porch, forlorn and shaky as Trotskyites placed at the children's table during Christmas dinner at Stalin's house. Hardly surprisingly, a whitish bank of fog drooped over us all afternoon, the marine layer staying inland abnormally longer than it should. The house had sold shortly after it had landed on the market: prime real estate of a certain kind, with the passage of time, longevity fortuitously leaving it plunked down in a highly desirable neck of the woods. A house for sale in the neighborhood was relatively rare, this one going cheap with its need for a barrage of restoration. Bob left practically half of what had been inside the house behind when he rode off in the cab for good, having stored the rest. He told us he was going to hole up with someone he knew in Arizona for an indefinite stretch of time, an acquaintance with a formidable stash of Chronic, he mentioned in passing, noting this Arizonan long had been an affable touch for the life-sustaining product. Being nearer to the source apparently was one silver lining in his particular black cumulonimbus.

The power of the centrifugal misfortune upon the three of us turned out to be much stronger than we expected it would. Each of us, to some extent, was going his or her separate way. When Lila and I finally faced up to the moving costs, as well as expenses, rent and utility deposits to name two, from which heretofore, we had received reprieves as perquisites of sacking out in the guesthouse, we realized that for us there would be no direct leap to another abode. The measly pay from our two half-pint jobs put together couldn't provide the wad we needed to assemble in order to make that frictionless relocation. So Thanksgiving Day not only was a parting from the paradise of congenial shelter at a sane ratio of the monthly income, but a parting of the ways for Lila and me.

The looming interregnum wasn't entirely involuntary, given that alternatives existed; it was only that those alternatives were so exquisitely piss poor. The friend with whom Lila had found sanctuary in the San Fernando Valley was not unwilling to take me in as well. Yet the price of that togetherness was an unacceptable and truthfully painful diminishment of necessary privacy, besides the psychic cost of knowing I was beholden to someone it would be a uniquely ugly LA form of indenture to be beholden to. I had a pal or two of my own who could be called upon to put a roof over my head in the direst crunch; but again, cruelly slender zones of privacy and a prohibitive reluctance to impose kept me from besieging them.

The specifications of the impending separation were as follows: Lila would take the car, enabling her to continue working at her present job; my intention was to quit mine, deeming it not to be worth the burden of public transportation use to get there. Nevertheless, I planned to stay in practice by continuing the composition of personal Encyclopedia entries as an absentee. All but the smallest, most portable items we possessed, toiletries and such, had been stored; and after paying the storage fee, and rental for the truck, by the final day our wallets were barren, mine especially. I was expected to go before too long to visit Lila in North Hollywood, where she'd be staying, both to see her of course and to get part of the proceeds from the selling of a few belongings of ours, for which the payment wasn't due till later. The money would help; but it wouldn't help till then.

I intended to get by on temp work once I'd landed in the hovel of the future. I'd told Lila that in the meantime I would survive on my final paycheck from the Encyclopedia, which I explained, I would pick up the day after Thanksgiving. In truth, since Pyramid, like many other companies staggered their payrolls at the beginning, the last check coming my way wouldn't land in my pocket for two more weeks. I described for her an SRO hotel I knew of where I hoped to take up residence. It was, I assured her, an SRO which, compared to similar shadows under the rock of the American Dream housed a larger segment than usual of the threadbare, yet mentally alert; a roosting place more than elsewhere for a benignly bohemian clientele divided as always between the artistically and pseudo-artistically odd. It also was chocked with garden-variety ex-cons, practicing criminals, maniacs, and scruff-necked no accounts who looked not too unlike me. A friend of mine who drew political cartoons lived there; and I knew the bartender at the bar adjacent to it. All of this was factual, though in order not to multiply her distress I chose not to include that I couldn't take up residency at the hotel for a couple of weeks: the period until my manna arrived from heavenly, soon-to-be-former employer, Pyramid. Better for all concerned, if she remained unaware, that after saying sayonara to each other Thanksgiving Day I would be heading off on what was expected to be a two-week bout of drifting in the streets. Depending on whether I managed what money I took I might be able to flop in a boarding house for a night or two.

Late that final afternoon we were standing by the door of the guesthouse staring in the direction of the Pacific, of the car in the driveway, and of a slightly-above-middle-class West Los Angeles neighborhood deep in Thanksgiving. All of this came with the territory, we knew by now. Lila would tell you it was part of a kind of Russian Roulette: you lived by your wits, and made it on whatever talent had been dumped in your lap; or you ended up killing yourself one way or the other. You stayed aloof, joined no clubs, cliques or organizations, ignored advice, cultivated your pleasures, sharpened your talents, believed the worst about everyone from the President to the next-door neighbor until you learned otherwise, which happened occasionally, at least as far as the President was concerned; made peace with the multifarious fabrications of the world, and hoped for the best. If you were for real in her opinion you played. Chances were extraordinarily high you would end up old, sick and by yourself, gone ancient in a cacophonous, flea-infested tenement, sharing food with a cat older than you, and probably smarter. On the good side you would be used to that.

Lila was a little concerned, even a bit suspicious, upon learning when she asked me if I was ready to leave, that she would not be driving me to the hotel, instead leaving me behind to say a leisurely "solo goodbye," and to take a "long, long, walk," before starting for my destination.

"Hope we can save a little," she said, referring to money.

"A little, I hope." The more said at the end the worse it would feel.

"We'll just stay on the lookout for a place; anywhere...if the rent is right..."

I walked her to the car.

"Take care of yourself," she said.

________________________________

I was numb. Especially my gums. Bob had sent me off into the world with the only survival kit of any value, then: a gram of coke. It was the day when the word had come to him that the selling of the house had been finalized. He actually did something he'd done only once or twice over the years we'd been there: he knocked on the door of the guesthouse. When I joined him for a shot and a cigarette in the "big house," he offered me the packet as a kind of parting consolation gift. My perception of his generosity was mitigated by the knowledge that he hated stimulants, and that his supplier occasionally threw in a package of powder with the usual order as a tangible form of gratitude to the best of his clientele. Bob accepted these gifts as if delighted to get them, knowing he could pass them on. There was certainly a measure of generosity in that. So every so often, I would receive a granular surprise from Bob.

After Lila had gone, and after I had amply commiserated with the detritus left behind from our time of never unwelcome stasis on the Westside, as on every similar special occasion in the past I followed the rituals attendant to ingesting what I assumed every other intelligent person considered to be the miracle elixir. Every chop, sniff, taste and rubbing of membrane yielded frissons of long lost and sublime anticipation, if akin to anything, perhaps akin to the excitement of the wildly improbable expectations of pubescent youth out on the town for the night, mercifully sans the atrocities of pubescence. It was certainly a "sober" realization of "maturity" that the only consumer item always worth its cost was drugs. It was one life lesson learned: the one sure and reliable path toward genuine physical ecstasy, and emotional uplift, temporarily at least, can be found through the consumption of the world's natural properties which avail such benefits, aided only by man's ingenuity, and perhaps some functional knowledge of chemistry. As of this writing, no one was in possession of knowledge of a permanent path...no matter the propaganda.

In this case, anticipation of the insouciance of this guaranteed artificial high, when facing that conspicuously frightening and relatively catastrophic moment, was the only thing that could conceivably mitigate the trauma of the moment's approach, reliably ensuring something in that moment worthy of looking forward to. The numbness was the happy numbness antecedent to a customary form of numbness shortly to ensue, the sort inherent in a condition of permanent roaming. Likewise, it was a last grasp of invulnerable joy that was prelude to the miserable vulnerability of sleeping where and when you can. As it came to pass, it was surely the preferable way to tiptoe into the shallows of a reality that promised to drop off soon enough into depths lower than anything for which you might have prepared yourself by consulting Zagat. It would become clear right away when the numbness was gone, that this vast city, vast under any circumstance, when relegated to foot travel without recourse could cause you to regard the prospect of it much as you would the water if you were floating on a board in the middle of Lake George.

The first encounter with danger occurred when attempting to cross the parking lot of Fat Burger on Westwood Boulevard, where little could be more dangerous than salt and grease addicts pulling away from a drive-thru window aching to expedite their fix. Even with my recreational self-poisoning by "dangerous" drugs, my life expectancy promised to be much greater than theirs. I made this observation as a recovering salt and grease addict myself...one day at a time indeed. The stanchion for a streetlight just beyond the parking lot provided a convenient support to lean against, so I stopped, and removed the Stoli bottle, still a quarter full, from my bag and took a sip. The good feelings, far from nearing extinction were still on a rising trajectory. Bouncing from corner to corner during the traversal of Century City later in the night, the threat from limousines stretched to the length of barges, moving at speeds that had them gulping resources more thirstily than liquid fueled rockets, was no minimal threat to one peripatetic aficionado of socially menacing narcotics. Another walk through the valley of the shadow of death was the exit drives of upscale cocktail factories, where SUV's rolled out of lots like Tyrannosauruses thundering off the steppes, coming at me from every direction.

The streets themselves seemed to be swirling with gilded malignance. Nevertheless, I could find many a hideaway where I could nip at vodka, so my outlook remained cheery; barely less artificial than that of cheerleaders of every race, religion or creed proclaiming as much from podiums, or talk show sofas everywhere; American cheerfulness as intoxicating as Apple Jack. Perhaps as much fun as anything was watching multiple Ollie Norths on a bank of televisions inside the window of Good Guys. A priest came and stood beside me, watching them with me. We were aware from the profusion of graphics on the screen, and the identities of guests, well labeled as they were, that the discussion concerned the right presumed by some to exist in the Bill of Rights to possess a weapon. It had to have been my imagination, or my artificial sense of fun causing me to react giddily to what sounded like the noise of rapidly discharging rounds wafting across an area code or two. After a minute, the priest turned to me, nodding toward the choir of silent Ollies, shook his head and said tartly, "What a pantomime of deceit." Some taint of Jesuitical crypticness perhaps, but I agreed with him, I was almost certain.

I made myself a guest at a number of bus stops, taxi stands, plaza benches, and hotel entrances blessed with doormen; visited with a wide diversity of Angelinos enjoying the out of doors, all of my socializing of a convivial, sometimes bacchanalian nature, the escalating joie de vivre of transgressive origins causing me to converse with greater enjoyment to myself certainly, and to others if I gauged correctly. I crossed a picket line, though only to get to the other side. According to signs and shouts, which I for one endorsed, health benefits and a living wage for dusters of offices and swabbers of toilets were offensive to the sensibilities of executives at advertising and media companies whose conglomerations occupied the buildings the dusters and swabbers dusted and swabbed.

When a suggestion of lethargy crept into my step, I sat myself down at a sidewalk table out front of a conspicuously sleek bistro. I asked the waitress to bring me a paper cup, which surprisingly she did. I slipped the Stoli out of the bag and filled the cup. Before too long I was marveling at how much time I could spend transfixed by the erotic magnetism of a patch of a woman's calf visible between the heel of a pump, and the hem of a jean. I made friends, and before long was partying as if it were any other night in recent times. The breeze was mild; the palms were swooning; and bougainvillea was in the air.

When closing time came, I did not return to home as usual. A point was reached, after a good deal of walking, when I began to run out of gas. When I started to feel especially ragged, I began to search out a cranny to crawl into for a spell of rest, and a modicum of shelter. When I woke up in the morning, lying in a crumple between the brick of a building and a hedge, I discovered myself hungry, cold and extremely stiff. It was a day of tedium and tedious marching to nowhere. Eventually, I decided to march in the opposite direction, westward, away from the SRO that was to be my destination in another fortnight. The time it would take me to get there, from whatever starting point I finally would begin from was no longer of concern. Walking had never been tedious, but today it was. It was the first of many similar days.

#

# 

# CHAPTER TWO

DREAMS AGAINST THE OMNIPOTENT PURVEYOR OF OUR DAILY NIGHTMARES

I was napping, stretched on a bench beneath a palm tree on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, protected from the elements, and from the aimless voyeurism and petty hectoring of visiting and indigenous mall walkers of Greater Los Angeles by the armor of the LA Times spread across my face. Rain, as any outdoors enthusiast knows, beats paper. After the first few drops punched me in the face I rose up like the gargoyle of egregious underachievement I was and scampered past Banana Republic and Tower Records searching for shelter. As the bottom fell out of an overripe California sky, I clung to the window of the Midnight Special Bookstore, gazing upon a promised land of time suitably passed in dryness. A placard propped up on an easel just inside the door announced: A Reading by Francine Erricson, from her memoir, "Daddy's Kiss."

I breached the castle doors, finding myself smothered by people browsing, as well as elevated conversation from the superbly read, milling about. But near the back there was an opening among the shelves, in which chairs, some of them already filled, and a podium had been situated for something obviously auspicious. I wanted to be a part of it, though for non-literary reasons all my own, and only from the last row. A man in wire-rimmed glasses was standing at the end of the row, in such a way that passage into the row, and to a seat was blocked.

"What's the password?" I asked.

"Excuse me?"

"What's the password?" I repeated.

He chuckled nervously. "I don't know what you mean."

"What's...the...password?"

"The password?" he spat out querulously.

"Yeah, the password."

"I don't know what kind of password you're talking about."

"Oh. Is there one?"

"One...password? A password?"

"Yes, I believe that's what I've been asking, repeatedly."

"A password for what?"

"Do I need a password to get into this?"

The man trod agitatedly away, opening a passage for me to enter as yet unknown realms of literate pleasure. I was in a kind of stupor that had the restful bodily effect of dozing, when Francine Ericcson finally was introduced. A poster from the cover of "Daddy's Kiss" was plastered to the front of the podium. When the author began to read I felt receptive, as well as warm and dry. What I heard was this:

"I looked up. The sun had suddenly disappeared, the dazzling sunshine replaced by a gauzy grayish, light, so little different from the day we went outside to see the solar eclipse, after finishing an early lunch...olive and cream cheese sandwiches, as I remembered it, maybe just because I was hungry. I looked up, and his face was inches away from me, kneeling down, putting one hand on the handlebar of my bicycle and tugging at my hair with the other. 'Time for dinner, darling.' Oh, I squiggled back and forth on the bicycle seat, responding to...did I know at all what I was doing?...intensifying that peculiar, inexplicable rush of blood causing me to tingle in such an obviously, obliviously pleasurable way, which even then I sensed, wasn't entirely innocent."

If observers had offered me descriptions of my facial expression, "blank stare," I imagine would have been the one most accurate. But I wasn't a quitter when it came to hanging onto sheltered resting places. Francine was reading:

"You may not believe me. I don't know why it happened...there was nothing precocious about it, but the phrase...meaningless, absolutely without connotation of any kind to me then...'bad girl' ...floated, as though it were weightlessly adrift, exactly like some object outside one of those shuttles made for space you see on television from time to time, into that girlish filigree of my forming consciousness."

I was aware of being slumped down in my chair, but of course unaware whether I was snoring or not. But what I witnessed was exceptionally vivid: a television screen. On it, men in suits were sitting in chairs around the set of a television news show. "It isn't about sex," Christopher Hitchens was insisting, "It's about lying. It's about perjury. I don't need to tell you that."

Beside him, was the goat-faced Mephistopheles Patrick Caddell, asking, "What is it, in all due respect, that gives you people the chutzpah to come over here from the White House with these preposterous rationalizations of sleazy, abominable behavior, which, when made public, would cause any other politician to act out of principle and a sense of decency, any politician other than Bill Clinton apparently, to resign, even if the behavior didn't technically rise to the level of an impeachable offense?"

A seat down the dais was Rahm Emmanuel, answering, "The truth gives me the chutzpah, Mr Caddell. The desire to defend a president who has done an excellent job for citizens of this county, which is what is most important to him, and to the majority of the American people I might add, if every single poll I've seen since this story has been the media's focus is accurate. Perhaps you should explain to me why it is necessary, with all the challenges we as a nation face as we approach the turn of the century, for people like myself to have to spend so much of our time defending our president from a partisan inquisition, so obviously contrived by the president's political enemies...it's amazing how these folks in the media can peddle the story so aggressively as a serious story with a straight face. Honestly, in some cases it's astonishing how much what appears to be petty feelings toward the president are allowed to cloud objectivity, and affect news judgment."

"Oh please, Rahm," interrupted Hitchens. "Bill Clinton, and nobody but Bill Clinton is responsible for the mess he finds himself in. This virtuoso of prevarication has skated unharmed away from culpability in one scandal after another during the course of his administration, and persons such as yourself, his enablers if you will, give us these same old vast right-wing conspiracy excuses. What is it about this man's character, what is it about Mr. Clinton's integrity, or lack of it I should say, that makes it impossible for him to come out and look us in the eye and admit to us he lied directly to our faces; and admit he lied under oath during a deposition after swearing on the bible to tell the truth? What is it about Bill Clinton...Bill Clinton...B-Bill...Clin-ton-ton." The words had begun to reverberate, the reverberations gradually slowing and deepening. "Bill Clin-in-in-ton... B-b-ill Cli-Cli-Clinton...ton-ton." Traces of smoke could be seen seeping up from under the seats, repetition of the name Bill Clinton continuing to slowly reverberate until the dais perceptibly began to shake. Flames rose from behind the seats, and slowly enveloped the three in reddish orange. The set began to crease and crinkle, and the television picture started to curl up like a burning photograph. The flesh melted, until nothing was left but charred skulls, eye sockets glowing with embers.

It must have been me yelling out loud, or perhaps making some yelp of amusement that woke me up. I stood, still hyperventilating, and jostled my way to the end of the row, crossed the store and made a run for freedom in the plaza. Rain was still falling, if only lightly, yet enough to require evasive action on my part to avoid puncture wounds by recklessly wielded umbrellas as I stamped through the promenade. All of the sudden I felt it would be nice to talk with Lila. Before calling her, I took refuge on a bench next to an ashtray under a restaurant awning. None of the diners were taking smoke breaks at that very moment, so I took a few slugs of the cut-rate vodka I was hauling in my pack. The vodka warmed and soothed me. Upon recollection, the dream, if not the experience of having it, or where I'd had it, brought a soothing sensation and a feeling of relief; then after I sat longer even a feeling of well being. I left the bench and rambled through the promenade in search of a phone. Lila's host picked up on the other end.

"Yeah?"

"Could I speak with Lila?"

"Who's calling please?"

"Her significant lover."

"Ha. So where are you at the moment, Donovan?"

"Doing a little shopping at the mall."

"Oh really. I thought money was kind of tight for the time being."

"I turned a few tricks."

"Oh, well I'm glad to hear things are back to normal."

"Good one Cynthia."

"Alright, I'll get her." The phone was silent for nearly three minutes.

"Hi you."

"Hey baby."

"You calling from the hotel or from somewhere else?"

"A payphone. Decided to get out for a while."

"I don't blame you. It's kind of cramped in that one room I bet."

"A little. I'm stretching my legs...taking...a long, real long walk."

"Good."

"How are things there?"

"Pretty good. Fucking Burbank cops gave me a jaywalking ticket yesterday."

"Burbank? Cynthia's in North Hollywood."

"I was at the hardware store on Olive, crossing the street going back to the car. I had to get some things...I've got my jars and watercolors and stuff all over the room. I needed to get supplies so I could do some organization. This bastard Burbank cop...they're the worst, fucking Nazi Barney Fifes...shakes me down. Jaywalking. Jesus H. I told him my parents gave me permission to cross the street all by my lonesome."

"That's my girl."

"Didn't do any good. The cocksucker shook me down anyway. I swear, it's like there's a giant vacuum machine in the sky that pulls the bills out of your wallet a second after they get there. Course, there's so goddamned much money around it's hard to believe. Every nimrod...I don't know where all of 'em get it. Seems like everybody else is just suffocating in the stuff. Anyhow, I got the room fixed up nice.

"Settling in, huh?"

"Well...only for the time being. You know that."

"Oh, I know."

"I'm grateful to have a reasonably quiet place to work when I get home, and a room to myself to sleep in. "

After we finished talking, I walked slowly away. Standing in the open so long had dampened and chilled me. The more I walked, the more I didn't feel so well. The rain was reduced to a mist by now. A girl around twenty, with long, blonde hair stuck a piece of paper in my hand as I walked past. It was a pass to join one of the studio's movie preview audiences at the Laemmle's nearby. Normally I refused them, or threw them in the trash. Now, using one of them seemed like a grand idea.

While the lights were still up I filled in some of the information, not necessarily accurately, but filled it in nevertheless on the sheet they give you; then feeling too weak to do more rested the clipboard on my lap. The theater darkened, and the screen quickly brightened with a montage of Mercedes Benzes roaring in Dolby sound through what appeared to be Malibu Canyon. After Mercedes, Dell Computers advanced its cause with a commercial in the form of a mini-sitcom that either instigated laughter from a member of the audience or coincided with his hacking cough. During the ad for Coca-Cola which followed, my mind wandered back to the halcyon minutes of reading the promotional material regarding the film, remembering, or imagining that its plot involved Nazis, hockey players, and cops; or perhaps, revolved around a central character who was a hockey playing Nazi policeman. Bruce Willis might have been included in the cast. As the fifth or sixth advertisement invaded the premises, I took stock of my comparative good fortune, consoling myself with the comforting thought that paying customers regularly paid for the privilege of the same ads. None too fit when I entered the theater, by the seventh or eighth pitch from the screen I was genuinely ill. I checked my previewer's paraphernalia back in with the proper personnel in the lobby, and left.

Reeling out of the promenade, off into the dark, I immediately began the hunt for as undiscoverable a hideaway as I could find, possessing two amenities at least: dryness and warmth. Seeming to grow more unwell with every block I walked, I conceded the priority of concealment and settled for an unlocked postal branch, where at least I would be cozy for a while. Bunching my jacket into a makeshift futon, I claimed the warmest space of floor, the plot right in front of the stamp machines, which hummed, and were a little toasty near the bottom. At first, shivering and sweating, I flipped back and forth with a touch of fever. Pretty soon, my head heavy as a sock filled with ball bearings and my body covered in aches, I slipped down into the deep, deep end of sleep.

What only could have been a spray of gunfire shattered the glass in the post office window sending a massive chunk of it sailing into the meat just below my shoulder blade. I squinted to see the sidewalk better, my first glance revealing what may have been a wounded person lying there in a heap. The hand reflexively pressing against my wound was dripping blood. Acutely aware that strength was seeping out of me I used every bit at my disposal to rise from the wounded crouch against the wall and gradually to slide my way to the phone on the wall. Pulling the hand out of my pocket with a scoop of change, I dropped everything but the quarters I would need to make the call. When I'd finally managed to dial the digits: 9-1-1, I was surprised to hear a recorded voice on the other end:

This emergency service is provided by AOL/TIME WARNER. If you're bleeding, press 1; if metastasizing cells have resulted in dysfunction of a vital organ, press 2; if you've had a stroke or heart attack, press 3; if you don't expect to live until help arrives, press 4.

Quite uncertain of the amount of time left to me, I pressed 4.

If you would like to hear music while you expire, press 1.

Without waiting to hear any other options I pressed 1.

_If you would like to expire to classical music, press 1; if you would like to expire to punk, press 2; if you would like to expire to hip hop, press 3; if you would like to expire to rap-metal, press 4; if you would like to expire to indie rock, alternative or jazz, press 5; if you wish to expire to country and western music or_ to _classic rock you have previously expired, and are requested to press six, in order to make arrangements with the funeral home or mortuary of your choice._

Before I could press a number, an EMR unit arrived in front. The driver came inside and introduced himself as a representative of the publishing company, Conde Nast. He told me that in order to be driven to a hospital I would be required to purchase a subscription to Vanity Fair. He added that it would be necessary for me to pay with a credit card. Informed that I had no valid credit card, he accompanied me to the street, and loaded me into the rear of the unit. As the ambulance passed through the empty streets, I lay in back, while the men up front remained attentive to the radio. The audience was being persuaded to the position of the speaker, on a subject I had arrived too tardily to the oratory to be aware of. In service of persuading to his point of view, Mr. Limbaugh was advising his listeners: "Fact number one: Jupiter is the planet closest to Earth. Fact number two: An isosceles triangle is a triangle with all three sides of equal length. Fact number three: Abraham Lincoln, 27th president of the United States, was by far, without question, the handsomest figure in Greek Mythology." After a pause he added, "Case closed." The two men in the front of the ambulance nodded their heads emphatically up and down. The driver twisted his neck around and said to me, "For your information, the alchemists at the American Enterprise Institute have created gold, utilizing a process which mixes the DNA of President William Jefferson Clinton with the DNA of an audience member of Premiere Radio Networks selected at random." I grimaced, from the pain caused by the enormous shard of glass in my back.

It was right after this that the ambulance pulled into the entrance to the parking structure beneath an extraordinary complex of buildings. The sign up above, which continued across the fronts of many buildings, the complex itself going on for as many city blocks as I could see, read: Jerry Bruckheimer and Cardinal Mahoney Presents: Fox-Fargo Accidental Petroleum and Telecommunications Solutions. Riding up in the elevator, blood dripped from my wound down to the floor, my shirt already completely soaked. The EMR driver took me into a tiny waiting room and left me there. When the woman behind the glass, a female police officer from the Los Angeles Police Department turned around, she explained to me that due to the bankruptcy of all of the major insurance companies, "as the result of insufficient profits," my health insurance was now invalid. I told her I had no health insurance. She answered, "Never mind," and asked me to take a seat.

A man I had barely noticed when I came into the waiting room, stuck out his hand to me once I had sat down. He introduced himself as Ralph Nader, and told me, "The revolution is near at hand."

"You don't say, " I answered.

"Yes. I do." Then he asked, "Are you hungry by any chance?"

"I could eat," I told him.

He took something out of a brown paper bag and handed it to me. "Try this," he said. "It's a non-genetically engineered corn-on-the cob."

I accepted it. It was the size of a pinky finger, and tasted like turnips, but I swallowed it nevertheless.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"What I really want is to get out of here." He reached into a briefcase, first pulling out and handing me, "a slug for the Blue Line," then reached back in, and retrieved what he told me was a lifetime supply of Advil "for the troubles ahead."

At this point, the woman behind the glass called out to me, "The doctor will be with you in just a moment."

When the six hours had passed I was led into an elaborate and expensively appointed office. A man rose from behind the desk in order to greet me. Stepping around it, he came and shook my hand.

"I'm the manager," he told me. "I'm the highest authority here. I wish to express my deepest sympathy, bordering on suicidal depression for the extent of your injury."

"I believe you," I said.

He gestured toward the expansive window behind us, and I followed him as he walked toward it. There was a magnificent view of city and sky. I noticed the cloud cover had sunk quite low, and a strong wind was swirling the darkest clouds. The Manager informed me I had been "invited in" in order to undergo "the routine physical examination required for verification that you remain attractive enough to qualify for registration renewal of City of Los Angeles citizenship."

"Oh. I understand." Still, I beseeched him to hear me out, telling him it would take only a few minutes of his time. He acceded. So I proceeded to explain, that though I felt quite confident of the caliber of my attractiveness, nevertheless, I believed strongly that he should take into consideration my salutary habits, and reliably consistent practices, which included my thoughtful, even informative contributions to conversation in social settings; my thorough reading of a number of daily newspapers from across the land; my love for and devotion to books, particularly a superior kind of literary writing, with the attendant hours of time spent reading each and every day; the degree to which I treasured silence, and my customary adherence to it for a portion of the day; yielding the time and lack of distraction necessary for engaging in significant periods of undisturbed thought; thus, making me an asset to my fellow Angelinos since it guaranteed I would seldom be intrusive or cause disturbance; and that for the sum of this evidence of my contribution to a higher quality of living in our beloved Los Angeles, I should be spared the requirement of taking the test, and of meeting current minimum standards for attractive appearance.

The Manager gave me no answer immediately. He gazed for some time out of the window, looked down at the floor, as though exhaustively engaged in a process of deliberation. In the silence, thunder could be heard rumbling across the city, while flashes of light suffused the clouds in the western sky. When he finally spoke, he launched into a profuse, and effusive monologue of praise for me and for my "laudatory habits," applauding my "taste in literature," my "diligent attention to current events and public affairs," the "civilizing nature" of my "interactions," as well as the "neighborly deportment" of my "daily life," finally agreeing that, "you should retain your citizenship based on these qualities and these qualities alone, those of physical attractiveness being of secondary importance by far." As soon as he'd said it there was a searing flash of light, then almost instantaneously a shuddering clap of thunder. At the same time we realized the place we were in had been struck with a bolt of lightning, things inside began to fall, until, in a burst of noise and chaos the building imploded. The blast sent me cascading through the air. For one split second, from an all-encompassing vantage point, I witnessed the entire complex crashing down and the city itself, quaking. Then I landed.

I woke up hollering at the top of my lungs. Quickly, I sat up shivering from fever, or from the chill in my blood put there by the dream. I sat paralyzed against the wall of the post office until I heard a truck pull up outside, and soon after, men's voices. I was standing by the time the two men came inside. As one of them unlocked a door into the working area in back, the other said to me that unless I had a letter to mail, or stamps to buy, I should be on my way. I complied, lugging my benumbed limbs, and dream-shocked mind, out into the faintest imaginable shroud of drizzle.

____________________________

"What's called for," I told myself, " after that," as I trekked away, "is marijuana." I could only fantasize about the improvement to my shaken psyche, and to my overly exerted body that smoke from a few fragrant green buds piled into the bowl of a sturdy pipe would afford. Alas, all I did have was a shrimpy roach somewhere far down inside my pack, which, nevertheless, I would use during my next available "down time." Parts of the recent dream recurred. As before, with the earlier dream, when I reflected on it at a safer distance, I found it to be a decided comfort: much as a familiar song is comforting anytime it's played. Consequently, as I robotically put one foot in front of the other, occasionally I would call up the dream as a balmy distraction from the harshness of the current travail.

In truth, my zombie-fied trudging was something of a forced march at the hands of over-zealous security guards and bored cops, for whom my appropriations of shelter were the bane of their sluggish third shifts. During the march there was little attention to surroundings, other than keeping a lookout for the next haphazard, ephemeral domicile. Such inattention was terminated with rude alacrity when a beige BMW screeching on two wheels rounded a corner out of a cross street and came within a foot of putting me into orbit. Being, as they say, speechless, I flipped off my would-be assassin as he sped away. And then the car slowed. The driver raggedly jammed it in reverse and aimed it in my direction. I scoured the pavement, the gutter and the sidewalk behind me, and saw nothing readily useful as a weapon. As the BMW came swerving up to me, I scampered across the street and snapped the antenna off an Explorer parked in front of an apartment building. The driver slammed on the brakes so hard the car nearly stood on its front end. Three husky, affluent post-adolescents sprang out the doors. They came around and stood between the car and the curb to face me. I was whipping the car antenna back and forth in the air like Zorro. It made a whooshing noise as it displaced the air. The one on the right said, "Let's see you give us the finger again."

I gave them the finger again. To the one who had spoken, I asked, "Whose rich daddy owns the car, lunkhead?"

"Up yours," the one on the left grunted.

"What are you going to do with that?" the one on the right asked.

"I'm going to tear your face open with it, dumbshit."

"Yeah?" answered the one on the left, following this with a curt, faux laugh.

"Yeah?" repeated the one in the middle, perfectly duplicating the curt, faux laugh he'd heard.

"BMW's are so _gay_ , " I answered back.

"Yeah?" answered the one on the right, expanding on it significantly when he added, "Say your prayers dick."

"Your daddies never made it out of B movies," I told them.

"What?" replied the one in the middle with a genuinely puzzled expression.

"Huh?" said the one beside him.

"Your sisters are all flat-chested," I told them.

"Fuck you, you crazy fuck, " said the one on the left.

I answered, "You're too fucking fat to surf, Buddha."

"What?"

The one to his right, who also was the one in the middle, moved toward me slightly. The others then followed his lead, a phalanx of jewelry, male breasts and concentrate of cologne coming at me.

Flinging the antenna with quickened malice back and forth in front of their faces, I assailed them with, "Your mommies acted in soft porn."

"I'm gonna bust your head wide open, asshole," blurted the one on the left, pushed to the point now he was ready to charge me like a bull.

A few blocks up, a car slowly turned from a side street and in our direction. The car turned out to be a huge, black truck, when it pulled to a stop just before the bumper of the BMW. The truck's headlights threw us into the spotlight. A man about forty climbed down from the cab, put his hands on his hips and asked, "What's going on?" Getting no answer, and after standing and watching for a minute or two, easily sizing the situation up, he turned around and walked to the back of the truck. He reached into the truck bed; then he came walking toward the three of them carrying an iron chain in one hand, a heavy wrench in the other.

"Yeah, fuck you," one of them said. The three of them eased closer to the doors of the car, then began to open them.

"Get fucked, assholes," one of them hollered, as the three of them transformed themselves into a whorled frenzy of serial bird-flipping en masse. Then they slammed the doors; the driver started the engine and the BMW squealed away.

The man in the truck asked if I was okay; then hearing that I was, offered to give me a lift. Inside the truck, he asked me where I lived.

"I'm a free-range citizen at the moment," I told him. He said he was headed home from work and that his house was at the beach. I told him he could drop me anywhere near there.

"Looked like you pretty much had those punks at a standoff," he said.

"I think the appearance of insanity, having nothing to lose, and Irish temperament are ninety percent of the battle."

He was returning home from working an overtime second shift at Technicolor over in the valley, it turned out. His job was keeping some kind of machinery there in working order.

"You have a little trace of...sounds like a southern accent," he pointed out.

"I lived in the south when I was a kid."

"Yeah? My grandfather was from the south. Georgia."

"I wonder what brought him here?"

"I don't know. I think he worked in some kind of factory there. _My_ father was a bookkeeper his whole life."

"Mine was like your grandfather; he worked in a factory...a textile mill."

About a mile from the shore, the man pulled a beer out of a paper bag sitting between us, and opened it up. He pulled a second out to offer to me. As I was stepping down from the cab, carrying my beer, which I told him I wanted to drink later, right before I napped, he asked me to wait. He went around to the truck bed and yanked a heavy blanket up, and asked me if I wanted to take this with me too. I had it almost out of his hand before the word "yes" could get as far as my throat.

____________________________________________

Sky and ocean formed one continuous black wallpaper of my bedroom for the night. The former looked, and the latter sounded riled. I felt blessed however suddenly to possess peace and privacy for as long as they could last. Both easily were worth the cold and bluster that would be their price. Besides, it was a cool Pacific breeze, not a frigid wind.

I scooped myself out a little bed in the sand. I wrapped the blanket around me and lounged back with my beer: night-tripper by the sea. I captured the nub of a joint floating around in my pack, and utilizing the paraphernalia of antiquity, the cave man's roach clip, a pair of tweezers, I smoked the joint down to a wispy coal. My world was all silence and relief and remove. The incessancy of wave and wind erased any acoustic manifestation of mankind still extant in the night. Only birds, whatever ornithological nightlife cruised the beachhead in that wee hour of night, or dewy hour of newest day made an audible representation of earth's creatures capable of surviving a cacophony of baying wind, and banging surf.

Eventually, I surrendered my attention entirely to heaven above. The tarpaper dome had become a pornographic planetarium for an audience of one. A show of constellations twinkling in female forms, disrobing, misbehaving lubriciously and coupling acrobatically provided a majestic sidereal peep show that kept me awake a while. Sleep overtook me only after I burrowed myself into the sand, snuggled there with other crustaceans.

I felt heat warming my back before I even raised my head. Soon as I'd blinked the Santa Monica stardust out of my eyes, I saw first a parapet of palms braced against the concave shoulder of a turquoise hill. I imagined, I hoped actually, I had been stowed away unconscious and brought to Tangiers. Then I saw the billboard with a picture of Mickey Mouse inviting one and all to Anaheim to frolic in the ubiquitous corporation's shareholder adored playground. Of course Morocco might well have had its share of the identical billboard. The one within my range of vision I now could see, had a scaffold clinging to it on which a group of men were engaged peeling Mickey's face, scraping him into curlicues of paper that twisted out stiff as whiskers. As I watched, rays of sunlight broken through a swaddling of morning fog toasted me to a happy and contented crisp. It occurred to me that I felt extremely well. Joggers and dog-walkers had begun to trespass on my isolation, yet I was especially cheerful. Taking stock while I luxuriated in the natural splendor and salty warmth of my inadvertent Pacific vacation, I concluded I was managing handily. I was on top of things, even having laughs. I turned back from my ocean view to look beyond the beach and saw that Mickey had vamoosed; he'd been iced of course.

But I was healthy. And fully awake.

#

# 

# CHAPTER THREE

CITY OF LITE

No matter the incongruence of my location I was securely entombed in a book of Thomas Bernhard's. I was sealed up in a tiny cosmos of Austrian anomie, wherein the armies of conquering stupidity were bloodily mangled, the universal peddlers of humbug surgically filleted, the forces of cultural mutiny adjudicated and their heads impaled; travesties of history were coughed up violently, and their perpetrators skinned alive; autocrats, plutocrats, top cats and craven multitudes were mercilessly belittled; wherein the concussively wounding and exquisitely hilarious absurdity of every breath of existence was memorialized in howls, and where the gutters ran with vomitus of disgust...my kind of place. I had decided to re-read all of them, the Bernhard books, though I had only one of them with me then. The others were stored with the rest of my material world.

I was sitting and reading at a busy car wash. I'd been noticing from the avenue as I walked by, the carefree customers sprawled outside in the folding chairs, browsing magazines on benches waiting for their automobiles to shimmy out, and for the climactic toweling off, when I got the idea of joining in. It was not difficult to stay mostly inconspicuous among shiny people and shiny cars. A first during this time of living off the land: earlier in the day the jungle had offered up a pack of cigarettes. The found booty was at my side all the while I was reading, and I puffed down half at least of what I had. The combustibility of my neurons was only improved by synergy: stimulation by language and tobacco simultaneously. I stayed there reading and smoking till dusk, when the car wash closed.

When I left, I was stung by a bite of nostalgia for proximity to the entirety of the books I owned. When you had them around you, they appeared to wall you in so to speak with priorities you cherished, and barricaded you in steadiness against grand mal seizures in the maledicted world at large. Observing the soaping, spraying, and scrubbing of automobiles had enflamed one more nostalgia, recalling for me the gratifications of regular grooming. Still in possession of a meager savings account, the unspent bills in my wallet to be used for a single night beyond the streets during my hiatus from habitation, I made a decision. The night had come to retain a hole in the wall, one with its own bath. There were only three more days before I could roll into Pyramid and lay claim to the last of the real paychecks. I sensed deep down, there was no rising tide of inspiration to martyr myself to thriftiness holding out the entire fortnight, and ending up with the paycheck, as well as retaining the pittance I still would have in my pocket.

The little slice of paradise I found, white stucco bathed for many years in California carbon monoxide and particulates, and now a slimy brown, was crumbling, marinating in bus fumes, and the neighborhood surrounding it vibrating with the droning racket of discount commerce, and legally unsanctioned trade. There were still palm trees in the yard, natch. After a meticulous process of selection the house had been chosen because of the sign in its first floor window advertising vacant rooms going by the night, the week and the month.

After the bill for my stay had been settled up, I hopped across the street to a pan-Asian-operated bodega there and scored myself a bottle of Gallo. This transaction, coupled with the preceding expenditure depleted me to a level of merely cents. But I was blessed with strong conviction that I could fend for myself successfully in the wild for three more days. I'd been given a prime location, on a corner of the structure, up on the second floor. Breathtaking wouldn't be the adjective I would choose first to describe the vista I could view from the window. And while respiration never was interrupted, after observing the view for nearly an hour, more than once, a powerful reflex to hold my nose was felt.

I had pulled an assemblage of sticks in the form of a chair to the window, and sat there for some time watching the ghetto go by. Luxuriating, I foresaw a long evening ahead of smoking, drinking, reading, sleeping and bathing. The challenge of how many separate and clearly distinct naps I could complete during a period of slightly less than eighteen hours was enticing. As I tilted back the bottle and let the wine spiral down my throat, the sounds of this particular rooming house clanged, thudded and moaned around me. I came back from a visit to the pissoir and found a gaggle of LAPD in the middle of the street, and a slew of rollers parked every which way all across the intersection. I sat and watched while the blue-shirts extinguished the melee, whatever its cause, and dispersed everyone present for the ruckus. It reminded me of something I'd seen first-hand, or second hand, I didn't know for sure. Whether because the windows were tinted, or due to the quality of light from businesses and lampposts, the intersection out the window looked bathed in yellow. It was a tint less brown and dignified than sepia, a brighter yellow than the dirty gold of old paper. But it put me in a historical frame of mind. As I slugged down more Moby Grape it struck me I should put pen to paper. There was a wire notebook and a Bic lodged somewhere in my pack. I spread the notebook open over the bedspread; then lay on my side, hovering above it with the pen. I wrote:

## THE 1972 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION

For the very first time, convention doors were opened up to delegates other than regular party hacks. Using a laudatory set of quotas and an unprecedented democratic process of selection across the land, a vibrant and diverse gathering arrived in Miami to cheer on the Democratic ticket. Television watchers could observe that blacks, women, feminists and long hairs appeared to have the run of the convention floor. Naturally, much of the country was repulsed, or frightened out of its wits, as the case was. There was suspense, though minor suspense attached to the outcome of the delegate count, with George McGovern, the boldly anti-war candidate, and the superannuated liberal warhorse Hubert Humphrey, being not too far apart in delegates upon arrival at the convention. McGovern had been slightly ahead, and was expected to win. He did.

Also, for the first time, to those in observance, during THIS convention it looked like a lot of fucking must be going on. For those with a pulse, and without the usual prudish or conservative inhibitions, this added enormous appeal to the week's proceedings. It was quite in contrast to the tedious collection of Republicans that would gather two weeks hence, also in Miami. There, among a mass of pasty-faced dipsy-doodles, and wax figurine reactionaries, a lubricious pussy or bolt-upright tool would have been conspicuously out of place.

Due to the lengthiness of the Democrats' delegate count, and a refreshingly Sixtyish disorganization, McGovern's acceptance speech was delayed till three in the morning. But the feeling of chaos and lateness of the hour rendered the occasion with a plangent nocturnal edge. Of course, the great majority of the nation was catching its forty winks, as was its wont. McGovern made an impassioned and eloquent speech. His call to unilaterally shut down the war in Vietnam still was too radical a proposition for an electorate not yet, though soon to be sickened by the nasty, immoral and futile debacle.

Then it was time for a nap.

_______________________________________

Our arrival was simultaneous. The unwritten rules of etiquette not only had not been written, they had not been conceived for this occasion. Just goes to show what kind of times we were living in. He'd rounded the dumpster from one side, at the same time I'd rounded it from another. We stared for a minute. He said, "Dinner time I guess." And he was right.

For my part I was anxious to eat. I tried to retain a gracious demeanor, while under the surface my acquisitive instincts were pushing me to insistently forage, consume, find a bathroom, kill time wandering, find a place to sleep, and finally to wait for the sandman or the security guard, which ever came first. The landmark that had drawn the both of us to its dorsal aspect was Gelson's gourmet market, snuggled cozily into a section of Los Angeles designed to be inhospitable to the hoi polloi. Functioning beneath even that stratum, we were not persuaded to stay beyond the boundaries, by disincentives effective with persons higher than we.

My inadvertent dinner companion was large, with long, blonde hair, and a gray and yellow beard. I told him, "Help yourself."

He said, "Would you mind?"

"I can wait."

"I'll look for the both of us," he offered decorously.

"Fair enough."

In front of the dumpster there were stacks of plastic grocery crates piled with discarded items. He began to push and paw his way through. Occasionally he would hold an item in his hand examining it, read the printing on the package perhaps, then toss it to the ground beside him or into the open maw of the dumpster. He continued to read and to ravage, and to evaluate and to deliberate over the choices as any conscientious shopper would. At a certain point however, he began to grunt and growl.

"Anything wrong?" I asked.

"Fucking low fat this, nonfat that...damn...damn."

"The pickings are a little slim?" I asked, grinning like Howdy Doody.

He paid no heed, too focused to be distracted, or too genteel not to tiptoe around such a large lame elephant discreetly. Then he uttered a hybrid sound in which I discerned snarling and moaning, before shouting out, "All Lite...Lite...thirty percent less...oh, here...75% light...mother of Christ...mother of our lord and savior...how do they live on this shit?"

"I don't know," I said, "How do we?"

After a thorough rousting of the crates, and a shallow incursion into Big Green, he ended up with packages of French Onion Soup, some English Muffins, and a mixed grill of canned corn beef hash and canned kippers. I took along some organic peanut butter, some organic tomato soup and a sack of fat-free, salt-free tortilla chips. Times indeed were hard. Coincidence followed inadvertence, and with not a bit of consultation, we started off in the same direction. Flea-bitten flaneurs, we strolled along the boulevard, carrying the duffel bag and pillowcase respectively, holding our evening's groceries, observing the incipient nightlife of the city as we went. Some number of blocks into the journey the man turned to me and said, "I'm Rolf."

"Donovan," I said, sticking out my hand.

We walked long enough to traverse the perimeter line between coveted and condemned neighborhoods. But we knew we had entered another territory altogether, when trailers situated along the side streets began to be encountered, then cameras and lights set up in position, and of course production assistants, some talking on walkie talkies, others on cell phones, present in locust-like numbers. Rolf elbowed his way through the moderate number of rubber-neckers gawking at the scene, and got up close. Those of us there as fortune-blessed Hollywood unwashed gathered in witness, among whom were included aspirants, devotees, and the worshipful populace in general: together, the awed and the aping, were joined by those working nearby at gainful employment; and of course the rest with free-time-heavy schedules: a category that included loiterers, and in the case of Rolf and I, a sub-category of loiterers classified as gone bust boulevardiers, all admonished repeatedly by authorized production assistants to hush up. After a few minutes it was apparent, taking into account the arrangement of the actors, the kinds of props prominently in evidence, and most revelatory of all, actual overheard conversation among the actors, director, and crew, that the scene being filmed was a depiction of a political candidate on a walking tour. The fictional politician was being portrayed by Christian Slater, an actor with fictional qualifications to act according to one or two accidental critics within earshot. The famous television bloviator, newspaper columnist, and occasionally outed plagiarist Mike Barnicle was appearing in cameo, in this scene accompanying and casually interviewing Slater's politician. Slater, the director and Barnicle stood discussing elements of the scene they were preparing to shoot. The director said to Slater, "We are still keeping the bare bones on the page, Christian...aren't we?" He looked from Slater to Barnicle, then over to a man standing with a group near the camera. "Keep mixing with improvisation," he continued to Slater. "Mike, maybe you should ask him something along the lines of, when he becomes governor, would he be looking into the issue of the disproportionate numbers of blacks serving time in prison...or maybe...maybe, something about the differences in sentencing for crack and coke...you're supposed to be a sympathetic interviewer."

"In real life, I'd hate to ask things that sound too much like liberal media questions," Barnicle told him.

"You don't try TOO hard," the director responded, "not to be liberal do you?" Barnicle just shrugged his shoulders.

"That would just make you conservative," the director said. "Wouldn't it be good," he continued, "if the candidate made a joke about something...one of your questions? Like...'With my star power, this neighborhood can become an empowerment zone.'"

"That's pretty dumb," Barnicle said.

"Dumb?" the director repeated. "In what way is that dumb? Isn't an empowerment zone...isn't that something having to do with voter registration...empowering the neighborhood?"

"It has nothing to do with that," Barnicle told him.

"What is it then?"

"It's sort of complicated. It has to do with providing tax incentives to businesses willing to locate in a given neighborhood, a poorer neighborhood...giving subsidies, tax breaks for hiring employees within the neighborhood."

The man standing close to the camera broke in, and said to all three, "It's nice to be sticklers for accuracy...but ...we don't want to get carried away, carried away with dry material."

"Exactly," Slater said.

"I could ask him a question about redlining then," Barnicle suggested.

"Putting a subway here," Slater offered, hoping to help. Rolf began to guffaw loudly. The men on the set turned their heads slightly in the direction of where the laughter came from.

"But it's a transportation issue isn't it?" the director questioned Barnicle.

Barnicle shook his head and chuckled. "Nope. It has to do with banks...it's illegal, but it's a policy of financial institutions, refusing loans and mortgages to people in certain geographic areas of a city...usually a minority area. Or maybe, an insurance company not offering various forms of insurance, based on the fact that somebody lives in a certain part of town."

"That sucks," the director responded.

"Yep," Barnicle agreed.

"How about this?" the director tried again, "You could ask him a question, say about empowerment zones, and he could answer with something along the lines that you're asking sort of irrelevant questions...blow it off, as kind of an insider political question, not of interest to the neighborhood."

"I don't really think he'd do that," Barnicle told him.

"Why not?"

"He wouldn't blow me off...like that. It doesn't fit my public image for him to blow me off for that reason."

"Which kind of image? As a media person?"

"He wouldn't blow off a question from me because it seemed like an insider question... I don't have that kind of reputation. I'm associated with working people...average Joes...regular people." Rolf began to guffaw again, loudly. All three men looked in his direction.

"Maybe," the director continued, "a lot of improvising isn't the best idea. Let's save some of this for tomorrow. I was thinking...maybe...we might could have the city council person...the real person, whoever it is, tagging along with the candidate, showing him around the district."

The man standing over near the camera asked the group of people around him, "Who is the city council person for this area?"

The director answered hesitantly, "I really don't know." He looked at Slater, who looked at him with a blank face.

"Eric Garcetti, you numbskulls," Rolf shouted out. The three men on the set, as well as the man over near the camera and the group around him, as well as all the production assistants glared in the general direction of Rolf.

The director, looking from person to person, finally asked, "So?" Slater shrugged his shoulders. The man over near the camera said, "I don't know who it is."

One of the production assistants, nodding over at Rolf, said, "I think he's right. It's Eric Garcetti." Then the director yelled at the production assistant, "Come here." The production assistant shuffled over, and the director whispered to her for a minute or two. Then the production assistant made her way to Rolf, and whispered at him for a minute or two.

Rolf, after threading back through the claque of gawkers, got to me, and said, "Let's go," and returning to the sidewalk waved his hand east. I joined him, and we resumed our stroll along the palmy thoroughfare. I asked, "What did the woman say?"

"She asked me if I would be interested in coming back tomorrow, to the same place, and working as an extra. She told me I wouldn't have to say anything, and I'd get paid for it, and something to eat."

"Whaddya know. So are you?"

"We'll see," he said. His tone located his answer someplace between indecisiveness and indifference.

Still at loose ends, with free time on our hands, no appointments crowding in, and none visible on the horizon, we resumed our two-man parade of the indigent. At a Mobil station near the top of a long hill the two of us finished ascending with an unseemly, even life-threatening amount of huffing and puffing, we plopped down on the curb beside a pay phone at the edge of the lot. I got back up to fill my plastic bottle at the fountain right inside the garage. When I sat back down, I rifled through my pack, found the Bernhard book I was reading and yanked it out. I'd barely opened it, when Rolf asked out of the blue if he could see it. I handed it to him. Starting at the very beginning, he began to read. Interpreting his turning of pages as a signal he intended to continue I lay my head down on my knees, and closed my eyes. I was startled, when a gravelly voice barked the words, "Do something," very near me. I looked up, to see a man with a clipboard in his hand, a pencil behind his ear, and a smirk on his face standing directly in front of Rolf, staring. Rolf looked over the top of the book and said, "I am."

The man stepped an inch closer and told Rolf, ""No, DO something, bum."

"I'm reading...mind?"

"Reading?"

"If you knew how, you could too," Rolf said, obviously well practiced at handling inane badgering.

"You lazy piece of shit," snarled the man, glowering and leaning forward menacingly.

Rolf said, "You're too mentally disadvantaged to reason with, so I suppose I'm going to have to kill you."

The man took a step closer, causing Rolf to lay the book in his lap, and the two of us to tense up expectantly and glare. Our brother from another planet calculated the math, and left growling.

"So long, Einstein," Rolf snapped at his back.

We discussed briefly the philosophical dimension of this intrusion, how it did or did not represent a significant portion of the populace in its point of view, concluding in any case, only that to attempt to harass someone in such a fashion was beyond the understanding of either one of us. Rolf returned to Bernhard, and I to my refreshing pause.

We had pressed a few more blocks into a Valley of the Shadow of Tony Apartment Buildings when the aroma of charcoal and grilling meat, and smoking onions stopped us in our tracks. Halted on the sidewalk, our noses twitched, and then pointed in the direction of Mecca: in this case, the first floor terrace of a building across the street. We'd already had a snack from our respective gunnysacks not long after leaving the back of Gelson's. But this was the real thing, not organic peanut butter. We crossed, and stood at the curb, looking. What we saw appeared to be one enormous party spread out in two apartments across from one another in the same building, including terraces; or, two parties underway simultaneously, intermingled perhaps. Two big gas grills were flaming away on one of the terraces.

"Smells good," Rolf opined.

"It does," I agreed.

"I'm hungry," he quickly added, his body seeming to tilt so slightly toward the building, tipping off his intentions.

Looking at the thronged terraces, I said, "I'm tired, to tell you the truth."

"What, the walking?"

"I'm perfectly willing to admit that hours of walking every day catches up with me at a certain point."

"Hearty food could help that."

"Yeah, it probably could."

Thirty seconds later, Rolf turned his head to stare at me, and said, "Well?" Then he turned his head back, standing erectly at attention, with his face rising to meet the smoke.

"All right," I sighed. "Eat first, rest later." Taking the lead toward the door I told him, "We'll give it our shot."

Inside, we passed through spillover from the parties in the lobby, or a larger than usual coagulation of the building's lobby rats. On the first floor, a cluster of people was milling in the hallway between partying twin apartments. The doors to each were open, revealing them to be as dense with humanity as a New York subway car during the morning rush. No special attention was paid to us. Seeking guidance, I approached a petite brunet alone in the middle of the hall after the man she was talking to took his empty glass with him into the apartment at his right.

"Who lives in here?" I asked, jerking my head left.

"Two girls."

"Oh. How about over there?" I inquired, head inclined right.

Laughing, she said, "You weren't invited by them either?"

"Nah."

"Freelancing, huh?"

"I was just on my way upstairs to my apartment. I don't know anybody down here, but since it's a party..."

"More the merrier, and all that."

"We're very merry."

She chuckled benignly, so I asked, "And who is it lives in here?" and nodded right again.

"Those are my friends, Sam and Dina. Dina's a reporter on Channel 7. Dina Mendez?"

"I don't watch the local news."

"She's married to Sam, who's a teacher at USC. He teaches screenwriting, and some other media-type courses, I think."

"What about the two women?" nodding my head in the opposite direction.

"I was just introduced to them tonight. I can't remember their names. One does hair, and one's a makeup artist. I heard when they figured out they both were having parties tonight, they just said, 'What the hell,' and made it one giant two-headed bash. Everybody's friendly; a big happy family, mostly hipsters."

"Hipsters?"

"Yeah. Both parties. Altogether hip."

I took a look around, more symbolic gesture than reconnaissance.

"I wouldn't go that far."

"Oh you wouldn't. Would you be willing to educate me as to why you wouldn't?"

"Yeah. Because, whatever they are, they aren't anything that possibly could be described as hip. They look friendly...fine people to party with as far as I can tell."

"And what qualifies you to know?"

"Nothing. I just do. What qualifies you?"

"Well, for one thing, I cover clubs for the Los Angeles Times. "

"Okay, then I'll give you scenesters, I'll give you trendsters, I'll even give you bloodhounds for the latest advertised hot spot; just not hip."

"And you define hip as what, Mr. Authority on What's Hip?"

"If you can buy it at a mall, or it goes to a club with a line out front, it ain't hip. That's one rule of thumb."

"Okay, so we know what you consider unhip. You still haven't told me what it is you think is really hip."

"My man Rolf here is really hip," indicating him with yet another jerking of my head. She gave him a very thorough once-over. I'd had a chance to spruce up the day before, but Rolf was looking slightly frumpy. Rolf's eyes bulged out a ways, sort of a special effect in the flesh.

"Whatever," she said, rolled her own eyes, and walked away.

Rolf stared at me and said, "I'd be lying if I said I understood the point of that."

"It's a party."

"Speaking of which, there are two apartments to choose from, besides staying out here in the hall. But the drinks and the food are inside."

"I think I'm going to have to go this way," pointing to our left, "with the hairdressers and the makeup artists."

"Not me, " he said. "I like the sound of reporters and...what was the other one?"

"Screenwriter, teacher, that whole thing."

"Right. Sounds better to me. I may be in the business tomorrow, too."

"Yeah, you may." I went to my left. He went to his right.

On my journey I wandered among garden-variety mating rituals, stunning, whiplash-inducing women, deals, possible deals, and callbacks announced with megaphones; measured amounts of dancing and vigorous, ambitious drinking. I filled a plastic cup with Absolut, then threaded my way back to the hall, thinking I could look into Party B, or Party II, the party across the way, and see how Rolf was faring. I bumped into him in the hall. "What's for supper over there?" he asked.

"Um, there were burgers, dogs, chips, bread. What about over there?"

"Salad. Corn-on-the cob. Rice with chicken or something in it."

"Hmmm. I might start out with salad; and some of that rice with something in it."

"I want a hamburger, and at least one dog," he told me deliberately.

"Help yourself," I answered, generously gesturing toward the apartment's threshold.

On my own, at the flip side party, I eavesdropped on conversations centered around: proposed restrictions on helicopters in air space above a freeway chase; the merits and disadvantages of a software program called, "Hollywood Screenplay;" and the appropriate uses for cumin, then sensing myself more displaced than only minutes before I hurried to the terrace for dinner. My cup was low, so I topped it off with Stoli first. I scooped my food onto a paper plate, looked for a place to park, and finding little pasture not already being grazed, wandered down the hall, ending up in what looked to be bedroom number three. I sat down all by my lonesome on a purple loveseat, took the remote and turned the television on. It struck me as a C-Span kind of evening. Not for the first time in the history of the channel, the viewer was made privy to a panel discussion originated from American University. The panelists were some recognizable usual suspects: David Broder, Sally Quinn, Tim Russert, and Cokie Roberts: a media gang of four if there ever was.

Shortly thereafter I was joined by a redheaded man with a ring in his nose also having a bite. We exchanged pleasantries, and then turned our attention to observations from inside the gastrointestinal tract of the Washington beast, the cocktail party circuit, from the Duchess Cokie. My party mate acknowledged, "I'm in love with her Eddie Munster hair." Mr. Broder described the use of a carpenter's leveler to achieve the flattest political point of view achievable against the gravity of Earth, after which my roommate asked me who he was.

"David Broder. He's called the dean of Washington pundits. That's not really him, just a freeze-dried replica. No...it's him. "

"He looks almost lifelike either way."

"Close."

The man, who was sitting on the edge of the bed eating from his paper plate, raised his arm and yelped, "Hey," alerting me to the action of pulling a flask from the pocket of his coat. "Kettle One," he announced. I watched closely as he unscrewed the cap, then leaned in my direction. "Here ya go brother," and he poured it into my practically vodka-depleted cup.

"Muchos," I said.

He seemed especially baffled by the contributions of Sally Quinn. "Who in the fuck is that broad?"

"Well, that's Sally Quinn. She's the wife of Benjamen Bradlee, who was the editor of the Washington Post during its investigation of Watergate...Woodward and Bernstein, All the President's Men...that."

"Gotcha."

"She's known around the world as the Uber-Hostess of Washington, D.C., of parties you never would want to go to, in other words...you, me or anybody with a pulse, a funny bone or a fucking libido."

"Fuck her."

"So to speak."

"You seem to know who they all are?"

"I guess I do."

"Who's the fat guy?" he asked, when Russert filled the screen.

"An important fat man; very, very important."

"Yikes," he said, and gave me another blast, a truly generous blast of his Kettle One.

"You're a saint," I said.

"Fucking A. I cut hair like a motherfucking prince, too. Here man, take my card."

I took his card.

Absent any imperative to move I remained in the seat. People shuffled in, people shuffled out during the course of the gala. My cup fell empty, but I drank from the cup of a woman who had joined me in the loveseat. A spliff went down the line and I took my turn. Eventually, I became the recipient of kisses from the woman in the loveseat with me. Though realizing the woman and I were alone in the room, I decided it would be only prudent to check on my alter-indigent, Rolf. I stood like the Tower of Pizza, and began to snake my way, fuzzy-eyed through the remainder of the apartment. It was clear enough, even to me, that many less party animals were present than earlier in the night.

I located Rolf in the kitchen of the apartment opposite. He was sitting in a chair at the table with an apron around his neck, getting a haircut by one, or perhaps fifteen women. It looked quite sharp as a matter of fact: a sort of pompadour, Chris Isak style. Seeing him well cared for, and by appearances reasonably entertained, I backtracked to the other apartment and the prospective lover curled in the loveseat there. Not long after, disengaging from the bosom of my loving seatmate, I drank from a bottle of Stoli, whose origin I could not account for even if the origin was I.

_____________________________________________

In the dark, in the bed, nothing in the bedroom looked familiar at all. Then I realized it was another bedroom altogether. The woman beside me in bed was a better acquaintance than she had been in the loveseat, if the absence of clothing and the tender proximity of our bodies to one another were of value as clues. I raised my head a little more and was able to observe that this apartment had a terrace similar to the ones where the parties were, until it dawned on me, it was an apartment in the same building. The terrace was covered in virtual jungle: a potted overgrowth of plants and flowers. There was also human life evident, here, for there was Rolf, emerging from off to the side, and standing in the middle of the flora. Drunk I assumed, and lost in the uninhibited freedom of the great outdoors, he unzipped himself and took a leak. I said a prayer that my bedmate wouldn't awaken then. When Rolf was empty he came back inside the apartment. He lay down in the middle of the floor, causing the dog lying there, which I now recalled lapping at me during some foggy juncture earlier, to get up from his spot and leave the floor to Rolf. Shortly thereafter, still awake, trying to assemble a reliable chronology of my recent history, I realized the woman in bed beside me not only had awakened, but now was rubbing me in a sensitive spot. Abandoning the compilation of historical moments for sensations associated with participatory eroticism I began to respond in a congenial way, until the vigor of our activism bounced us off the mattress onto the floor. Awakened again and chastened, Rolf stood up and left the room, politely closing the door behind him.

There was a certain amount of leapfrogging, wrestling, clenching and diving, but eventually she was pinned. Yet shortly, in the course of penetrating her with a frenzied precision, an extraneous sound manifestly coming from some place other than either of us, became salient among the ambient sounds. The squeaking had a rhythm: squeaks coming at regular intervals. In fact, they almost seemed to be happening in concert with the thrusting of my mighty sword. Around this time the mutt, whose space we had inherited second hand from Rolf, had begun to paw and howl at the door like a Mississippi blues singer circa 1935. Our exact longitude and latitude were inches from the closet door we were banging hard against. Had there been witnesses at the scene they would have heard something along the lines of, "...so good," squeak, "Oh God," squeak, "Jesus," squeak, squeak, squeak. Then slowly it occurred to me. I reached underneath my lover and ran my hand over flesh and floor, finally discovering and pulling out Rover's rubber squeaky toy, which had been pushed so far inside her it was halfway to El Dorado. On the last squeak she began her illustrious finale, causing me to commence to join her with my enthusiastic, but comparatively pedestrian denouement. Then we fell asleep on the floor.

__________________________________________________

Bathed in southern California morning light, after partaking of the unexpected opportunity to bathe in water, my second such opportunity in as many days, I contemplated how sublimely democratically sun and fun were spread among the inhabitants of the City of Angels. My bountiful night, even the high points of the nearly completed fortnight were demonstration enough for me that even the lowly could be Kingfish for a day in Los Angeles: sex, pot and chicken in every karma in the city.

Together, my new fuck-bunny Sonia and I sipped coffee at the breakfast table while watching the Today Show on the portable television atop her kitchen counter. Fully alert, we moved past the exchange of the biographical factoids appropriate for pillow talk, and laid out some hard facts of personal background. I stated my place of current employment as Pyramid Publishing in order to spare her from the ignominy of having been sexually gratified by a brief-standing, but member nonetheless of the pariah class. For a similar reason I listed my current address as my former West Los Angeles residence. The solidity of my citizenship soundly established by gainful employment, and a roof over my head in an acceptable zip code, the virtue and integrity of Sonia's orgasm was duly protected. I remembered Rolf, but of course, had no idea what his destination had been in the middle of the night. If he still was inside, or within proximity of the building, I might run into him when I made my exit.

Sonia, curly auburn hair shampooed, fair freckled skin scrubbed, looked fresh as a bowl of peaches and cream sitting in the chair across from me.

"God I was blasted," she blurted, running her hand through her hair and blowing on her coffee before taking a sip.

"I was on alcoholic autopilot myself."

"Want some toast or anything?"

"I think I'll wait a while on food."

"Me too."

"Quite a night."

"A good time was had by all I presume."

"I have to presume since I don't remember."

"Well, we're a somewhat awkward pair. You've probably heard this one somewhere before, but I don't do this very often at all. Familiar huh?" she added grinning.

"Normally, I only end up with people who do it on a continual basis, some of them even without pay."

She laughed, fortunately.

"I must have clubbed you over the head and dragged you up here."

"I was just now thinking how violated I feel this morning."

"Once I've set my sights on something I usually don't beat around the bush...that sounds awful...you know what I mean."

It was my turn to laugh.

"I'm pretty sure I was pre-clubbed by the time you found me. I doubt I needed dragging."

"I remember enough to recall you being more than a willing victim."

"Always."

Sonia asked me how I ended up at the party in the first place, so I told her my invitation to the party had come from the woman who normally cut my hair.

"How about you?" I asked. "Neighbors I guess."

"I know Sam downstairs from work."

"The guy who teaches at USC?"

"Um hum. That's what I do."

"What subject?"

"Journalism."

"A college journalism teacher. It's the devil's work."

"You think so? Really? I also do a little bit of script work on the side...for sitcoms...just polishing generally. Before that I worked in public relations, or media relations as it's typically called in political campaigns. I last did that on the Dole campaign, the national campaign in 1996."

"You're a Republican?"

"You're not?"

"Don't even think it."

"I knew something about you seemed really different last night."

"I know, I was a whole lot better looking then, right?"

"No, you're still nice looking today. You seemed smarter last night, that's what it was."

"I was thinking the same about you, oddly enough."

"Uh huh. Looks like we've got ourselves back to awkward."

"Well you know what they say: bedfellows make strange politics."

About that time, Matt Lauer complimented Orrin Hatch on the senator's necktie. "Weather," she said, and changed the channel to local show, "Good Day LA."

When Sonia finally asked, "Will you be able to get home okay?" I recognized the signal and replied, "My car is out there somewhere."

Outside, I felt lucky again, all buttered up by the sun. Rolf was nowhere to be found. But I reminded myself, anything can happen.

__________________________________________

The days of walking as a means to Zen perfection came to an end. I pocketed the paycheck hot off the payrolls at Pyramid, cashed the check, and bought myself provisions. Soon after, I matriculated at the SRO of choice. I appointed my single furnished room with additional furnishings, such as a table, a lamp and shelves, all from the second-hand furniture store, nearby. I liberated a small number of belongings, and basic necessities from the storage space: a boom box, books, eating utensils and a coffee maker of which Lila had granted me legal custody.

Lila and I had not tacitly, though had fleetingly, even if obliquely agreed to a no fault policy regarding sex with others while we lived apart. There lurked in neither of us any predisposition to become proprietary, or jealous. Neither of us was the least bit bamboozled by conventional morality, with its inherent hypocritical conveniences, and Everest-sized loopholes for conventional people playing conventional roles, to perpetrate ordinary or extraordinary misdeeds. Understanding accidents will happen in circumstances such as ours, it would be accurate I believe to claim on behalf of both of us that we _hoped_ accidents could be avoided; but also hoped and expected that if any occurred, they would be few and minor. My accident could have been a prototype for the recreational single-night engagement. Douse it with alcohol, and it was virtually a fornication waiting to happen. In any case, the first evening in my own quarters felt like the perfect time to give Lila a call again, now that I was actually where I was supposed to be, and where I was thought to have been for two weeks.

I pushed the initial down payment of change into the phone at a relatively serene car wash, closed for the night. Rather than Cindy, it was Lila who answered.

"It's you," she said as soon as I spoke.

"It is," I proclaimed. "I'm calling from the heart of Hollywood."

"Yuk."

"Exactly."

"How's hotel life going?"

"Home sweet home."

"Poor baby."

"At least I have one somewhere," I told her, truthful by a hair.

"Maybe it wont be for too long. One good thing is I'm able to save out here. I'm saving whatever I can. It'll build up eventually."

"And I _did_ get a couple of the temp things since I talked to you last. I have to call them in the mornings, since there isn't a number where they can call me. I'm expecting to get a lot more work from them now. Be nice if I could get one of those semi-permanent gigs that lasts for weeks, sometimes months at a stretch," I told her, lying by far more than a hair. I _planned_ to do all I said I'd done now that I was settling down. Only for that reason, naturally, did I present the plan as fait accompli.

"I miss you."

"Awww. I miss you too. How's the valley, sugar?"

"I don't see much of it. When I'm not at work I'm here."

" Moving away to a distant land hasn't changed you a bit."

"Hardly. Once in a while I go out somewhere with Cindy."

"What are the hot spots in the greater North Hollywood, Toluca Lake, Burbank area?"

"I bought some olives and onions and spaghetti sauce at a local Trader Joe's. There was a shitload of life's special, bright and shiny people in there just like there are in every other store. But it's still the best deal in town."

"I agree sugar. It's worth getting your foot run over occasionally by the latest sport utility baby carriage when it comes to getting cheap cheese."

"That's how I feel."

"How's Cindy? Not that I particularly give a fuck."

"She plays her music too fucking loud; and it's bad music. That girl never had any taste in music."

"Like you say, maybe it won't be for long."

"As long as I can stay productive, I don't really give a shit where I am. I've got what I need here to keep busy; so I'm feeling all right. In the meantime, I'll put some cash away, you do the same; maybe we'll be able to reestablish our sovereign state soon enough."

"We'll see. I hope so." I did hope so. But I didn't believe we could crawl out of the hole and find our affordable Shangri-La in the near future.

"You stay safe down there in the demimonde."

"As rat traps go, this is a pretty safe one...like I told you. I'm still dangerous enough to survive, honey. I belong here to tell you the truth."

"You belong with me."  
"There too."

"So it's not all just a bummer?"

"Not at all. I'm still practicing all the chronic, artsy, quasi-intellectual avocations, and partying some, like always," I reported, winging it, based on general expectations of the days to come and experience of days passed."

"Good."

"What were you doing when I called?"

"Drawing. I have that radio book thing from Santa Monica on, on KCRW...Book Germ? I have it on. The host is definitely the Mr. Rogers of pretentious book chat. Gives me the heebies."

"I treat myself to not listening to things like that."

"I know. So do I, normally."

We exchanged our good-byes, so longs, and requisite love and kisses. I'd laid down the first couple of months of rent in advance. Now that I had a neighborhood all my own I was ready to be all that I could be. In the weeks ahead I would stake out the environs: discover the markets, dives, newsstands, the taco joints; mingle with the indigenous population; and most important of all, acquire compatriots and a bar to call my own.

#

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# CHAPTER FOUR

THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT SITS

To outsiders, the place bore the universally ingratiating, euphemistically elegant name, "Cocktails." To the rest of us it was just home. I was standing in front of the adjacent SRO, the place I slept, and under the circumstances, the nearest thing I had to a home away from home. I'd just come down from my room. I was making my first attempt to activate vision in that bright afternoon sunshine that viciously affronts the eyes. Slowed by the light, but extremely focused and highly motivated, I took a baby step toward the bar. My path was blocked of a sudden by a tall angular man in a Hawaiian shirt and yellow pants. Politely, and in a British accent he asked, "Could you direct me to the office?" Transparent as the question seemed, the answer was a complicity wrapped in a subterfuge wrapped in the commission of a felony. I couldn't answer it correctly, and I told him as much. The rarely heard from Samaritan in me made an appearance and told the man, "I'll find out for you. Do you have a minute?"

"Oh yes, by all means. You're very kind." As two birds ripe for killing with one stone descended from the heavens, I led the man into the bar.

Inside was dim, cool, perversely insulated, and the sound of a purring television replaced the insidious noise of industriousness out in the street. Straight ahead was a long bar with a cuneiform top; above it the television tuned to CNN. Three males and a female were seated on the stools around it. The seats of the empty ones exposed their torn, red naugahyde. A scattering of rickety tables was hanging by a thread in the center of the room, and around the walls were booths: ripped, brown naugahyde brethren of the barstools.

As I approached the bar with the Brit in tow, a deep voice from somewhere in front of me bellowed, "NOOOOOORRRRRRM."

"Man that's tired," I answered for the millionth time. After I'd smacked down my pack of Benson and Hedges Ultra Lights, I began to slowly and methodically slap the surface of the bar with the open palm of my hand, all the while staring into the back of the man behind the bar. The bartender said over his shoulder without turning around, "I hear ya Donovan." I grinned at the British man. He was in the process of making the Sherlockian observation that everybody else in the place already had an accelerated diurnal buzz humming along. I turned to the others who had accumulated there and asked, "What room is the office this week?" Andrew, the heavyset man right next to me said, "No idea." Stan, the next man down had only the wherewithal to shrug, before the last male left in this noble lineage answered, "Raul knows."

"Where is he?" I asked.

"It was that time of the month. He had to go down to the unemployment office and do the check-in thing so his money won't stop."

Added Andrew beside me, "Once a month he's got to swear to them how passionately he's looking for another job cleaning office garbage cans from midnight to seven in the morning for the minimum wage."

To the British man I said, "Clever group, aren't we?" Giving me a quintessentially British look that said, "I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, but I'd rather have my head dipped in shit than to behave impolitely," answered, "Quite."

Since the moment seemed felicitous, I asked him, "So, are you having one matey?"

"A drink? No. I don't suppose. Not at the moment."

"You could front me one."

"Oh, I really should, shouldn't I?"

"Yes."

The bartender was putting my Stoli rocks down right at that moment.

"So I already have it. Just pay the professor there," indicating to him the man behind the bar.

"Who?"

"The bartender."

"Was he a professor, actually?"

"Actually, he came very close to passing the GED equivalency on the third try, but no, he was never a full professor." The professor hooted appreciatively. I swallowed down half my drink, which is what it took for me to get my sea legs on this, the first day of the rest of my life. Then I joined the others, and gave my silent attention to the television news. The owner of a cable company servicing a broad chunk of Los Angeles was being trundled out of a building in bracelets, then plunked down in the back of one of those official black law enforcement cars, accused of bungholing stockholders and creditors for a billion or two. The Enron boys were up next. After them came those wacky cut-ups who had waylaid WorldCom, now effectively neutered. One certainly couldn't argue credibly that these citizens weren't industrious. Apparently the only animals busier than beavers were dirty CEO's. The commercial interruption caused Andrew next to me, who had control of the remote to flip the channel to Bill O' Reilly. Stan hollered, "Get it off that putz."

The Professor countered, "He's the voice of the working class."

"My ass" Stan said. "That shit bucket went to Harvard. His family was loaded. It's a shtick."

The customer to the right of him said, "This guy's Morton Downey Jr., without the cigarettes and those thingamajigs on his face. Fuck, we're the working class."

The rest of us stared. "Well," he amended, "not literally."

"Ah," Andrew said, "Technicality."

At this point I liberated any of the others staring at my glass pondering whether it was half-full or half-empty of the burden of contemplation, and downed the remainder. The Professor was there and leapt into the breach immediately, bringing me another.

"I'm just quite anxious to get myself to the office," the Brit reminded me. "It's most urgent, really."

"I understand. I don't think we'll have to wait much longer to get the info. Listen, I'm going to relieve myself. Hold the fort." I took a big swig from the glass, reducing the volume inside it by half again, and left.

Returning to my station, the Professor was holding forth to Andrew and Stan on our bar mate, and my neighbor Chris. Attentive, I slid a smoke out of the pack, made the other fifty percent in my glass evaporate, and set the cigarette burning.

"So I tell him," confides the Professor, "'you see Chris, I know it's tempting, having a name that could either be a man's or a woman's, but you mean to tell me you're going to dress up like a woman, falsify your gender on a government form, make up a kid to qualify for Aid to Families with Dependent Children...what's that, for about 400 bucks a month?'" We all chortled at Chris's expense.

"To think," I said, "that Chris, with such a brilliantly diabolical criminal mind, still has to live next door in the roach hotel with me and the other inferior breeds."

Andrew asked, "What else did you tell the poor defective?"

"I told him," answered the Professor, "he should just settle for milking them for a disability check the same as you." Then we laughed at Andrew's expense. Just in the nick of time, the always-vigilant Andrew noticed a promo for Larry King underway and hushed us, saying, "I want to see who's on King tonight." The voice of a thousand promos announced, "Tonight on Larry King Live, a full hour with the former Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson." The groans spilled over the bar like a crashing wave. The mercifully reflexive change of channels borne of acute revulsion, brought us to the oasis of Access Hollywood, where tales of toil on the movie set were juxtaposed with clips of these various show business incumbents of Parnassus describing their leisure pursuits in answer to Letterman's famed, "So how was your summer?" This moved Stan to sentimentalize uninhibitedly that, "Now I have something in common with Harrison Ford. We both sat on our ass all summer." I bolted half the extant drink, and as the weak light penetrating into the bar was adumbrated by the shadow of the prodigal Raul returning, bolted the other half.

"How'd it go," the Professor queried. Stan and Andrew chimed in similarly.

"Okay," said the understandably frazzled Raul, "No problems."

"What took you so long?" the Professor asked.

"I stopped by my ex-old lady's apartment to get my bicycle. It's on her terrace. It wasn't like I was gonna steal it. But I wasn't in no mood for people looking at me like they thought I was. That bike is mine. I figured, at least during the day there wont be too many people around. I forgot this is LA... nobody does nothing during the day...they're all home. That place was crawling, man...the pool, the garage, the hallways. I said, 'to hell with this." Aware of the impatience of my charge from the former imperialist empire, I immediately asked Raul, "Which room's the office in right now?"

"311," he answered efficiently.

Turning to my British friend, I said, "There you go."

"Wonderful."

"Are you ready? If you want, I'll walk you up there."

"Oh yes, yes. Aren't you kind?"

Taking a pass on the truthful answer to this, I signaled the Professor I would be soon to return, took a bon voyage gulp of the drink, then moved toward the fading light on the street. Outdoors, the sun had dropped behind a string of buildings, and the streets were now safe for those with sheltered eyes. We passed through the double glass doors into the hotel's foyer, walked past the clerk ensconced in his cage at right, and onward through the elevator doors. The chamber strained hard to make its ascendance, growling, moaning and shaking so hard it felt more like a space capsule atop a rocket pulling manfully against the gravitational pull of earth, than a simple three story elevator ride. The second the door began to move we sprang. Once escaped, we marched, the Brit right behind me, straight down the pockmarked and paint-emancipated hall to 311. I banged on the door hard. There were steps across the floor, and then a voice just the other side of the door answered gruffly, "Yeah?"

"It's Donovan."

The door was unlocked, and a prematurely graying middle-aged man, who otherwise had the appearance of a businessman, except for wearing shorts, socks, sneakers and a shirt with the shirttail out, welcomed me in.

"My friend here came to see you," I said, presenting the Brit. He instructed the Brit to follow him. I closed the door behind us and leaned against it.

"I'll just wait for him I suppose."

The man took a seat in a stiff-backed chair between the window and the dresser. A large attaché-type case rested atop it. He closed the lid on the laptop computer propped up on the bed.

"Yes, well," said the British man, " what I need is the Lady of course...let me see, four of the packets...yes, that, that should do it."

The other man reached into the case, moved a thing or two around, pulled something out, and handed it to the British man. "Alright bud, four packs a whack."

As he took the packs and paid the money, the Brit asked the man, "I say, do you live in the building?"

"Jesus, pal...you kidding me? I live in the Valley. I own a house in Studio City. I'm five minutes from Art's Deli and Moby Disc. Why would I work insane hours and risk the righteous indignation of the law to live in a fuckhole like this?"

"You certainly wouldn't."

"I certainly wouldn't."

The British man balled his fist around the packs of heroin in his palm, and said, "Thank you kindly," to the other man. As he was walking toward me, the other man aimlessly addressed the Brit's back. "British, eh?"

Over his shoulder, the Brit answered him, as I opened the door for the both of us, "Once."

I escorted this satisfied customer from a far away land out to the street and wished him well. Again, he thanked me with that well-meaning, but unnecessary British obsequiousness, the result of a couple millennia of class strictures hardwired into the British brain I supposed. It seemed a nation of people either uppity or groveling, with little in between.

When I shuffled back into my de facto living room, the Professor was standing there staring at me expectantly, along the lines of your favorite cat when you walk in the door. I was as eager to be served as he was to be of service. I sucked the little liquid left around the ice cubes in the glass remaining on the bar, then transferred my ardor to the one arriving. The Professor rewarded himself for a job well done by tossing another in a leisurely series of Jagermeisters down his throat.

The same five were there: Andrew, Stan, a comfortably fitting male irregular, whose name so far had been superfluous, Raul, and our single female patron Donata, pecan brown doyenne of the boulevard, customarily reticent on account of her transfixion by the television screen. They all seemed, after their continuous fueling through the afternoon, to have achieved a delicate equilibrium poised to crack.

The news was on. Andrew generously apprised me of all I'd missed: "The players and owners came to an agreement in the baseball thing," he told me, "so there's not going to be a strike. But the docks are shutting down. The ballplayers decided a one hundred and forty million dollar salary cap might not exploit their labor. The owners decided they may be able to afford to pay a few gazillion more in salary without having to eat Hormel Chili for dinner like us. I'm going to need," he said without a dram of ironical hijinks in his voice, "to catch the news a little earlier in the day to figure out the beefs the dockworkers and terminal owners have with each other." At the commercial he cavalierly flipped the channel to C-Span Two. Stan issued a general appeal for a loaner cigarette, and I slid him one down the bar. As I pulled one out for me and lit it, the low sun, signal of another day dwindled down with the light, was slanting through the tiny square of glass in the door and through the cracks in the haggard façade of the building, catching me in the eye, putting spots in front of me for several seconds. I could hear the booming voice coming out of the face on the television screen before I could see it. Trent Lott, Majority Leader of the senate and pitiable owner of that face was assuring: "...it is legislation that will guarantee, when the time comes, the rights of hard working Americans may not be abridged..." Talking over him, Andrew complained, "Why is everything only for hard working Americans? Isn't anybody else entitled to anything?"

"What I want to know," asked the Professor, "Is if somebody is watching and judging on an individual basis who's working hard and who is fucking off a little?"

"It's always," Andrew said, "Hard working Americans deserve this, hard working Americans deserve that; every speech, every politician, every part of the political spectrum. Lazy people don't have rights?"

"What about," I asked, "Somebody like the Professor? He works. If you catch a look a look at him at certain times you might even describe him as hard working, even though most of the time he's a shiftless pile of dung...like now."

"It's hard work listening to what comes out of your mouth," the Professor said.

"And why is it," Andrew asked, "Always HARD working? Since when isn't just working enough?"

Raul on the end said, "I guess if I'm doing just enough to get by they can deport me."

"What's the cutoff point," the Professor asked, "Between hard working and just working? I'm working hard enough to meet the criteria for hard working, but I don't want to work any harder than that; just the minimum amount of hard work. I don't want to work harder than I have to to keep my classification."

"If you did," I said, "It wouldn't really be very American. I think trying to be more than hard working might actually be un-American."

"Or plain stupid," Andrew said. This provoked Donata to break her silence. "I'm a hard working American," she announced. "I ain't got no dental plan, I ain't got no pension...shit...they don't even WANT me to work hard, otherwise they wouldn't fuck with me every time I get out there and get to work."

The professor told her, "You might as well give it away."

"Hell, I might as well, if they ain't gonna let me be a hard workin' American."

"Donata, you're a saint," Andrew told her.

"An angel of mercy," I chimed.

Donata said, "Fucking right I am. But the price ain't going down."

Andrew, launching forth with Inaugural grandeur declared, "I'm supposed to be guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say in the Declaration of Independence you have to pursue happiness at a frenetic pace. I'm pursuing happiness. I just prefer to pursue it sitting down. Do they want to take my benefits and my right to vote away just because I'm not considered to be a HARD WORKING AMERICAN? I'm still an American, motherfucker."

"They should add that," I said, "To the Pledge of Allegiance. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And hard working or not, I'm still an American, MOTHERFUCKER."

"The truth is," the adopted stranger and foster boozechild between Stan and Donata said, "the country wouldn't be able handle it if all of a sudden all the non-hard working people got a heavy ass dose of big ambition. Wouldn't be enough jobs for everybody with all that extra competition. There wouldn't be enough rewards of hard work to go around."

"Exactly," I said. "People who don't work hard are the forgotten Americans, the forgotten heroes. They're the real patriots, sacrificing the rewards that benefit hard working Americans, so that hard working Americans can keep those benefits to themselves."

"My ancestors" Andrew said, "came to this country believing that stuff they'd heard about the pursuit of happiness. Their idea of happiness was not having to do a hell of a lot."

"Same with mine," I said. "In fact, they came from a part of Ireland where the people who didn't feel like doing a hell of a lot were in the minority, and were constantly discriminated against and persecuted by hard working people. That's the reason they came to this country...in order to have the freedom not to do a hell of a lot. And now every politician who makes a speech comes along, and by exclusion, subjects them to the same old prejudice."

"My vote," Andrew said, "if I make the effort to get up off this stool and vote goes to the man or woman who spells out in his or her speeches that they are concerned for the well being of every hard working, sometimes working, barely working, hardly working, scared of working, downright worthless, lazy, uninspired, apathetic, freeloading, deadbeat, cocksucking American...regardless of race, creed, color, or level of exertion."

Just as he finished, Tom Daschle was enunciating on the floor of the senate how, "...we will protect hard-working Americans from the effects of this legislation..." Before he made it any further, we all hollered, clapped and cheered. If balloons had fallen from the ceiling, another milestone in the course of democracy would have ended perfectly.

#

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# CHAPTER FIVE

A PENNY TO KEEP YOUR THOUGHTS TO YOURSELF

"Self, thy name is sedentary," is about all I had to say, and only to me obviously, as I sat with Professor Bartender, with Andrew and Penelope in the watering hole mid-afternoon, recovering. The surface of the table supported the Professor's glass of wine and his pack of cigarettes; Andrew's beef dip and his fries accessory; my tall coffee and Penelope's tea with honey. The door opened, letting the bright sun sweep in like the fireball from an exploding tank of gas. Even worse, two emissaries from the world of the living set upon us, a black man wearing a suit, and a white woman decked in slacks and a blouse. The Professor asked them, "Can I help you?"

"Do you work here?" the woman asked back.

"I do."

"My name," stated the woman, "is Detective Gunderson, and this is Detective Peel. Did any of you folks hear about the deceased man found in the alley behind the hotel next door?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Yep," said the Professor.

"Yes," Penelope told her.

"I guess you think somebody else deceased him," Andrew conjectured.

"That's right," answered Detective Peel. "Which is why I need to ask if any of you remembers seeing anyone suspicious in the vicinity?"

"Ummm...everybody," I said.

"How about suspicious activity then?"

"Fill in your own punch line, "Andrew answered.

"So nothing out of the ordinary," followed Detective Peel, "from what is usually going on; nothing alarming enough to take notice of?"

"It's not the safest place in the world," the Professor told him, "but I don't know of anybody who saw anything ominous going on that could somehow be related to a man getting killed. I have to be down here everyday, so I assure you, I'd like to be helpful in any way I can."

Detective Peel took a piece of paper out of a folder, and held it over the table so that we all could see it. "Anyone recognize him? This isn't a great photograph...it's a Xerox of a driver's license. But does anybody recall seeing this man here, in the bar, next door, or anywhere in the neighborhood?" All of the heads at the table nodded, "No."

"Never seen him," said the Professor.

"No," I told him.

"Uh uh," Penelope said.

"Nope," answered Andrew.

"Any of you live in the hotel next door?" Detective Gunderson intervened.

"I confess," I said.

"Me too," Andrew sang like a canary.

"I don't. I just run this place," the Professor told her.

"Well that's suspicious on both counts," I pointed out.

"I live there too," Penelope said. "And I have an extremely suspicious activity I can report; suspicious to me at least."

"What happened?" Detective Gunderson asked.

"I was walking home from a job last night...I'm a musician...and about two blocks from here some maniac I see walking up a side street comes within a hair of grabbing me and doing something or the other. I let him have it first."

"What do you mean?" pressed Detective Gunderson. "I mean, what made you think he was going to harm you, and what did you do to him first?"

"I could sense that he was following me and I used my guitar case to knock the ever-loving piss out of that creepy motherfucker. I wasn't about to wait to see how it turned out. I don't give the benefit of the doubt at three in the morning on an empty street. And he looked like a creepy dude when I saw him walking up the street."

Detective Peel jumped in. "So you approached him with your guitar case, and then...what?"

"I didn't approach him with shit. I stopped for a second and put down the guitar, then got up swinging. For some strange reason, he just happened to be about three inches from my neck when I turned around."

"You hit him with the guitar case?" Detective Gunderson sought to confirm.

"You're goddamn right I did."

"And that stopped him?"

"He was lying on the ground."

"Then what?" Detective Gunderson continued.

"I kicked him in the nuts, then ran like hell."

"I've heard," I offered, "that that's a very effective crime prevention measure."

"I believe it is," said Detective Gunderson. "What did this man look like?"

"A big guy wearing a cowboy hat and a black shirt. Not much hair on his head...shaved maybe. Ugly fucker."

"If he was wearing a hat," Detective Gunderson asked, "how did you see how much hair was on his head?"

"His hat fell off when my guitar case hit him at ninety miles an hour."

"Oh." Both she and Detective Peel scribbled in their notebooks for a little while. Then Detective Gunderson took a card out from under her belt and handed it to the Professor, but looked at all of us of when she spoke.

"If you hear of anything, or remember something, contact either one of us, alright?"

"Sure thing," the Professor assured her.

"Okay," Andrew avowed.

"I will," I said.

"Sure," Penelope added.

"Okay. Thanks," Detective Peel told us, "for your cooperation."

"Thanks," Detective Gunderson seconded, as the two of them turned and headed for the door, and crossed back out of the darkness and over into the light.

"I can do without that," the Professor said as soon as they were gone.

"Do without the Five-O coming around, or without the murder?" Andrew asked.

"Let's be really outlandish and say both."

Our teatime fell apart when the Professor got up in order to wait on newly arrived customers, Andrew left to take a nap, and Penelope departed for an eyeballing spree at Amoeba Records. We'd all heard about the dead man earlier in the day, when the homicide police, and a howling and flashing convoy of rollers besieged the alley and areas thereabout. Flogging myself with understatement, I said to me, " I think I've got some time on my hands." What I came up with for an afternoon time-fritter was a walk around the neighborhood and a Lew Archer-like questioning of neighbors about the dearly departed, who'd departed directly from our alley. It would spare me the suspense of waiting for some unlikely ever to be reported official word of an almost certain never to be pursued case, and its non-existent resolution. The cops really couldn't give two illegal searches and seizures about one more al fresco stiff in this neck of the woods. Besides which, I needed the air and the exercise...not that I'd necessarily be breathing genuine air in this burg. But it would give my respiratory system something to practice on. For whatever reason, the notion sprang into my head that in order to embark on this kind of detecting work I needed to have a name for myself, a nom de dick so to speak. So I christened myself, Peeko Pacifiko.

Before I proceeded further I got my flask out of my pocket and took a blast. Pulling open the door, I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes and dove headfirst into the sunshine. Squinting in both directions I observed my first potential witness, the man always selling oranges on the corner at the intersection. I assumed there was nothing in the investigatory manual advising against taking them as you encounter them. After the minimal exfoliation of shoe leather used getting to the corner, I politely waited until the light had changed, and the man's prospective customers were speeding under the green light. Given the alcoholic potency of my breath, and the solar temperature of a steaming concrete sidewalk I worried the man might go up in flames before my eyes when I opened my mouth. Disregarding the danger, I asked him first, "You were out here yesterday selling oranges weren't you?"

"No," he answered.

I'd seen him out here myself. But taking the difference in our respective first languages into account, I put the question to him another way.

"Were you selling oranges yesterday afternoon, and last night during rush hour here at this same intersection where you're selling them now?"

"No," he said flatly. My intended second question was to ask him if he'd seen a man looking particularly out of place or in distress yesterday afternoon or night, and I felt that strategically the first question verifying his actual presence here where he could actually have been a witness should be answered first. On the other hand, there was no law dictating I could not jump ahead to the second question if I wished. Still, if the man DID claim to have seen what I was asking him if he had seen, while denying he had been here to see it, I was dubious about the value of the informant's information. Acting on a brainstorm, injecting an innovative compromise into the investigatory technique, I questioned the man in a third way, one with the potential to cleverly entrap him.

"Yesterday afternoon and night, when you were out here at this intersection selling oranges, did you happen to see a man who seemed particularly out of place, lost, or in any kind of distress?"

"No," he said. The light changed to red and he ventured out to practice his salesmanship on the captive audience in a line of parked cars. I judged it the better part of investigatory instinct to know when to give it up. And I told myself it wasn't a dogged man, but a stupid man who persists when the sun is much too hot and way too bright. Even Sam Spade drove up the occasional cul-de-sac, and Philip Marlowe encountered his share of liars, and impenetrable morons.

I rounded the corner, used a crosswalk at mid-block, then proceeded to walk on the shady side of the street. I began to feel a little a bit of worry about the ultimate size of the pool of genuine potential witnesses. Maybe no one had seen a thing. With no specific knowledge of where the victim had been, one person had as good a chance to see something as any other, meaning the only method ensuring a comprehensive canvassing of potential witnesses was to question every living Christian soul in the neighborhood, the thought of which thrust me to the brink of running at Mach One back to the bar.

Two-thirds of the way down the block that followed, the old woman who sat daily in front of her used furniture store was situated in her customary place in the green recliner leaned against the storefront. Using a tack similar to, but slightly varied from the earlier modus operandi, I said, "I was wondering if you happened to see an average looking white guy around here yesterday afternoon or night, who looked like he might be lost, or having trouble of some kind?"

"All white guys look average to me," she said with a straight face. After about fifteen seconds she added, "You...you look really average...and really white." At my expense, the woman laughed herself into a coughing fit.

It was sometime around this point that I realized my curiosity had evaporated with my precious bodily fluids; that I'd had as much exercise as my lungs could undergo before collapsing; that I remembered the expected, and only remuneration for this walking gig was kicks; when the sudden conclusion arrived in my head fully formed that this line of work simply didn't suit me. I told myself that without a doubt this job should be left to professionals. If they blew it, it wouldn't be the first time professionals in this country or beyond didn't earn their pay; or that the work didn't comport with the pedigree. But these broad societal problems could not fairly be laid on one man's doorstep. So I graciously withdrew from the case and returned to the bar.

A few days later I was waiting for a take-out coffee in front of the cash register at the famous Vermin Are Us Diner, as we of that unfortunate locale liked to refer to it, when I noticed Detective Peel sitting alone in a booth. He appeared to be in the latter stages of a premeditated assault on a California Omelet and a Caesar salad. He remembered me when I presented myself, and he asked me to have a seat.

"How's the case?" I wanted to know. "The man who washed up dead in the alley? I assume that's why you're hanging around here still. Either that or you fell in love with Bess," and I nodded toward the lady with the hairnet behind the counter.

"Bess is a honey, but yeah, it's the homicide that has me here."

"Made any arrests?"

"None related to the citizen found in the alley, no."

"Still no idea what happened to the guy?"

"We know exactly what happened to the guy. Somebody put a dent in his head and it killed him."

"Which somebody was that?"

"We don't know that part," he told me with a grin.

"Think you will?"

"Anything's possible."

"Does that mean you still might find it out?"

"He or she or they could come down to the station and turn themselves in," he said.

"Much chance of that?"

"Anything's possible." He put down the fork for a second and took a swig of his iced-tea.

"On the outside chance it doesn't happen that way, and you're no longer actively looking, how else would you find out?"

"You'd be surprised how many of these thimble-brained perpetrators blab their heads off. A lot of times when they do, we hear about it and bring them in."

"There are," I assured him, "some less than intellectually gifted blabber mouths in the immediate vicinity."

"I'm aware. I've been around here a couple of days."

"Can't tell me what you were able to shovel up...tell a civilian?"

"I can tell you," he shrugged. "What is it you want to know?"

"Well you have to wonder what the guy was doing down here."

"We know that. He ran out of gas."

"Makes sense."

"We found out a thing or two," he said. He pulled a ring notebook off the seat and laid it on the table. "I just finished up my notes, and a draft of my report."

"So how do you know he ran out of gas?"

He spread the notebook open with his thumbs, scanning a page then whipsawing over to the next. "I got a witness who saw the man standing in the street beside his SUV right down from your hotel. He was standing there talking on a cell phone."

"But how do you know he ran out of gas?"

"We know it because at some point later on the car registered to the decedent got whupped on and was badly vandalized. Somebody called in an abandoned or inoperable vehicle, and the patrolman had it towed to city garage. Tank was dry as a bone."

"Where'd the guy go?"

"We don't know exactly where he went right after that, but we know why."

"Why?"

"Witness said some bangers in another SUV pulled up beside him, and him and them exchanged some words. Man was seen hauling tail, with the bangers riding along in the SUV...behind him...or beside him I think." He flipped a page, and scanned for a second. "Witness heard bangers yelling something like," and Peel looked down and read from the page, "like 'Run pasty...pasty, pasty, run."

I chuckled and said, "Sometimes running's your best shot."

"Sure 'nuff," he agreed.

The waitress brought me over my coffee in the Styrofoam cup, and slapped the check down like a blackjack dealer throwing a Queen to a man with a count of twelve. Peel was staring up front, where a fry cook with a remote control in hand was frozen into a zombie's daze by a televangelist selling salvation from the television atop a freezer.

"Any chance," Peel pleaded with the waitress," we could get a breather from Jesus?"

"Jesus," she yelled toward the front. The fry cook snapped his head around. "Could ya change the channel?" the waitress shouted at him. "That's annoying to the customers and it's annoying to me." The fry cook looked down at the remote and started a steady march from channel to channel.

"His name is Jesus?" I said with a laugh.

"His name is Jesus," she answered, slightly rolling her eyes in a signal of overall exasperation with what one detected to be the incessant drolleries besetting her life.

"Gracias," Detective Peel thanked her.

"Glad to. Religion is the opiate of the masses," she proclaimed to us, confirming suspicions she once had lived in a commune.

A wooly-headed man with small black-framed glasses turned to me from the booth adjacent and said, nodding up front toward the visage of Newt Gingrich now staring out from the television set, "There's a scene in a film by a British director named Lindsay Anderson, showing a wall in a run-down section of London with a scrawl of graffiti on it that reads 'Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals'."

"I know," I told him, "I saw it. O' Lucky Man. Love that film."

"LA," said Detective Peel, wagging his head.

"Anything else?" the waitress asked me.

"I'm good," I said.

"Now look what we've got," alerted Detective Peel, nodding his head forward, where Oliver North was squeezing off his ammunition on MSNBC.

"This is going to be even worse than Jesus," the man in the next booth said. "He's getting ready to take telephone calls from viewers."

"Opining is the opiate of the right-wing masses," I warned. About then, Jesus fell into another trance in front of Dr. Phil and the channel remained stationary.

Detective Peel leaned slightly forward on his elbows. "Opium is the opiate of the opium addict," he said to me across the table, "which is the opiate of most concern to people who work in my line."

"I imagine it would be," I acceded. Peel had pushed his plate away, and was sipping his tea.

"So this man runs out of gas down here," I resumed, turning my back on Jesus, the waitress, and the cineaste in the next booth, "is out on the street yapping on a cell phone, and then gets chased around by some local mooks."

"According to a person who said she witnessed it, yeah."

"That it?"

He pulled the open notebook toward him and let his eyes scurry across the pages. "Two ladies sitting on a stoop, who were sitting on the same stoop the night our boy was loose in the neighborhood saw him jostle the door of the pharmacy next door. They said he was on a cellphone then, too. They told him the place was closed, and asked if they could help him, but he shushed them and pointed at his phone."

"Huh."

"Then...okay, here...man who works at a gas station next to a liquor store said he saw the guy in the picture, the picture of the decedent I showed him...you saw it...standing in the door of...he was actually blocking the entrance to the store while talking on his cellphone," Peel related. The detective looked up from the pages. "The guy was moving around. I'm guessing he couldn't find his way back to the car, and couldn't give anybody directions to where the car was, since he didn't really know himself. No money was found in his wallet, so if he wasn't robbed...his credit cards and driver's license were in there...that would explain why he didn't call a cab. That's assuming he didn't have anybody else who could come and give him a lift right at the moment."

"You get the feeling the dead guy was Mr. Talkative before he was dead."

He smiled. "Yeah."

"What else?"

"Just a sec." Peel reached out and got the attention of the waitress when she passed.

"What can I get for you?" she asked.

"A slice of pecan pie would hit the spot."

"You got it," she said.

Peel had returned to flipping and scouring notebook pages when the waitress returned with a huge brown slab of pie. Peel slid the notebook across the table to me and said, "Here, why don't you just read it for yourself," then picked up the fork and started to dig.

I found the notes he'd made after talking to the man working at the gas station next to the liquor store. Down a little from there, began a large block of writing that continued over to the following page. After that, there was another section under the heading: Final Report. I jumped back to the words, "small neighborhood market," in the previous section, and began to skip along reading from there:

"... _owner of market states customer brought bottle of Fiji Water up to counter. Owner asked thirty-something white man if that would be all. Customer asked the owner if he could ask the owner a question. Owner said go ahead. Man said something like, 'If you were looking for a street, somewhere in this neighborhood, a street that gets you right to the freeway eventually, which way from here would you walk to get there?' The owner told him to keep going on the way he was going, south. Told him he was only two blocks away from where he needed to be. The owner asked the man if he was planning to take a walk on the freeway. Customer answered that he was hoping to find his car he'd had to_ _abandon. Owner asked him how come he hadn't known what street he was on._ _All man said was that everything had happened really fast. Owner asked the man why he didn't call a taxi to drive him around looking for his car. Man said something about his girlfriend in San Francisco having his ATM card. Owner unsure whether man meant she was a visitor in San Francisco or lived in San Francisco. Not clear myself. Man told owner that his checkbook was in his car and that he was short of cash. Said he'd been talking to a friend of his on his cellphone, but his friend was on a "shoot," and couldn't help him out for a little while. Customer thanked owner for assistance. Owner says that while putting money for Fiji Water into the register, he told the man that if it weren't for having to mind the store he'd help the customer look for his car. Says when he was giving the man change, the man's cellphone started to ring. Customer answered phone and started talking. Owner advised customer he would prefer if customer did not use telephone inside store. Owner says man put his finger to his lip and made a "Shhh" sound. Owner says he asked the man again to please go outside while talking on a cellphone. Owner says the man then held up the palm of his hand to make the "Stop," sign, signaling the owner to stop talking. Owner says he pointed to the door and told the customer, 'Outside.' Owner says man abruptly stopped talking and said something to the owner along the lines of, 'This is pretty goddamned important," and mentioned something concerning how much money was being spent on the "shoot" his friend was on, the cost of the time, how much people were getting paid an hour, that sort of thing. Owner told man again he didn't want the cellphone used inside the store, and told the customer it was extremely rude of him to do so. Owner said he noticed about that time, what he presumed to be two men whose bodies and hats he saw standing behind a large rack of potato chips._

At this point I stopped, turned the notebook on its side, and read the notation that had been written in the margin of the page:

" _Lab confirmed today DNA from blood on cellphone matches decedent."_

I asked Peel, "You found a cellphone?"

"Yes we did."

"Where?"

"In the dumpster in the alley where the body was."

"Pew."

"Uh huh."

"There was blood on it?"

"Somebody found another objectionable way to use a cellphone."

"Yeah, I guess they did. Who found it?"

"You're looking at him."

"That means you climbed right in there?"

"That's what it means."

I made a face evincing extreme disgust.

"I'm always wondering," Peel confided, "how come nobody ever disposes of a weapon in a big bakery case of Krispy Kremes...or maybe in a woman's lingerie drawer. Always a fucking heap of trash in some stinky-ass, godforsaken alley."

"You'd think the guy could have just left it on the ground." I said. "He did his murder; why make somebody have to get down into that world of funk just to retrieve the weapon? He knows you're going to find it anyhow if he's leaving it so close to a guy with a bloody head."

"Perpetrators aren't especially considerate. It's one of the more unpleasant lessons of this otherwise rewarding vocation," Detective Peel told me soberly.

I continued reading on through the remainder of the notes:

_Owner says customer talking on cellphone said to person he was having conversation with, something like, 'You wouldn't believe this shit...this anal store clerk.' Owner says customer ended conversation with person on cellphone. Customer said to owner, as owner remembers it, 'Christ, what's the big deal?' Owner told the man he'd tried to ask him politely not to use the phone inside the store because that was his policy. Customer said, 'Jesus,' or 'Jesus Christ,' and angrily left the market. Owner says he followed the man out onto the sidewalk and watched him walking up the street. Owner says when he returned to the market two men shoplifting potato chips went running past him out of the store, going in the same direction as the customer who'd been talking on his cellphone. Owner gave chase for a minute, but gave up_.

When I reached the end, I continued down, and quickly read the Final Report in its entirety, the report being comprised almost completely of the preceding notes, with the occasional addition of a related observation or a snatch of analysis. At the end, which was the enumeration of the most common sense speculations on the person or persons who might have been responsible for cellphoning the man senseless, and finally pulse-less, there was the slightest bit more writing. There was a line that read:

# The Vic-

Beneath that was one final, three-word notation:

What an asshole!

CHAPTER SIX

NORTH OF HOLLYWOOD

"Over the hill and through the pass, to Cindy's house we go," was what I trilled as I traveled along the Red Line. I was to cross the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, make my way to the Lankershim Boulevard Station in North Hollywood, San Fernando Valley, USA, for a short vacation. A few hours later, a refugee from Cindy and her retinue of fashion industry spa rats, I was sipping coffee outside Priscilla's: a coffee joint on the border between the Toluca Lake section of North Hollywood and the city of Burbank. It was time, Lila and I had decided, to once again become as one in the flesh, as well as to discuss the facts of our financial life; the prospects, and more importantly the timeline for acquiring housing in the likely multiple-family dwelling in our future. I had been bivouacking in the hotel going on three months, all the while, becoming dangerously content. After rent, food, whisky, and an occasional spliff, foregoing necessities such as new books, Q-tips, or a television set, I was saving next to nothing from the dinky pay they give you at "pimperaries". But still I needed a brief getaway from the demands of pleasantly indolent squalor and cheerful dissipation. A few days was all I could manage at Cindy's, and no doubt all that Cindy could manage with me. Lila had little time to spare from either work or art, and no inclination to tempt her purse in the hedonistic nether world with me and mine, so stuck rigidly to her austerity plan. Nevertheless, for both of us, periodic temporary reconciliations were to be as necessary, as they were desirable.

Priscilla's seemed to be warehousing more than a few writers. There were numerous persons with notebooks or legal pads or laptops, writing conspicuously. Some of them wore glasses. Perhaps it was the electro-magnetic power of Warner Brothers around the corner, which pulled amorphous scraps of plot and theme and ideas for special effects out of poor wretches, previously innocent coffee drinkers morphed into unwilling scribes. Hypnotized when passing the billboard-swamped walls of the Warner's edifice, the post-hypnotic suggestions of future gabillions of dollars, convertibles, and associate producer credits kicked in about the time the dear souls were paying for cappuccinos. Yes, popular art works in unmysterious ways.

It was one of those sparkling pure days of winter you sometimes get in Los Angeles: crystal sun, dry air, and warmth infused on a gentle wind. You could sit outside in a circle of sun and incubate, which is what I did, at a table of my own in front of Priscilla's: coffee in reach, a cigarette on standby in the ashtray. Lila sauntered around the corner from the parking lot in back, coming out of the west in a blaze of sun that burned small, black holes in my retinas when I tried to stare. It was clarified when she was standing beside the table before she sat, from how she looked, and even the way she smelled, that beyond soul connections and practical matters this was a conjugal visit. After a brief, but intense public display of affection I told her, "I'm glad you didn't have to hike up here or take a cab."

"No. Cindy cooperated. Lack of generosity isn't one of her faults. This car of hers is nice, really nice. Wait'll you see it."

"It's wasted on me. You know that. All cars look the same to me. Except that aluminum foil monstrosity we own. How is it by the way?"

"It takes a long time to replace a radiator, apparently. I think they might call me tomorrow and tell me it's ready."

As we were walking to Cindy's car I asked, "How much is that radiator going to cost?"

Looking at me like I was one of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, she told me, "I'll protect you from the actual figure. But it's in the hundreds...leave it at that."

"That'll whack a hole in the piñata you're saving money in."

"No fucking shit. How's your savings plan going, bud?"

"Well..."

Noticing as we started driving, that we were not moving in the direction of Cindy's, but south in the general direction of Ventura Boulevard I asked, "Where are we going?"

"Up in the hills. We have to do a couple of errands. I have to pick up something from somebody's house for Cindy. It's part of the deal to use the car."

"No escape from Hollywood deal-makers...North Hollywood deal-makers, now."

"Better than walking."

"Tell me about it."

We began the climb up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, swung off at Mulholland, wended around and climbed some more, then took a tiny street that snaked along the edge of a ridge. Lila slowed the car, affirmed the address on the piece of paper lying on the seat, then drove through the gate onto a circular drive in front of a show piece so luxe it would embarrass the Borgia clan. Lila explained to the woman who answered the door the nature of our visit. The woman told us she would notify Mrs. Rapinski of our arrival, and invited us in. As Lila and I stood waiting in the foyer I asked, "Mrs. Rapinski is who? Is what?"

"I don't know what she does, exactly. They're working together...not as in they work at the same place, but they're working together on some kind of project. That's as much as I know."

"I can sense there's more you want to tell me."

"I have to walk past a fashion coffee klatch to get to the kitchen a lot of the time. The proud, the few, the brain-dead fashion crew."

"And what does Big Daddy do?"

"Edgar Lapinski is one of those studio guys. Development? I think development. Got any scripts you wanna leave off?"

"I will not work with Edgar Rapinski."

Lila was laughing, but put on her serious face quickly when the woman who answered the door returned. The woman said, "Mrs. Rapinski will be right down."

Before the woman could even turn around, the doorbell chimed. The woman opened the door and found herself face to face with a Federal Express deliveryman.

"I have a package for Mr. Rapinski. Are you Mrs. Rapinski?"

"Pfft. I'm the housekeeper." She spoke now with a heavily pronounced Spanish accent. " _Mrs. Velazquez_. But I can sign for it, can't I?"

"You certainly can." The deliveryman handed her the clipboard and showed her where to sign.

"All right. Here you go." He handed her the package. "You have a good day."

Mrs. Velazquez smiled politely and told him, "You have one too." She smiled at us as she walked past, taking little steps, and carrying the package so gingerly that if you couldn't see it you might have guessed it was a specimen bottle without a lid. Mrs. Velazquez ran into Mrs. Rapinski as she was coming off the stairs, and into the foyer. Mrs. Velazquez showed Mrs. Rapinski the package. Mrs. Rapinski took it from her, and instructed her to, "Go upstairs to Mr. Rapinski's library and ask him to come down, please." Mrs. Velazquez did as she was told. Mrs. Rapinski then proceeded to greet her guests. She approached Lila with an outstretched hand, and when Lila's met it, Mrs. Rapinski shook it so anemically you wondered if she would have the strength to speak. I got a sideways glance of acknowledgment, but nothing more.

"You're the person Cindy Sizemore sent?"

"I'm the person picking up the portfolio for Cindy Sizemore, uh huh." Lila was not amused.

"One second." She turned around quickly and began to walk away, saying over her shoulder, "It's down here in my office." She disappeared, and a minute later returned with an oversized manila envelope. As she was handing it to Lila, Edgar Lapinski descended the stairs, a lanky man with silver hair wearing a Lakers jacket. As he walked up to his wife, Mrs. Rapinski pointed at us and said, "This is..."

"Lila," Lila offered on cue. I followed suit.

"Donovan."

Mrs. Rapinski said to Mr. Rapinski, "It's from New York."

Taking the package and examining the label he told her, "It's the book." He took a set of keys from his pocket, and used the edge of one to perforate the tape sealing the flaps of the package.

"Which book?" she asked.

Mr. Rapinski continued to yank and tear his way into the package, lifting his eyes long enough to send a condescending glance in the direction of Mrs. Rapinski.

"Oh," Mrs. Rapinski remembered. "The woman we saw on Charlie Rose...the rare, signed first edition or something."

As he extricated the bubble wrap, he muttered, "Umm Hmm." Then he lifted a black, hardcover book out of the box, and dropped the box beside a vase on the table in the foyer. He turned the book over and examined the back of the jacket.

"Great condition. She really is the most incredible writer of this era, one of the most incredible writers, ever, truly. Beautiful shape. _Beautiful_."

Mr. Rapinski opened the book with extreme care, first flipping the pages gently, but eventually whipping them over with inexplicable vehemence.

"What the..." He held the open book in the air for Mrs. Rapinski to see, meaning that Lila and I, standing behind her, could see the pages too. They were entirely blank.

"Look," he bellowed plaintively, and turning pages for us displayed the innards of the book in all their blank-paged wonder. "What kind of bullshit is this?"

While Mrs. Rapinski nonchalantly took a closer look, Lila answered, "Not the good kind."

Mrs. Rapinski squinted at the pages as if perhaps the printing might actually be so subtle, or so discreet, the human eye could not detect it from any sort of distance.

"There must have been some kind of mistake," she determined.

"You think?" Mr. Rapinski said.

Lila and I looked at one another and shrugged. I said, "Not much there...definitely over-rated."

Lila nudged me with an elbow and scowled, then asked Mr. Rapinski, "Is it signed by the author?"

Mr. Rapinski looked down, flipped the pages back to the front and reported, "It's inscribed, yeah."

"I think what you've got there," she told him, "is a rare book. Probably worth a whole lot more than you thought before."

Mr. Rapinski considered this for a moment. We were all in a little semi-circle staring down at the empty pages.

"They just don't write them like they used to," I offered.

I got the elbow from Lila again, before Mrs. Rapinski concluded, "I really don't know Edgar. I think you're probably going to have to talk about this with whoever sent you the book."

Mr. Rapinski looked steadily at his wife with what only could be described as a certain amount of bewilderment.

At this point Lila held the manila folder up, waving it until she had fully captured Mrs. Rapinski's attention. She told her, "Well, thank you. We need to get going."

After we had passed through the gates of el hacienda grande that fashion and development built, and returned to the road, I told Lila as we drove along, "I think I can see the ocean from here."

With the car skirting the precipice of a tall ridge, she looked off into the distance to her right, clamping her hands as tight on the wheel as possible while she did.

"Yeah, I _can_ see it. That's something. All the way to the Pacific."

We were chugging down the winding noodles of road to the valley again when I asked, "What's a one bedroom go for in Cindy's neighborhood?"

"I'm thirsty," she said. "I need to stop pretty soon and get a bottle of water."

"Fine by me. We're almost down."

"A one bedroom in Cindy's neighborhood?"

"Yeah."

""A grand. Probably a little more. Twelve, thirteen."

"Oooh."

"It's a little cheaper over here than over there, that's about it."

"For us at the moment anything seems a lot. On the other hand, maybe it's never being able to transcend the lower depths of buying power that makes me feel perpetually young."

"Makes me feel old. But poverty as The Fountain of Youth...that's a good one."

"Lookout sugar," I begged, after she nearly punted a bicycler over the guardrail into the chaparral.

"Yeah, yeah."

"I guess bargains never are easy to come by," I philosophized.

"Unless you want to live in Pomona. I don't know if rent-free mansions even constitute a bargain in Pomona."

"Mansions in Pomona...now that's a good one. You know you're the one always claiming that scrapping for bread preserves the killer instinct."

"Something YOU agree with."

"Yeah, in most cases it probably preserves it. I'm an exception, since my killer instinct will be permanent either way I'd be willing to bet."

"Mine too. But I'm also willing to bet we'll never be in any position to know for sure."

"Smart bet."

"Wherever we live, there's no getting around that giant chunk of startup money."

"Money's always the elephant in the room, ain't it? "

"It is unless we abruptly pull out of artistic Russian Roulette and join the reputable wankers."

"No pulling out of anything here. I'm stubborn, no matter how stupid it makes me look."

"Do you care whether we end up over here or over there?" she asked, pointing, in her mind, actually pointing to the other side of the hills.

"Not really." I could just as well have added that at the moment I had lost the will to live above the lower circles of poverty in which I currently resided with such sybaritic snugness. The amount of money that needed to be plunked down initially, and forked over regularly sounded staggering. We'd had it far too easy at Bob's. It wasn't sumptuous living in the guesthouse; but neither of us needed that, or could even stand it. The principle point of this was to cohabitate. The second was to retrieve a better quality and greater quantity of privacy, while preserving time and a proper nimbus for our "little hobbies."

"Having been at Cindy's a while, I have to admit it's a good location, especially for the valley. That neighborhood is basically the border between the valley and Hollywood."

"So we could go back and forth across the border with impunity, as far as Immigration's concerned."

From there, the conversation actually deteriorated, though such was a principle form of amusement for the likes of us. We had stopped for water, and now were sitting at the stoplight at Laurel Canyon and Moorpark. The car could be heard to sputter while it sat idling. Then it coughed. Then, it died. Lila repeatedly tried to start it again. But Cindy's car was dead as liberal Republicanism. When it came to cars, Lila and I were like a communicable disease.

As we got out of the car, car horns behind us and around us began rioting in the streets. Lila ran at the side of the car with the door open in order to steer, as I tried to push. From somewhere, a man appeared on the other side of the back bumper and helped me nudge the car rightward into a lot. I thanked him for helping, at which time he asked, "Have your cells?" I told him we didn't. He volunteered to us that his wife in their car across the street had hers, and invited us to use it.

Lila tried twice, but could get no answer from Cindy. The man and his wife, who looked similar in age to, and appeared to be at an economic level comparable to that of the Rapinski's, offered to take us back to Cindy's in their souped-up ride. Our choices were either to wait with the car, or to take the ride. We put a note on the car designating it as inoperable, and promising a reasonably swift re-location to the necessary repair facility. Without talking with Cindy, we had no idea where she would wish to tow it, or even perhaps, who should do the towing. We did expect to figure prominently in subsidization of the process.

During the obligatory vacuum-filling-colloquy-among-confined-strangers as we whizzed along, Lila mentioned that we were returning from visiting someone in yon hills. Our driver asked Lila if we had visited, "anyone I might know?" Sworn to no secrecy either by Cindy or by the Rapinskis, she told him, "Caroline Rapinski."

This information ripped the lid off a barrel of laughter in the front seat.

"They're friends of ours," the woman said.

"Edgar and I do a little business sometimes, too," the man volunteered, with a chuckle so meretricious it sounded like an aluminum can being kicked along a sidewalk.

"Edgar is a studio executive, and my husband runs a talent agency. Are you in the fashion business with Caroline?" the woman asked Lila.

Lila told her she wasn't in the fashion business at all, while my grin grew so expansively, my face resembled a baking biscuit. Then she elaborated, confessing to the woman she was merely a wage earner working at drawing and painting in her free time. I steeled myself against the ubiquitous, "What do you do?" that was about to be fired at me like a silver bullet. When it hit, I was ready. In order to prevent any apprehension on his part that I would punk him in the back of the head with a roll of food stamps, then rob him, I once again placed contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Political History at the top of my resume. Naturally, the vagueness of my occupation confused him. So, as in times past, an example seemed appropriate. Lila pulled a pen from her purse, while I found a use for the flyer for a play at the neighborhood playhouse someone handed me at Priscilla's. Tuning out the ambient strained conviviality, I hurriedly scribbled out today's exemplifying entry. As I was writing, our driver turned into the parking lot of Vendomes Liquor in the heart of Toluca Lake, and asked us if we would mind a stop for refurbishment of his booze supply. Since the cause was such a good one we immediately assented. I continued to write, and by the time he returned to the car with his brown paper sack brimming, I had finished. I made the announcement that my sample was ready to be publicly spoken. Everyone turned in my direction, and I read:

## The American Invasion of Grenada

_Due to a customary Republican combination of hubris and ineptness, the administration of Ronald Reagan retained United States Marines in Lebanon, long past when it was necessary or safe for them to be there. Part of a multinational peacekeeping force contending with turmoil in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, (an invasion in response to attacks on Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization from the Lebanese side of the border), U.S. marines were sitting ducks by 1983, when all hell was breaking loose: embassy bombings, snipings...an array of truly unsportsmanlike behaviors. The suicide bombing of the Marine barracks on October 23, 1983, was a shocking event to American citizens; an embarrassing one for the Reagan politburo; and a real political downer for the Republican Party_. _With the unemployment rate above nine percent, Ronnie's recession stinking up the joint, and the Bonzo-in-Chief's approval rating in the mid-thirties following the barracks bombing, if you were a thinking man's Marxist in Grenada, this may have been about the time you said to yourself, "Uh oh." Yes, invading Grenada was to be the distraction of the day for the Reagan Mob._

_In Grenada, banana republican Commies who had ousted a Commie tinpot dictator, and replaced him with a newer model Commie tinpot dictator, ostensibly for aesthetic reasons, hired crews of Fidel's finest day laborer's spared from the revolution in Cuba to pave a dirt road somewhere in the jungles of Grenada, and, according to crack Reagan propagandists, turn it into the finest military airfield in the rural Caribbean._ _The Reagan marketing squad warned with a wink typical of their group of cut-ups, that with Communistas swallowing the tropical island whole, Cuba and Grenada soon would join forces to form a Marxist Moby capable of dominating so powerfully, as to cause the entire northern hemisphere finally to knuckle under in godless, communistic_ _submission._

As if there were further need of scarifying scenarios, or trumped up Dudley Do Right rationales, there also was the pretext of the fabulous medical school of Grenada sitting there naked as a jaybird: an appetizer for the voracious communistic whale. Reaganistas, citing the need to rescue the school's handful of American medical students...not the best and brightest of America's future physicians or members of the AMA, declared that now more than ever, American military might should be put to use if only to keep the world safe for medical malpractice. America's European allies expressed disapproval of this unilateral invasion of Grenada. But given that conservatives considered having foreigners as allies a regrettable nuisance, as well as a perpetual source of self-doubt, when comparisons were made to housebroken peoples abroad, it was no surprise when The Great Communicators enunciated, that: friends don't let friends stop them from engaging in face-saving military aggression.

After Fortress Tropicana Americana had been handily shellacked, and with a puppet show entirely acceptable to the Regan Administration as visible as light at the end of a tunnel, democratic Grenada could safely set sail in the paternalistic waters of American hemispheric hegemony. For dessert, the Reagan Ringtail Rounders employed this helpful distraction to even further use, in the aftermath of their major military triumph, recognizing an ideal time to install Pershing Missiles in Germany. This occurred despite protestations by bullied Germans, and many elsewhere, that by doing so the targeting of Germans by Soviet missiles, in the event of an East-West dustup would conscript German cities, already on the front lines of the cold war, into battle numero uno of a hot war, and in such an event, render them sacrificial vaporization fodder.

They continued to look in my direction, and they remained silent. Suppressing three-fourths of a snicker while a quarter escaped, " Lila said eventually, "That's very informative. Thanks."

Our driver, staring hard at the both of us said, "Well...let's see...some pretty harsh things said in your little talk there about Republicans. People may think everybody in this town is liberal, but I'll have you know my wife and I are staunchly Republican," his temperature soaring the longer he spoke. "People may think everybody here's a Democrat...but we, we don't care a damn for ugliness like that about people we admire as much as Ronald Reagan. You're awfully glib about a lot of things."

"You have no idea."

"He tries," ventured Lila, the mediator, "to accommodate himself to what he can't help believing is the utter ridiculousness of everything he sees around him...just this relentless, pulverizing combination of randomness, manipulation, avarice, chaos...just...absurdity. He acts silly, in the vein of laughing instead of crying, you know? Just think if everything made him angry? He hardly ever gets angry anymore. It's extremely psychological." She didn't allow so much as an upturned corner of her mouth the entire time.

"And you're not of the same opinions as he?"

"Yes, now that you mention it, I am."

"I really don't think we want to talk with you anymore. I believe it might be better if you just got out of the car here. You should be able to find other transportation home." His wife didn't seem to have recovered from any of this. She'd said nothing. But her face had sort of a tipsy look. The experience, for her, did not seem to be in any way unpleasant.

By now getting out of the car was quite a relief. I did say to the man as I was getting out, "Thanks for the lift...for the partial lift, at least. Nothing personal. Healthy political disagreement is a good thing, don't you agree?"

"That stuff...borders on the scurrilous. How can you be so disrespectful of such highly respected leaders and their motivations?"

"How can _you_ be supportive of such disingenuous leaders? How can you let yourself be lassoed like a calf by a bunch of opportunists roping you in with myths?"

"Get the hell out."

Lila and I stood in the parking lot watching the car drive away, eating exhaust.

She said, "No bipartisan spirit on that one, huh?"

"No."

Still grinning, she said, "Back to the streets."

"If transportation is destiny we're good and fucked."

"Take good care of the feet."

The two things, we decided, that needed to be attended to expediently were purchasing beer and vodka, given the convenient location of our expulsion; and calling a cab to take us back to Cindy's, exactly in that order. We anticipated a need, once we returned to Cindy's, for a supply of alcohol to help us wind a great deal further than only down.

We got in back of the line with our bottles in hand. As we stood there with the rest chewing our cud, the middle-aged woman in front of us tapped the man in front of her, who was standing more or less in profile, on his shoulder. He turned our way, but looked at the woman in front of us without speaking. He had strawberry-reddish hair, a big build, and was decked out in a black leather jacket that looked and smelled completely new. A little surprisingly, he was able to clutch in his arms a twelve-pack box of Dos Equis and two big jugs of Bombay gin all at the same time.

The woman in front of us said to the man, "You're Pete Rambo aren't you?"

"I am."

"I love the way you do the weather."

"Thanks."

The customer at the register took his change, lifted his bag and left. Pete Rambo stepped up in line, and unloaded his heavy burden.

"How are you tonight?" inquired the cashier.

"Doing fine," Rambo told him.

"Sounds like it's gonna rain a lot."

"Looking that way."

The cashier rang the items up, took the money, put it in the register and handed Mr. Rambo his change. "Anything else I can get for you Mr. Rambo?"

"This'll do," the weatherman answered.

When Lila and I exited from the store the renowned weather announcer was still outside, standing to the right of the door just to the left of the pay phone we intended to use. His ration of intoxicants was on the ground at his feet and he appeared to be searching, somewhat frantically through his wallet, located in his hands. We passed him, and went to the phone.

I was ready to pick up the receiver and dial, digging inside my pocket for the fifty cents required to make the call. In the end I came up with fourteen cents in change. Then I asked Lila what she might have. She dredged the bottom of her bag, bringing out a nickel and approximately 30 pennies. I told her, "Fuck it, I'll go back in and get some change."

"Wait."

She turned to Weather Guy, the only one amongst us still rummaging through a repository of funds. Before she could speak, he asked, "What do you need?"

"Just fifty cents," she said. "All we need is a couple of quarters to call a cab to take us home."

"Where do you live?"

"Not far at all."

"I'll give you a ride."

Lila turned to me and said, "Save us six bucks at least."

"Sure," I said, thinking, "hard times, _hard_ times."

The weatherman also had souped-up wheels: a sleek and flashy silver sedan. We had been in it with him only a matter of seconds, before it was obvious he was loaded past the point of returning any time in the foreseeable future. He told us as we were leaving the parking lot, "Listen, I do need to make a couple of stops first."

"Not a problem, " Lila told him, before whispering to me, "At least we're off our feet in the meantime."

"How many minutes in a meantime," I whispered back.

Our current driver cracked open one of his jugs of gin and offered it all around. Lila and I passed, on the grounds the two of us preferred the beer and vodka we had on hand to ease the sting of longevity in our current tribulations in transportation. It began to rain. Drops began to spatter the windshield in what appeared to be the beginnings of an aspiring deluge.

"You were right," I told the weatherman.

"How's that?" he said without turning around.

"You were right about the rain. When you told the cashier in the liquor store that it looked like we were going to get a lot of rain, you were right...seeing how it's raining now," I added just in case.

"Oh yeah. Huh."

I had no idea where we were when he asked us if we wanted to join him for dinner. He explained he was meeting a group of friends at Le Petite Chateau, a fancy French restaurant, according to him, in "the neighborhood." He added that since he was inviting us, he insisted we let him pay: an insistence we resisted neither verbally, or at least in my case, even in thought. He confessed he'd be, "running a little late, what with these couple of errands." But any concern that this revelation diminished the honor of the invitation, was not atop our list of concerns. Following a brief, whispered consultation in back, we said, "yes," though between us we'd agreed to follow through only if it was absolutely unavoidable. The grub was sure to be tasty and the price was right, but it had been a long day already, we agreed.

The car pulled to the curb in front of a white building decorated in blue neon, the blue awning flashing the name Venus Faire Adult Emporium.

"Won't take but a minute," our weatherman told us. "Why don't YOU come with me?" he inquired in my direction. Lila was asked only to remain in the car, in order to "watch it." She ducked her head, took another look at the awning and said, "Yeah I think I want the security detail." My answer was that I'd as soon soak up a little porn atmosphere as observe the traffic flow in an anonymously dreary business district.

We pulled open the curtained glass doors, passed by the security guard, and entered the stacks and racks of videos, and sexual aids situated in the large front room off of which was the passageway to the Performance Area. Rambo began circulating among the merchandise. I ambled among the stacks, then lost myself browsing in the lesbian aisle, somewhere between No Man's Land # 1 and No Man's Land # 27. When I saw Rambo head to the counter with a stack of boxes under his arm, I proceeded to situate myself near him at the counter.

"All ready to check out?" he was asked by the clerk.

"Yeah, I'm set," Rambo told him.

The clerk did his tally and said, "Eighty-seven eighty."

The wallet was in Rambo's hand already. He removed a hundred dollar bill, and handed it over. The transaction was being completed while I watched a tall brunet with long, straight hair, wearing a bikini, and silver high heels, come out of the back carrying a wad of money. The clerk shoved the pile of tapes into a large, black plastic bag and handed them to Rambo.

"Here you go Mr. Rambo," he said.

"Gracias."

"I always watch Channel Seven," added the clerk.

"Keep it up," answered Rambo, moving away from the counter.

I joined Rambo, and we started for the door, passing the tall brunet as she walked herself to the counter. A second after we'd passed her, she said, "Wow. Pete Rambo."

Rambo left the store before me, and as I was following him out the door, I heard the clerk behind us say to the tall brunet, "Need some change, Angel?"

We sped off in the Weathermobile, porn securely tucked in the trunk. We spurted through one rain-slicked street after another. The entire drive was a swirling suburban Rorschach that looked only like The Valley to me. At some point I asked, "Where are we?"

Lila said, "This is Burbank."

Shortly thereafter, as we sat in a turn lane from the wide street we'd been cruising a while, I squinted up through the streaked glass at a street sign that read, Magnolia Boulevard. We turned, going past an enormous orange building situated on a corner and entered the parking lot behind what was, according to the enormous black lettering across the orange edifice: The DO-IT CENTER. Rambo swept into a parking space. Beside us, there was a sports car, low slung and black, its driver in place at the wheel. Rambo switched off the engine, opened the door, and got out of the car. He slid into the seat of the car beside us, leaving the door open. The conversation that followed was easily audible, the burly man in the driver's seat greeting Rambo loudly.

"PEE-TEE-BOY."

"Whassup?"

The burly man said, "Here ya go, brother," as he put something in Rambo's hand, "O-O-O-N-N-E eight ball."

Rambo passed something into the burly man's hand and said, "Two bills and change."

"You're gonna love it," the burly man told him. "Everybody's loving it."

Passing in front of the car we were in, and the car beside us, on his way to the lot, an older man pushed a cart containing what appeared to be two large cabinet doors.

"What are you up to tonight?" Rambo asked the burly man.

"Nothing. I'm tired. I'm going home and crawling into bed. What about you?"

"Some friends and I," and here he nodded toward his car and its occupants, "are having dinner at Le Petite Chateau."

A forty-something woman carrying a paper bag containing curtain rods extending out, and holding the hand of a toddler eating a candy bar, approached the car two spaces down and fumbled in her purse looking for keys.

"This redhead who asked me for an autograph down at Residuals...ended up giving me her number...she's supposed to be there...gorgeous. Unbelievable."

"You're the man, PEE-TEE."

"All right. Later. Thank you."

"Thank you, Pete."

Rambo climbed back into his car and off we went, fishtailing out of the lot. Tearing back up Magnolia, Lila found the moment she believed to be an opportune one to say to Rambo, "Maybe you should go ahead and drop us off at home. We're kind of tired."

"Oh. But come on. Let's go eat. It's getting late." After a pause, he said, "It'll be real good. We'll have fun." The far off quality in his voice suggested not only that he was truly out of it but that he was channeling distilleries, which were speaking through him.

"I don't know," Lila said, in a dilatory maneuver that allowed her to engage with me again in whispered consultation.

Turning away from the street, and halfway around to look at us, he said, "I could let you out here and give you change to call a cab." He turned back around, which caused a bulb to flicker to light anew in his head. "I could call you one on my cell...I forgot."

"Why didn't you suggest that at the liquor store?" Lila inquired.

"Beats me. 'Cause I was distracted I think."

I conveyed to Lila my opinion that the continuing downpour was a strong incentive not to get out of the car.

She said, "I'm getting hungry."

I could almost hear the dinner bell ringing in my ear. "Let's go to dinner," I told Rambo.

Le Petite Chateau did show every indication that it was as superb a restaurant as our weatherman had claimed, meaning this likely was the one time in our natural lives Lila and I would eat there...if we did. The three of us were standing in front with the Maitre D when Rambo spotted his redhead sitting at the bar. She was joking with the woman on the chair beside her. After a few seconds of observation it was plain the two of them had come together.

"She brought a friend," Rambo apprised us of the obvious.

Standing rigidly in front of us, braced for inspection, he asked, "How do I look? Anything askew? Clothes, hair?"

"All of it is fine," Lila reassured him, "you look fine."

He glanced over his shoulder, as if to verify the women were holding their position, turned back to us and said, "You guys wait for the table, and I'll...we'll be on over."

"All right," I said.

"Listen," he continued with new lucidity, as if scared straight by his sudden case of nerves, "I'm taking care of everything. Everything you get...the check will be taken care of."

"Thanks," Lila said.

"Get anything you want. I mean it...anything at all."

"That's generous," Lila told him sincerely.

He smiled and turned, and marched off into battle. When he greeted the redhead at the bar she seemed genuinely delighted to see him.

"Nice enough fellow," Lila observed. "Sort of a maniac."

"Well, people who live in glass temporary housing."

"No shit."

"You're right, he is a nice enough fellow."

A minute or two later the Maitre D shepherded us back to the table. There looked to be six or seven place settings arranged on our long table. The rest of this little troupe, whoever they might be, besides Rambo and the females at the bar had yet to materialize with specificity, either physically, or in conversation, beyond Rambo's mention of "joining friends" for dinner. Knowing the early bird gets the drink, we didn't risk a rescinded opportunity to get one, making sure the waitress who instantly appeared didn't walk away from the table without an order for my Stoli and Lila's bourbon.

The question before us was whether we wanted to stick around. Lila's appetite could be sated free of charge, though only at the price of an awkward and protracted social occasion with the both of us in weary condition. No decision had been reached when the waitress returned with drinks. She stood beside us with her order pad above our heads, and her pencil poised as if to encourage us to spill our guts with an immediate choice of appetizers. We opened our menus, and mumbled in order to indicate our intention to do so.

"What are those puffy cheese things called?" I asked Lila.

Another second of scanning and she replied, "Gougeres. Yes, right there. Gruyere cheese puffs."

A woman seated at the table in back of Lila, so many diamonds pinned to, strapped on, and hung from various parts of her body she might have been a lobbyist for the South African mining industry, already leaning back in her chair with a glass of wine in her hand, leaned a little further back and said, "I realize you don't need any advice from me. But those are terrible for you, especially when you consider they're only an appetizer...and you're going to follow them with a meal."

"Really?" Lila asked. "Why are they more terrible than the rest of the stuff in a French restaurant?"

"I didn't say they were _terrible._ But I mean, they have, like a zillion-some grams of fat, and God knows how many calories. Just for a little appetizer."

I told them, "Maybe I'll order the Large, and make _them_ the meal instead of _following_ them with a meal."

The look on the face of the woman at the table behind us was like a warning that she was preparing to vomit into Lila's lap. She rolled her eyes with some super-sized theatricality, and turned around. Finally we told the waitress we would certainly be ordering appetizers but would need more time to decide.

Still undecided whether to stay or go, we procrastinated some more by heading out back to have a smoke. Lila went over to tip Rambo off to our destination. The smoking area was under an awning stretched above the rear entrance adjacent to the parking lot. We hopped up, and sat on the wall of the brick planter attached to the back of the restaurant.

"I'm hungry, but I don't think I want to talk to this particular crew all night," Lila said, as she puffed out her first cloud. "Been a long time since the two of us were alone together. I'm thinking we should just tell Rambo we're calling a cab, then go back to Cindy's."

"No argument here. Except, lots of free booze and eats. It could be laughs."

"With them?"

"With anybody. Why not them?"

"So you really want to stick around?"

I gave it fifteen seconds of thought and said, "Not really."

To our mild alarm, Rambo suddenly came walking out the restaurant door. He reached inside his jacket, and popped an unopened pack of smokes out of his shirt pocket.

"What's up?" Lila asked.

"Nothing," the weatherman answered, ripping the cellophane off. "The ladies are in the bathroom together. Time for a cigarette."

"How _are_ the ladies?" Lila asked.

"Great."

A man just coming under the awning from out in the rain closed his umbrella and shook it. He took two steps toward the door, stopped dead, and exclaimed, "There he is. Rambo."

Rambo chuckled and said, "Glad you could make it, Drew." The man stepped forward, as did Rambo, and they commenced shaking hands. Rambo turned to us, and said to Drew, "This is Lila...and Donovan."

"Hello Drew," we answered in duet.

"The station just hired Drew to do my job on weekends," Rambo explained.

Tilting his head in the direction of the parking lot, Drew quipped, "I think the meteorological term for this, is 'coming down in buckets.'"

"This must be putting us on track to get our average rainfall for the year," I told him.

"Nooooo," Drew said. "We're _way_ over, already."

"Are you sure?" I asked. "I wouldn't think we've had more than eight or nine inches?"

"The average is only like four."

"It was four last year, but that was one of the driest ever."

"I think it's around fourteen or fifteen a year," Lila added.

"No way," Drew sniped. "Between four and five at most."

"This is a Mediterranean climate," I said, "not the Mohave desert. Only four or five inches of rain every year would turn it into that."

"Nah. This is a dry climate."

"Not that dry," Lila said.

We all looked over at Rambo, the Weather Wizard for his contribution. He wasn't taking sides. He shrugged and put up his hands to indicate neutrality, or his absence of knowledge of factual information. He broke the impasse by inviting Drew to go back inside with him, which his hand on the door handle signaled he was about to do. He said, "There's a couple of ladies at the bar I want you to meet."

After the two of them had gone inside to electrify the girls at the bar with their celebrity, Lila and I stubbed out our cigarettes.

"We gotta get outta here," Lila said.

"Damn tootin'. Should we tell Rambo?"

"It'll get into a big thing. Maybe when he's not so ripped he'll realize how much money we saved him by leaving."

"He is a nice enough guy."

"Yeah. He is."

We scampered through the parking lot, hustled down an alley, then followed a drive back out to the street where the restaurant was. We were a little north of it, and continued walking north. Though we continued to walk, we did not encounter a pay phone, passing an Italian restaurant, a fish and chips dispenser, and a taco stand, coming to an intersection in which the crisscrossing of four or five large streets made pedestrians a great deal more conscious of their mortality. Surviving it, we canvassed the sidewalk of the strip mall on the other side to no avail, though we changed a dollar in the frozen yogurt store. We traversed another entanglement spun out of the same nefarious nexus of roadways and made our way north along the side of the road populated by merchants, rather than the other side, where there was a string of apartment buildings as far as the eye could see. The search was fruitless until, in a partially desolate place near an auto repair shop, a phone stood isolated, looking a bit naked in front of an empty parking lot. By the time Lila had the receiver in her hand, we could see that set back from the boulevard at the end of the tiny lot, was a small, brown building with an enormous plywood sign that read: Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee. It was a video store, dark for the night.

Lila told the taxi dispatcher we would be in front of Eddie Brandt's, and read the address off the front of the building. The rain had diminished to drizzle, so we stood by the phone and waited. When we were slumped in back of the cab on the way to Cindy's, Lila said to me, "Well, you had a pretty big night."

"Big night? How's that?"

"I'm not complaining. It took the sting out of some of the trouble."

"I'm not seeing where the _big_ was _tonight_."

"Big night. As in, you made your statement. You had fun...had fun, and made your statement, or had fun, because you were making your statement...whatever."

"What in the hell are you talking about? If there's one thing I never do on purpose, it's make statements. I barely make sense. If any statements are made, they seep out of their own volition. Statement? Huh?"

"Whatever the statement was I was in agreement with it. Don't be so defensive. It was fun. If it weren't for the mishaps, and the inconveniences it would have been a lot of fun."

"Well...you're welcome for the sideshow."

"Cindy is always accusing me of using _life_ or how I _live_ my life to try and make a statement."

"I thought everybody's life was a statement, whether they were _intending_ to make it one or not. The _intent_ is the only thing that makes a difference as far as I can tell. I was just quibbling about the intent behind anything _tonight_. Course, a lot of times, I can't see the line anymore separating what's intended from what happens of its own accord."

"That's odd. You don't know when you intend to do a thing?"

"I don't think about every single thing I do before I do it. Maybe the intent is so ingrained and so repetitive, a lot of what I do is reflexive. So the intention gets carried out automatically."

"That may not be so much intent, as just habit. I don't know if they're the same thing. I think what Cindy is saying is she thinks...maybe her polite way of saying I'm following some stereotype or preconceived role."

"I thought most people were. But it doesn't work if it isn't suited to you."

"Yeah. If it fits, if it naturally suits you, then that just means you're in the right role. I'm on the Artist's Russian Roulette track. It would make me miserable if I wasn't suited to it. And I couldn't follow another plan even if I wanted to."

"Might work for a while. Eventually it'd die from lack of steam."

"I'd wear it like an ill-fitting suit of clothes."

"It would collapse like a house of cards," I said, clambering into the cliché-mobile.

" _Born with your own paradigm_. Sounds like the title of a self-help book."

"Whatever mine is, I wish it included some opportunism in at least _one_ bone in my entire body."

"Nobody's perfect," she laughed, at me and not with me, I think.

We sat in silence for a couple of blocks, then she said, "It's like the Warhol quote, where he said, there's nothing more middle class than trying not to be middle class."

"We're congenitally middle-class. We just don't have any of the perks."

When we got to Cindy's, it was time to give the hostess the news about her car and prepare for the financial repercussions, even if the car's moment of breakdown had nothing whatsoever to do with the car's custodial driver. We were more than familiar with the bankrupting curse of automobiles. At present, we didn't have much of a bank to bankrupt. Yet, it might be another siphoning of funds from the current Project Cohabitation Redux.

After the nasty business was done, having been less odious than we had prepared for, we chipped in with Cindy on an affordable delivered meal...the fuel we would need before we fucked. While we waited for food, Lila asked, "What do you want to do while you're here on vacation in spectacular North Hollywood?"

"I just want to read. Is that so wrong?"

"No darling, it isn't. There'll be plenty of time to read. But I know what you mean. It seems to strike Cindy and her friends as the oddest thing to do."

Lila started to sketch, and I to read. Cindy's music filled the house, and it was as banal as advertised. All of the sudden Lila looked up at me from what she was doing and yelled, "Hey." She got up, jumped in the chair in front of the computer and started clicking away.

"Aha," she said.

"What?"

"Average yearly rainfall for Los Angeles is fourteen and sixty-two hundredths inches. That means we had the greatest mastery of meteorology of anyone at Le Petite Chateau tonight."

"That isn't as much of a boost as it should be."

CHAPTER SEVEN

DOWNSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

I was well connected in the world of temporary employment. Name on file, assignments began to roll in, at least a couple a week, which were plenty for me. Toil-filled days, when my expertise as a General Office Specialist rescued many a commercial enterprise from the crises provoked by absentees, days subsumed by computer drudgery and telephone answering on behalf of pimperary agency profits, were followed by nights with my sort of people in the de-facto hotel bar, only an elevator ride, and a skip on the sidewalk from my very room.

I had come back spiritually and hormonally refreshed from my vacation in what Lila had designated as that border wonderland between The Valley and Hollywood. My neighbor and bar mate, the cartooning Andrew was in the seat beside me. The Professor, as he similarly was six nights a week was the designated enabler behind the bar. The place was full, and making a racket when a man older than expensive cheese wobbled away from the men's room and came in our direction. The unshaved and unkempt man squeezed himself between Andrew and me at the bar, smiling, saying not a word. Finally acknowledging him Andrew asked, "How you doing tonight, Stu?"

"Got one for you."

"All right," Andrew agreed reluctantly.

"What's the lightest thing in the world?"

"Ummmm." Andrew looked at me and I shrugged my shoulders.

"Couldn't tell you," Andrew conceded.

"A penis. It's so light, you can lift it with a thought."

"Pfft. Pretty funny, Stu," Andrew commended.

"Not bad at all, Stu," I concurred.

"Professor," Andrew barked, summoning the barkeep over.

Instead of complying the Professor yelled from down the bar, "Yeah?"

"Give Stu one on me, okay?"

"Gotcha."

Stu turned stiffly and began to shuffle past the line of barstools, down to his own.

After acting as paying audience for Stu, Andrew and I turned back around, and watched the final portion of an interview with the former senator, Alan Simpson by Brian Williams on MSNBC. Andrew began a new installment in an ongoing series of interpretations of Brian Williams.

"Brian Williams has got to be a Republican," Andrew said.

This led to the ritual spat with the Professor. "I'm not any happier about it than you are," the Professor told him snickering, "but after the first sixty-seven times you pointed it out, I stopped considering the possibility he wasn't."

"And either way, I'm telling you now, that you can tell he's a Republican by his neckties," Andrew continued.

"How can you tell by his neckties?" I asked.

"If you start checking, you'll notice he's always wearing red ties. That's his way of signaling to the other reactionaries. When Republicans win states, the states are colored red on the electoral maps. Ties are how they wink at each other."

"Yeah, and when that doesn't work," said the Professor, "you can just go by the fact he subtly shades his questions and skews his snide remarks in such a way it's discernible what his preferences are."

In the midst of this, from the seat on the other side of me, Sherman, a thin black man with thick glasses, in his late twenties, articulate, a regular for whom it had not been necessary to acquaint himself with the hotel's accommodations, started to recount his difficulties with, and to ask me questions about ants. No doubt my current residency made me a presumptively knowledgeable source. As we spoke, I heard the Professor say to Andrew on the other side of me, "Try hitting the ashtray every once and a while."

"Perfectionist," Andrew could be heard to say.

"I'm running out of bar rags," the Professor told him, in furtherance of their snappy exchange.

On the other side of me Sherman was saying, "It's like the Ho Chi Minh Trail...they come marching down from the cabinet. It has to be a whole battalion, carrying supplies. I believe they're hauling cracker crumbs and pieces of Chip Ahoys, and potato chips from up there. "

"I'm telling you, don't bother with any of that other crap. Buy those metal stakes that come in a box of ten. Actually, they're designed to be used in gardens. There's a hole in them that has some sticky kind of insecticide inside. Put four or five of those stakes around. After only a couple of days, at the very most, you'll see light at the end of the tunnel."

"Next time I go to Savon. Nothing's safe around the place any more."

"You talking about the guy who got killed?" the Professor asked.

"No," I answered. "We're talking about ants."

The Professor, who already had the remote in his hand, jumped the channel from Fox News, where John Gibson was boring into the camera, to the Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick-at-Nite. The Professor watched Mary for a moment, and then hopped the channel back to Fox News. He muttered over his shoulder to the rest of us, "I don't know." He turned it back to Mary, where Ted Baxter stood delivering news.

"Which one do you want to watch?" the Professor asked.

"Why don't you flip a coin," I answered. "It's exactly the same show."

A young, well-built black man, wearing extremely baggy pants, a tee shirt and a gold chain had come into the bar, and was sidling up beside Sherman on the left of us to order a drink. The Professor spotted him, and went down to take his order. While the Professor fetched it, I overheard the man in the tee-shirt say to Sherman, "Evenin'."

"Evenin'," Sherman answered, no more than politely.

"You like this place, brother?" the man in the tee shirt asked him.

"It's all right for what it is."

"What is it?"

"How about the Southern California version of a degenerated Montmarte café," Sherman informed him, with a sublimely inflated air.

"Whatever that is," the man in the tee shirt said with a rough laugh.

"I just come in to sit and absorb, and take a few notes," Sherman elaborated.

The Professor brought the new arrival his drink, and whipped a payment out of the stack of bills the man in the tee shirt had laid out.

"You in the music biz?" the man inquired of Sherman.

"No, I'm not."

"What kinda hip hop you mostly into, bro?"

"I detest it."

The man in the tee shirt frowned. "Detest what? Detest hip hop?"

"Yes. Hip hop, rap, rock...I detest it all," Sherman declared.

"What the fuck you listen to then, brother?" He feigned a chuckle, adding, "You not listening to the voices in your head are you?"

"I have you to listen to."

The man in the tee shirt cackled and said, "Right. How 'bout I buy you a drink, Holmes?"

"I'm fine. Thanks though."

So what you listen to?"

"Ellington."

"Who?"

"Duke Ellington."

"That's it?"

"Nope."

"Who else?"

"Thelonious Monk...Miles."

"And that's it? That shit?"

"That shit, as you say, and a little Sinatra, occasionally Motown, vintage variety."

"Whew," the man in the tee shirt exclaimed.

I lost the thread of the free exchange of ideas and opinions to the left of me when distraction intruded in the form of raised voices just to the other side of Andrew. A single voice summoning, "Professor," loudly, and then a second time even louder, "Professor," drew my attention. Shouting before looking over to see who was in fact summoning him, the Professor snapped, "What?"

A large blonde man with hair combed down in his face, and bushy, long sideburns bellowed, "Hey, you're too young to be a professor, Professor."

The Professor glanced up, and with a look of recognition, approached the blonde-haired man as well as the man standing beside him at the bar.

"Try to keep the yelling below the supersonic boom level, boys. Are you lover boys having any luck tonight?"

The blonde man turned to the other man and asked, "Are we having any luck tonight?"

I leaned forward, and craned my neck around Andrew to get a better look. Both men at the bar were wearing uniform shirts with names sewn on. The large blonde man's shirt displayed the name Bob, while the shirt of his companion, a thin man with a deeply receding hairline bore the name Ray.

Ray answered drunkenly, "No. We never do."

"Everybody has luck," Bob corrected him. "No such thing as no luck. Fuck, we don't need luck; we need cooter. My kingdom, my kingdom for some cooter pie," he beseeched dramatically, with arms upraised. "Ain't that so Professor? Hey, you're too young to be a professor, Professor."

"I believe you mentioned that," the Professor reminded him calmly. "You men remember what I said, and keep it down to a dull roar. Enjoy yourselves."

The Professor turned and sauntered back down the bar. Andrew had control of the remote, and he resumed acting as spellbound witness to an interrogation of Merv Griffith by Charlie Rose. I resorted once more to eavesdropping on Sherman and his recently acquired debating partner. When I picked up on the conversation again, the man in the tee shirt was asking Sherman, "Brother, you interested in politics at all?"

"If it's a part of politics that pertains to me, yeah, I'm extremely interested."

"That's what I'm saying about the hip hop artists, a lot of the lyrics is politics that has to do with us. Take Dre or Jay-Z...didnya you ever listen to Public Enemy back in the day?"

"I'm all in agreement with Chuck D's politics, I just don't have any affinity with his kind of music...so called music."

"So called music? You rough man...you awfully rough on some brothers."

"You brought it up."

"I tell you what my brother," he told Sherman, "you seem smart. I just like feeling you out."

"I understand."

"What you do for a living?"

Sherman replied to him softly, "Let's just say I'm currently between jobs."

"So what was the last one you had? And what's the next one you plannin' to have if you say you in-between 'em?"

I turned away from the two of them, when Andrew stabbed my ribs with the business end of an elbow. After my involuntary, "Owww," I swung around on him with the look that demanded to know, "What the fuck was that?"

He nodded toward the door and apprised, "Look at this."

Just inside the doorway, moving easterly toward the male customer leaned against a post with his drink in hand was a slightly emaciated and sloppily dressed transvestite. The leaner leveled a pre-emptive, threatening glare, and the new arrival serving double duty moved past. A muscular Latino man awaiting an order from the Professor was approached next, as he patiently stood in back of Andrew. All three of us heard the transvestite say to the man, "I'm looking to suck some cock. Like me to suck yours?"

The prospective recipient of fellatio remained calm and sternly advised the failing seducer, "Move on."

The Latino man's good fortune, when the transvestite behaved as he had been advised, became Andrew's misfortune, as the transvestite stumbled forward to him.

"I'm dying to suck on your cock," the transvestite vamped at Andrew. "Whaddya think?"

"I think you'd have a better chance lady if you didn't scratch your balls while you were asking."

Down the bar, Bob, the big, drunken blonde man had observed with interest the transvestite standing in profile. He hollered, "You can come right over here darling."

The transvestite spun around, straightened up, and moved in Bob's direction. The alarmed, and possibly chastened sober Bob, screamed, "No. Go back. Go back over there. Go back."

The resigned, now four-time loser once again turned around, this time marching directly into the men's room.

Rising voices to the left of me put the swivel in my neck again. The black man wearing the tee shirt was barking at Sherman in a riled voice. "Be careful, walkin' 'round with dat dere colored skin. You gone' get arrested for impersonating somebody of _my_ race."

Brooking no guff, Sherman retaliated, "Street cred doesn't impress me friend. Means zero, less than zero to me. The African race has a very long history of sophistication. This thuggish, ignorant, illiterate street niggah stuff totally misrepresents our people and our heritage. It's an embarrassment as far I'm concerned."

Nearly crackling with voltage, the tee-shirted man responded, "You say I'm embarrassing?"

"In your way."

The man in the tee shirt got a hold of Sherman around the neck, put him in a headlock, while repeatedly grunting the word, "Motherfucker."

Sherman squiggled and squirmed. He finally managed to use his legs to push his barstool away from the bar, and onto the floor. The men followed shortly thereafter. The professor separated them, and straddling Sherman offered him a hand up. He said to the man in the tee shirt, "I don't know what the problem is bud, but you need to leave."

"Glad to," the man said. "Fuck his motherfucking Tom ass."  
As the man in the tee shirt dusted himself off and left, the Professor, pulling Sherman up by the hand, asked, "What in the hell was that about?"

"Duke Ellington."

"Come again?"

Being in the unenviable and unusual position of having to rise in the morning to report along with other of the suffering gainfully employed, my better judgment surpassed its more reliable inferior. I chose to spread my good-byes around, while the premises were still atwitter with our eye blink of a scuffle's wake.

I reported the following morning to the receptionist's desk at Cerebral Features, a production company specializing in the making of documentaries. Instructions descended from the Head of Research, under whose purview was a squadron of researchers; beneath them, yours truly served. The boss was a large female, who with her dirty blonde, and twitching ponytail looked from behind a little like Mr. Ed. Her voice resounded with the same stentorian boom of authority. Often using the "royal we," she presented my duties with the emphasis on the minutiae, using a simplicity of delivery that permitted even the help...me, in other words, to comprehend in full.

I was to be in command and would in fact comprise the entire workforce of the Cerebral Features Resource Center. My job was to hold the fort for the regular overseer of the domain taking vacation. The repository over which I would reign included non-fiction, and fiction books; reference volumes galore; documents, government records, archived magazines, journals and periodicals, videos, and a battery of internet-juiced computer terminals. Fundamentally I was there only to check materials out, and to monitor their usage. I wasn't convinced the company couldn't just give keys to everyone and let them come and go as they pleased, checking out the material of their own accord.

"Cerebral wants," said The Head, " for there to be accountability, as well as security, particularly when it comes to our equipment."

The physical space was loft-size, downtown New York loft size by the way: vaster than the words _cavernous_ or _gymnasium_ convey.

Cerebral Features I came to learn, had three full-length documentaries actively in production. One I was told, took the life, times and family origins of the painter Robert Rauschenberg as its subject. Subjects having to do with the various arts, as well as biographies of artists were frequent and cherished topics of the company's pictures. Another film in the works was a biographical investigation of the butcher-cum-furrier-cum-banker-cum-icon of capitalism-cum-plutocrat's plutocrat, John Jacob Astor. The third film underway delved into the individual slice of the hip-hop world carved by Suge Knight, a rags to better rags in the inner-city story, with all the attendant flying lead, and with the working title: The Life and Times of Suge Knight. The Research Center had in its collection, or had access to material or information about those very subjects of course, and as a research facility appeared loaded for bear.

My first day on the job was uneventful, as uneventful as it was in any way possible for a day to be. Not a living, breathing human form walked through the door for its entirety. I sat there like a flowerpot the first half of the day hoping to present the demeanor of waiting expectantly to be watered. Sometime in the afternoon, I pulled a book from a shelf and read till quitting time. The second day I brought a book of my own, and by afternoon, with the tally of foot traffic still not budged from zero took to one of the computers, and fooled around online the rest of the day.

Moving about at the company beyond the empty enormity of The Resource Center I encountered other employees jitterbugging from place to place, assuring me no general disaster or catastrophe had wiped the personnel slate clean, so to speak. The Head had neither visited, nor communicated with me electronically, telephonically, or otherwise. On the third day I switched from playing online in the afternoon, to playing online in the morning, taking up a book in the afternoon initially, but finally falling asleep. Still no researchers had made the traversal from the theoretical to the corporeal as far as the acting Head of The Resource Center could attest. Research on any current or future documentary production, or anything else had yet to be done in the Resource Center during my becalmed watch.

I'd been circumspect in my pursuit of derangement of the senses each of the evenings previous to a day at work. On the eve of my fourth day I succumbed to multiple temptations, and on the following day slept from morning till lunch, undisturbed by activity of any kind, then after a noon repast, slumbered till the so-called workday reached its end. Thursday night I developed the universally occurring, "flu-like symptoms," with their possible causes reaching infamously to infinitude, and feeling feverish, wondered if I would be capable tomorrow, not so much of making it through the workday, but through the much more stressful, and burdensome effort of traveling across town. The pimperary didn't care for absences due to alleged illness, but were more forgiving when there was evidence of a doctor or an emergency room visit. In order to ascertain the severity of my fever, and assess the worth of making a journey to a hospital, or an Emergi-Care I needed to take my temperature. Undaunted that a thermometer was not among my possessions, I asked around, till I received the tip that my neighbor across the hall, a gaunt man heavily predisposed to, and perhaps religiously devoting his life to the use of stimulants was a current thermometer owner.

I knocked on my neighbor's door, but getting no response, after forty-five or fifty seconds knocked again. After the sound of footsteps, a man asked a grouchy, "Yeah?"

"It's Donovan, your neighbor across the hall."

My hall-mate let me in, reedy as ever, silver-headed, with a silver goatee to match. "I wondered if I could use the thermometer you have. I need to see if I have a temperature."

He led me to a chest of drawers, rummaged in the drawer third from the top and pulled out the standard thermometer.

"You know how to work it?"

"Yes."

He returned to the bed, where obviously he'd been sitting before I had interrupted, picking up a spoon with a powder in it and holding it over a flame pluming above a burner. A younger man with shoulder length hair was sitting in an armchair a couple of feet away.

I took the thermometer into the bathroom, turned the hot water on, and ran it until the steam emanated from the stream. Then I held the thermometer under the spigot until I'd scalded every living microorganism to death, before changing the flowing water from hot to cold. When the thermometer seemed sufficiently cooled, I took it into the other room, sat down on a grocery crate and inserted the thermometer in my mouth. In the meantime, the two men in the room with me talked while they cooked the mother's milk.

The man in the armchair said, "Why do they call it freebasing?"

"I don't know, Jimmy" the man on the bed answered.

"It don't have nothin' to do with baseball?"

The man on the bed's stare lingered on Jimmy's face for a while before he told him, "I don't really see the connection, Jimmy."

"Well shit."

"You didn't leave anything cooking on your hot plate again did you?" the man on the bed asked.

Jimmy shook his head no.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"If you want to go down there and check to see, go now. Christ."

"Ain't nothin' on it man. Shit."

"All right."

Then they sat silently staring at the bubbling liquid. I sat on my crate with the thermometer in my mouth.

All of the sudden, the man on the bed said to Jimmy, "Jimmy, I guess it slipped my mind, but you know you're right about that baseball thing. "

Jimmy furrowed his brow and said, "What baseball thing?"

The man on the bed closed his eyes for a second and shook his head. "Baseball being the origin of the term freebase."

Jimmy ticked up his head in recognition. "Yeah?"

"This coca shit, it comes from down there in Colombia and Bolivia and Peru, those kinds of countries. And...I know you know this...all those baseball players come from down there...pro players in the majors, guys like Jesus, Felipe, Roberto, that kind of shit."

"Yeah."

"So these guys, playing ball down in South America, instead of chewing tobacco, or something else, they chew on these coca leaves...Indians down there used to do it...ballplayers got it from them."

"Huh."

"So, when these players would get on base, they'd have this really excellent boost from chewing the coca leaves, and they'd be able to steal more bases, or run for an extra base on a hit...a free base...freebase..."

"Damn."

I took the thermometer out of my mouth and checked the mercury. It had come to a standstill at the 99.6 mark...one above par. I couldn't get a decent note from an emergency room or a doctor with that. It appeared I wasn't terribly sick. Mine perhaps, were only the delayed symptoms of a time-release hangover coming home to roost. It is the classic situation: miserable in body or mind with a misery that resists quantification whenever the time comes to put the misery to decent use.

I stood, held up the thermometer and informed my neighbor the medical testing was done. I thanked him for use of his equipment, and told him I'd be on my way. As for the thermometer he instructed, "Throw it on the dresser." My nostrils seemed to rise expectantly, as traces of the acrid bouquet floating from the men's vicinity wafted past. I was unable to locate sufficient remorselessness to try to horn in on the two desperados' happy smoke.

I took the aimless route to our de-facto drinking annex next door. I still was feeling no better than crumby. When truly sick, and it was necessary to be absent from work it was beneficial to get the note, regardless of the cost of the medical visit, in order to stay off the pimperary's infamous blacklist...not actually a blacklist, but only the bottom of a list to be called to work, which instead of a blacklist, perhaps more accurately could have been tabbed a black bottom. Among the complaints and disgruntlements I carried into the bar with me inside my personal blue bubble of miasma were: that the hotel I occupied was listed in lodging guides as a five star hotel for rats; that the jobs I worked were worse than electrodes planted in the brain by the CIA as far as their effectiveness at making you go mental; that the world was upside down, and inside out, perpetuating its built-in advantage to, and remaining under the spell of jackals, preening peacocks and hyenas who understood the rest of us all too well for our own good.

I sincerely launched the first drink still intending not to cannibalize my vigor the night before a day of work as a hired hand. Hours later, having sustained through at least a couple changing shifts of dipsomaniacs and fair-weather boozers, I had become thick with the man who had spent a long span of time on the stool beside me. Certainly as we talked and drank, the length of our respective tethers from any commonly agreed standard of sobriety stretched in unison.

"Where _is_ the sunny side of _this_ street, that's what I want to know?" he asked, not so much out of the blue as out of sequence. I told him I would let him know where it was as soon as he bought me another drink.

"I'm tired," he said at some point.

"I know the feeling. I hate to see you go," I added truthfully, "but maybe you should turn in your glass for the night and rest up."

"No. Not that kind of tired."

"No?"

" _Everything_ is tired. All of it is _worn_ out. I'm so tired of everything being tired...I mean the 'I have a dream' thing I've done to myself so much I'm laughing at the fucking thing myself, really laughing, at the impossibility anything, I mean anything _will_ ever, _could_ ever go your way...you know, something important enough to give you some dignity. And besides that, when even every single trace of mystery about how the screwers continually screw the screwees is gone, and you realize there wont be anymore of the titillation you got from those revelations, you know you're really in a permanent pit of blah."

This struck me as extremely funny. Extremely funny in a bitter way or bitterly sad way, I concede.

I replied, "Nobody said it was going to be a tank of laughing gas. I wish they'd said, or hinted that it was going to be like having your ears sheared off with a Black and Decker saw."

This made _him_ cackle, the both of us now not so much happy drunks, as drunks with spasmodic funny bones. The man had said little about himself, an inclination I understood more than adequately.

He said, "It's all pro-forma. That's not the party line. If it was, nobody would even bother; so I guess the deities in charge know what they're doing."

"There are deities in charge of this? Listen, nobody ever said...here I go again with the nobody said...maybe somebody said it, we just didn't hear it, that whoever set all this up so it would cause so much hair-pulling was stupid or incompetent."

He was average size, had a ruddy face, curly dark hair, probably handsome to women but who the hell knew. He was likely older than me, but not by much, I didn't think. Though I knew little about him other than his capacity for gin, he had mentioned listening to classical music, and even that he liked to compose it. I wasn't clear if he meant compose it in a casual way or a serious way. He said he didn't like to talk about it and I needed no additional emphasis to understand him. As far as composing was concerned, I think the problem was that hardly anybody had ever seen or heard what he'd composed.

"You're doomed, you sense it from the beginning," he said. "You want to kill yourself, but you convince yourself it's premature. But naaaah. You're fooling yourself. God, I hate that."

"Me too. More than anything." The Professor, acting as a sort of composite Olympic committee of judges, gave our state of intoxication, and attendant asininity through his words and body language the equivalent of 9's and 10's all the way across.

"Jesus I feel pounded down."

I didn't answer, just took a gulp of my drink.

"If I'd been totally without a scrap of luck or ability, or talents, particularly luck in a lot of things, it would have made sense, or been easier for me to accept, or to understand. Why dump all this in my lap if it's only going to end up entirely squandered? 'It's all up to you.' Up to me, my motherfucking ass."

He became more self-revelatory, not as a result of urging, prodding or baiting from me, as the gin continued to pour into the reservoir.

"I've spent so much time composing, thousands upon thousands of hours over years and years. There's nothing to show for it. Not a thing. Nothing."

"I probably know as little about modern classical music as it's possible to know. "

"A lot of people composing for fewer and fewer listeners."

"Did you study it?"

"I was a music major in college, concentrating on piano, but that doesn't really have to do with anything. I didn't go on with the academic study of composing. Basically I'm self-taught."

"So how did you learn to do it?"

"Building on the foundation of musical training I'd had, reading tons of scores, listening to recordings to make the correspondences between the scores and the instrumentation...the actual sounds from the records."

The man excused himself to the restroom. The Professor leaned in and said, "A guy from the college in Santa Clara was in here one time hanging out with that guy, and he told me the guy writes incredible music."

"Seems pretty sharp."

"I'm not much of a classical music type."

"No kidding? I thought you spent all your time away from here going to symphonies."

"No, but I keep hoping you'll spend more time away from here."

"I know about the usual classical music suspects, but beyond that...I guess I'm reasonably content with my ignorance."

"You'd think with more alcohol you'd be less sarcastic."

"I know. It doesn't seem to work."

"It doesn't."

When my freshly bonded pal returned to the seat beside me he lowered himself to sit, barely touching his pants to the seat before shooting back up as though the seat were a scalding stovetop. Then he stood in front of it craning his neck down and around to examine himself.

"See if I forgot to do anything before I left the bathroom...if I can put it so elegantly," explaining himself, before taking a drunk's care to scrutinize his clothing to be absolutely certain the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed, if you will.

"I think you check out," I offered, "even though I'm probably not the world's most eagle-eyed inspector at the moment."

"I'll consider myself to have passed since I don't see any potential inspectors here who look to me to be in better condition."

"But then in your condition, who are you to judge?" I asked hooting like a drunk.

He sat back down, and after I had scooped the cocktail napkin I'd sent airborne off the floor where it had landed, retrieving it with the gracefulness of a penguin eating baby peas with chopsticks and balancing on a longneck bottle of Coors, both of us were back in our seats.

"I'm pretty sure you're the first classical music composer I've made acquaintance with in here." I mentioned, taking up my drink again.

"You're meeting them in the right order, starting at the bottom and moving up, if level of public accomplishment or extent of recognition are criteria."

"Fuck 'em," I said, "if they can't take a joke," coming close, but getting no cigar for the direct relationship of my response to the statement made.

"Yeah," he said somewhat sullenly, reflecting on the dismalness of his perceived stature, or feeling the silliness of my response as a kind of dismissal.

"What do you do with compositions?" I asked, reiterating my interest. "Unless they have an orchestra handy, what do composers do with music? If it's music for piano I suppose you perform it yourself."

"I use the piano to compose, but I don't perform. I don't care for performing. When you're composing but not performing...that's known as being a pure composer. And no, I don't like the unfortunate suggestion of purity," he added with a boozy chuckle.

"Then what's supposed to happen to the compositions? What do _you_ do with them when you're finished?"

"For somebody like me, the main thing, about the only thing you can do is try to hook yourself up with a music publisher. You try to find one who'll publish your scores."

"I'll spit into the wind and guess you've already tried that."

He laughed harshly and said, "You could say I have."

"So that's the whole ballgame basically, at least for people who don't perform themselves? Music publishing companies are it?"

"You can send them out cold to orchestra directors, or conductors, but the actual person you send them to rarely sees them."

"Who sees them?"

"Assistants, secretaries, screeners, flunkies, sycophants... everybody but."

"The way of the world," I proclaimed with a knowledgeable belch.

"So it seems...at least if my miserable existence is any guide."

If it's possible to inwardly wince I did so when his sorrow and frustration expressed themselves so acutely. "The guardians at the gate, and not very astute ones at that," I managed.

"Looks that way to me."

"So what would this hypothetical music publisher do, what do they do with scores? What do they do for the composer in the eventuality these hypothetical scores actually get accepted?"

"They make money off copyrights and royalties. But classical music is the least commercially viable of it all, surprise, surprise."

"I don't know Bach from Botox."

"No?"

"Not as bad as that really. I have an occasional fling with classical."

"That's all we ask," he said, smiling again. He called for the Professor to provide refurbishment to his empty glass, and as the need was being addressed continued. "Music publishers publish the scores, they produce sheet music, they distribute it for rental, for studying, or in the best case scenario, performance. They lay out money to promote the composers they represent. Nowadays, they finance the production of demos; they hire somebody to play the score, make CD's they can send around to record companies. The publisher signs a contract with the record company, and then the record company finds artists to record the music, then sells the records, and so on and so on. The publisher usually promotes the music for television or movies or videos...even theater musicals, or advertisements, anything and everything."

"Does it usually work...I mean, once the publisher accepts somebody and gets the process rolling?"

"Sometimes a composer gains recognition, sometimes not. Sometimes the publisher and the composer turn a profit, other times they don't. It's a crapshoot like everything else. I don't know what the odds are, but I doubt they're good."

"So, say there's a little success, how do you, or, how does this theoretical composer make money? Royalties?" I tried to be careful now to make the questions as painlessly impersonal as humanly possible.

"Voila. For somebody like me, royalties. If people start to commission scores, commission symphonies or chamber music or whatever, you're home free, financially, or at least able to make a living above subsistence."

He took a Thirsty Man gulp of gin. "Commissions are a major source of income for composers, especially pure composers who don't perform." After a pause he added, "Of course, I don't do anything at all, other than write music, send it out, then throw the envelopes away when they send it back." He emitted a piercing sigh. "I've never made a penny, never made any money whatsoever, never gotten a dime for composing music. I've never heard any of my music performed. Failed, completely."

"Last call," the Professor belted out, its arrival as astonishing to the ears of patrons, as Taps would be played above the undead. But to me its timing was a relief, saving me from an immediate need of response to something I had no decent response for.

"This isn't the oblivion I was hoping for," my buddy said. "This work is far from done."

"I admire the ambition," I told him, "but given the time, I think you're staggering at windmills."

"Not necessarily," he said.

Overhearing, the Professor admonished, "You're forcing me to say this...the good news is: you don't have to go home. The bad news is: you can't stay here."

My new pal piped up, "I remember things...like my name, my address, and most of my personal history."

"What _is_ your name?"

"Fred. What's yours?"

"Donovan."

"Fred and Donovan. Sounds like tap dancers or a fucking gospel music duet, or worse."

"It doesn't sound good."

"We should keep this going. I've got some weed at home."

"How far is home? I need to have a reasonable shot at getting back here...I live at Hotel Terminus," gesturing toward my lodgings.

"Like two and a half blocks away."

"Weed, huh?"

"Good stuff."

"Well nobody ever says, 'I got some weed' or 'I got some blow, but it's really lousy."

"Usually not. But this _is_ good stuff."

We got the last ones from the Professor, disposed of them, and adjourned to the street. We did the moonwalk down the cratered sidewalk to Fred's place. The clouds had blown ashore so we noisily ricocheted past a gauntlet of mist-bound, and yellow drooping streetlamps, palm fronds poking out of feathery sheaths above our heads. His part of the neighborhood two blocks west, and half a block north of mine was better than my own by a factor of the slightest amount above negligible. His housing wasn't too bad, however. It was a lower middle-class complex of weathered, though not battered bungalows.

The inside walls were orange. Fred had a living room with a gaping sofa that was virtually a siren's call to languidness, a coffee table, a couple of big, worn, low-slung chairs, bookshelves sagging with tomes, some sheet music, a stereo, and a pile of neatly arranged CD's. It wasn't all that different from my own little slices of Beatdom over the years.

"I have some gin here. You drink gin?"

"In combat conditions, yeah. By any means necessary."

The bedroom housed his piano, but other than that room was left for little except a mattress, part of which lay beneath the piano. A bottle and two glasses came back with him from the kitchen. He sat on the sofa. I sat in one of the chairs. We downed some gin and he produced his tiny bat pipe and a plastic bag of green. He'd been right and I'd been cynical. The chronic was good. Tubs of vodka, of gin, of superior ganja, and I barely knew where I was.

It wasn't long before we got back to topics we had saddled ourselves with at the bar. As it had begun to do there, merriment was leaving the building.

"Hold onto your dream, that's the lesson, hold onto your dream," Fred mocked, calling up award acceptance remarks from a thousand points of celebrity.

"You've inspired me, Fred."

"Christ."

I tried to light a smoke, but the lighter, no matter how many times I ground the metal together refused to spark. But matches were on the coffee table beside our pouch of vegetation. Cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, I pontificated as though it were cocktail hour at the Kiwanis.

"Don't give up, Fred. If you work hard, work your fingers to the bone, never give up, never, never stop...well, there's no stopping you. Hell, if you never stop, there wouldn't be any stopping you...so, looks like logic is in your favor, Fred."

He looked gloomy.

"You'll get there, Fred, old Freddy boy, you'll get there." I was spinning like a top now. Perhaps some flotsam of merriment remained, but was blowing south.

"Yeah," he muttered woozily, "hard work, persistence... _fuck_ me... honing, perfecting your abilities, _fuck that_...staying different from the rest, different from the rest, yeah, yeah...fuck, fuck _fuck_. Tell me more _motherfucking_ lies, _please_." He held up his drink. "Here here, more lies, more lies...lies, lies," and he was really reeling.

"I don't care much for your pessimism, Fred."

His face cracked a sliver of a smile.

"I really have worked...hard and ambitiously, persistently, doggedly...I'm almost certain I'm extremely good, and authentically original, Donovan. I wouldn't say that to anybody else. I never have. Sorry," he apologized, sounding fleetingly as if he was dead sober. "All of it to no effect."

"I bet you are, Fred. Goddamn right you are. No need to apologize, for any fucking thing."

I was suddenly conscious of some dreadful kind of discomfort just below my waist, until I realized I hadn't urinated in an ice age or two. I took my turn in the facility, and when I sat back down in my chair, a copy of Final Exit, the famous self-help book for suicides, with its recipes and its tables and charts and descriptions for the savvy consumer who wished to ensure the most effective suicide money could buy was lying cover up on the coffee table. I realized then as well, that we had been surrounded by an acoustic bombardment of piano and symphony, something of a particularly lachrymose variety. Fred's head was down and resting in his palms as though it was throbbing with pain.

"What's the matter, Fred?"

"I can't do this any more, I can't...I can't, I can't," he said in an agonized voice. "I can't do any of it anymore. I'm not going to...no, I can't. I'm taking off. Fuck it." He took another heavy belt of gin and kind of swooned back against the sofa cushion.

"This music may not be helping how you feel. It's sort of on the sad side. What is it?"

"Scriabin," he said. "The Russian composer, Scriabin."

I'd just begun answering, "I've heard of him," when he bounced from the sofa over to the music system, stopped what was coming out of the speakers, made a rapid vertical scan of the stacks of discs, singled one out and stuck it in the machine. As he was sitting back down a fairly perky Scott Joplin ragtime began to fill the room.

"Toe-tapper," he said, taking another hit from the pipe.

"Uh huh," I said flatly, dazed by the Dada incongruity of the total situation.

He leaned forward and flipped the book back over, then put his index finger on the page and slid it down, finally moving it left to right across the page. He looked up at me for a second and said, "Don't worry about any of this."

"I don't know," I said uncertainly.

"Shit," he said, getting up from the sofa and going into the kitchen. I lit another smoke, and leaned back in the chair with my gin. Scott Joplin's piano tinkled sunnily along. Eight or nine minute later, sensing through my layers of medication that Fred hadn't returned from the kitchen, I sprang up, and looked in. He was standing at a kitchen counter, gripping a pestle in his hand and twisting it inside a bowl. There was a glass of milk beside the bowl on one side, and on the other, six or seven overturned pill containers.

"What are you doing?" I asked with unconcealed alarm.

"Making myself something to drink," he answered.

I walked over and stood to his left. I picked up one of the prescription bottles and was squinting at the label when he said, "Seconal." Then he pulled a sugar bowl out from against the wall, removed the lid, revealing a brown looking powder and told me, "Cyanide."

"Jesus Fred."

He mixed it all in together, and pounded away with the pestle.

"Come on, Fred," I beseeched. "You know I can't stand here letting this happen."

"Don't stand there, then," he said with a grim, stoned giggle. He upended the bowl, and dumped the pill powder down into the liquid, then began to stir it with a spoon, until he had a glass of rich chocolaty lethal milk. Suddenly he appeared to sort of buckle at the knees, trying to hold himself up by hanging onto the edge of the counter.

"Come on, man," I said, pulling at him and loosening his grip, causing him to cling instead to me. Then I shuffled with him back to the living room and dropped him on the sofa.

By the time I got back to the armchair his eyes were closed. By the time I had a cigarette burning in my mouth he was loudly snoring. I sat there, perhaps an hour, possibly an hour and a half. The ragtime never stopped. I turned the living room lights out and went into the kitchen. The killer milkshake was sitting there, along with the rest of it. I figured Fred would likely wake up from his drunken night, take a look at it and be scared straight. I considered the possibility, stretching the definition of what it is to "consider" when one is in the state I was in, that he might be reinvigorated with the "can-do spirit" next morning and try again. "I doubt it," I said aloud. I thought of dumping it in the sink but said to myself, "Maybe the shit's expensive." I hated to waste it, even if it was deadly poison. It was after all, his deadly poison. So I left it. If he was going to do the thing, having to go to the trouble of mixing up another batch wasn't going to stop him. I guess I could have called the cops, but both snitching, and coercing someone to live went strongly against my peculiar grain, more so because of, or despite, being stupefied with drink and weed.

The next morning I actually resurrected and got myself to Cerebral Features. Once there the day's toil more or less had been completed. I scrunched myself into the fetal position in my chair behind the desk and snoozed. The severity of physiological deterioration inflicted the night before dragged at me like sopping, muddy clothes. Woozy, weak, anemic, and fully pitted in the gut, I slept without waking till three in the afternoon. Improved, I closed up shop for the duly authorized lunch break, walked down to the nearby deli for a sub and a monster Coke. Feeling much better after that I returned to my post at the Cerebral Features Resource Center, where nary a documentarian roamed. Easing back into my chair, feeling relaxed, satiated and warm, though still beat, I yawned, heaved a drawn out sigh, and within a few minutes returned to a deep slumber. I ended up putting in a little overtime, unauthorized and unpaid of course, leaving for good near the waning of dusk. The Head's office door was standing open when I passed, so I stopped, and let her know I was going. She thanked me for my service, and asked me how the week had gone, inquiring if there had been, "many difficulties at all?"

"Cakewalk," I told her.

The workweek, as it were, concluded, I stopped off in my room for cosmetic sprucing up before heading down to the pied-a-dive for cocktails. After the Professor brought the first he made a crack about the "spectacle of consumption" Fred and I had provided the night before. In between naps during the day I had recalled the previous night, though nothing had caused me to reassess the likelihood of Fred's rebound the following day. Yet sitting there now with a drink I was visited by misgivings.

After another one, both for fortification and to finish off my work-related stress, I paid up and moved on. The cool air was tingling already with a trace of typical Friday night sizzle and the streets had begun to bottleneck with weekend traffic. The travel time to Fred's seemed quicker than the night before. After the short walk, I confidently located the bungalow again, and knocked at his door. To my relief, the door opened. Fred was standing there wearing a coat as if he was about to leave. He had a box wedged under an arm. Rather than invite me in, he stepped outside.

"How's it going?" I greeted him.

"That's a hard one. I was just stepping out for a minute," he said, closing the door behind him. "Why don't you come with me?"

"All right. Where are we going?"

"Come on," was all he said, and started walking.

We walked along the sidewalk, passing bungalows on one side, parked cars on the other. Turning onto another sidewalk we continued until finally passing through the open gate in a wrought iron fence. We were in back of all the bungalows, stopped at the edge of a concrete patio beyond which there was a tiny yard. Far in the back of the yard was the community dumpster. I had stopped when Fred had stopped. He brought his cigarettes out and began to smoke. Standing beside him, I did the same, the two of us smoking and staring into the darkened yard.

"I wanted to see how you were doing," I said.

"I'm doing fine. He's not."

"He? Who's he?"

He pulled the box from under his arm and held it in his outstretched arms. "Van Dyke Parks is dead."

"Huh?"

"My cat. Van Dyke Parks is the name of my cat. He went into the kitchen last night while I was zonked, got up on the counter and drank some bad milk, really bad milk."

"Right. The milk. You have a cat?"

"I did."

"So the other Van Dyke Parks is still alive?"

"As far as I know. I hope so."

"Where in the hell was your cat last night when I was there?"

"He hides when people come over."

Fred started forward again, and I followed him through the yard. I walked beside him up to the dumpster. I told him I was sorry his cat was dead. He took a cat toy out of a pocket of the heavy parka he was wearing, opened the makeshift casket with Van Dyke Parks inside, lovingly laid the cat toy in, and replaced the lid. He blew a hard stream of smoke out between his teeth. It was a chilly night, chilly enough that we could see our breath in the air too. We stood a few moments more silently smoking the cigarettes. Fred heaved the box with the cat inside over the side and into the maw of the dumpster.

"I never saw that cat," I said

#

#

# 

# CHAPTER EIGHT

THE SEX HOTEL

"Man," the Professor said with emphasis.

I said, "What?" not aware yet of what his "man" was referring to.

"There," he answered, suggesting I follow his stare to the source of the "man."

I swiveled in my seat and saw an extraordinarily pretty woman in her twenties, long wavy auburn hair, wearing a flowery dress and elevated pumps, walk from the entrance over to a booth and take a seat. She didn't look around, only looked in front of her as she sat in the booth. Andrew beside me was doodling, in contrast to purposeful cartooning, as he, the professor and I observed her. She crossed one leg over the other, a long smooth slender leg, rocking back and forth across her other. The cliché about heroism is that often the hero is simply a person who is so cold or hungry, so desperate, he or she feels they have nothing whatsoever to lose by acting. Behaving out of a similar motivation, recently deprived of sexual sport, and presently marinated in tedium and sameness, I acted heroically. I got up off my chair, and walked over to speak to the woman.

"There aren't any waitresses here," I said to her, "shocking as it might sound."

"I don't need a waitress," she answered.

A well off looking guy who had just come into the bar and proceeded scanning the place, held a steady gaze in the direction of the booth, then started over. As he brushed past me sitting down in the booth, he said to the woman, "Crazy little thing."

Looking at him and not at me, she said, "Buy me a drink, Damien."

I said to the both of them, "Later," and as I turned to walk away I thought I saw the woman smile at me, though she uttered nothing.

"Goodness," I said to the rest when I sat back down.

"Yeah, she is something," the Professor affirmed.

"What's she doing in here?" Raul, from his usual position a few seats down the bar inquired of the gallery in general.

"Uh, Hollywood," the Professor said.

"Yeah," Raul said, "But _here_?"

"Who gives a fuck," Andrew answered testily to the various distractions, busy devouring the woman's legs with his eyes.

"Close enough," the Professor answered Raul, "the greater Los Angeles area."

"I'll never leave, and this is why," Andrew said.

A glance back at the booth, after the time it took me to have another vodka, revealed that Damien, the escort of our arriviste beauty was out of his seat, and in transit to the restroom. Somewhere in mid glance the woman started to look at me, doing so for maybe seven seconds, looking down at her drink and quickly thereafter lifting it to her lips. I turned away. Thirty seconds later, as I cursed the persistence of my sense of hearing while Leno discussed the uses of rabbit fur with Pamela Anderson, there was a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around the woman was there.

"Hello," I said.

"How come this place doesn't have a jukebox?" she asked.

"Music from a jukebox would make it difficult to discern nuances in the deeply philosophical conversations conducted here."

She snickered, and said, "Aren't you full of it."

"Yeah, he is." Andrew answered on my behalf. "Chock full."

"This is Andrew by the way," I said.

She put her arm out and said, "Hi Andrew. I'm Janice."

She turned to me and said, "And you're?"

"Donovan."

"Donovan? Hmmm."

"Donovan hmmm? My name caused you a whiff of suspicion?"

"I wouldn't..." and stopping, she cocked her arm and waved at Damien coming out of the bathroom in order to draw him over.

"This is Donovan," she said when he got there. "Donovan, this is Damien."

I said, "Hello."

Damien said, "Hi."

"And Andrew," Janice said, pointing.

And again Damien said, "Hi."

Andrew grunted, "Hello...uh, Damien."

Janice then asked Andrew and me, "Why don't you come over and sit with us?"

Andrew told her, "I believe I'll pass. Conan's coming on."

"All right," she said, as she turned to me.

"Why not. Let's sit right down together," I said, with a great big smile at Damien.

We ordered a fresh round of drinks before adjourning to our booth. My tablemates had been at a sushi bar before arrival here, a factoid I learned after we'd moved to our new location. I had no choice but to vehemently denounce the taste of sushi.

"I think what he's really trying to say Damien, is that he's way too cool to do anything as supposedly trendy as eating sushi."

"What I'm trying to say is, when I have a taste for a sixteen inch radial tire, then I'll let you know, and we'll go and have sushi."

Tilting her head to the side, she said, "Damien here works for a brokerage company."

Damien nodded confirmation.

"There's nothing at all trendy about that," she added.

I chuckled and said, "There's certainly not."

"What sort of not too trendy, but just trendy enough work," Damien said, "do you do?" looking at me.

"I'm in temporary word processing and clerical work, Damien."

Damien hooted and said, "And there's certainly nothing trendy about that."

"I figured you for something a little more arty," Janice observed. "You sure do like the bullshit."

"You never know," I said.

"What's that mean? I was right? See, I'm not so dumb."

"Despite what Damien keeps telling you."

"Being such a clever fellow," Damien cracked, pleased with what he'd come up with so far, "why are you in this hole instead of one of the hot spots on every block if you go a little further over? That neighborhood is getting, uh...I'd call it trendy. Still pretty shitty neighborhood, but trendy."

"I used to go over to Joseph's every once and a while."

"Where's that?"

"Over on Ivar, near the intersection with Yucca."

"What's it like?"

"Friendly. Attractive women, if you're interested in that sort of thing."

"You're not?"

"I am. I was thinking of you and trying to be considerate."

"I'm the one who's actually with a woman."

"How much have you had to spend on her so far to keep it that way? You can round the figure off if you want."

"You're really not very funny at all," he said, "kind of a loser."

I smiled and said, "Good one, Damien."

"Hey," Janice interrupted, "this is supposed to be fun. That really wasn't very nice, Donovan."

"He gives obtuseness a bad name."

"Love the hundred dollar words," he sneered.

"You should buy one sometime, then."

"Screw you."

I smiled.

First to me, then to Damien, Janice put her index finger over her lips and went, "Shhhhhhhhhhh." Then she asked me, "You really a regular in this...place?"

"I really am."

"Why?"

"I like it, don't ask me why. Also I live next door. That has a lot to do with it."

"You live next door? In that dumpy hotel?" She frowned. "You just like to mess with us don't you Donovan?"

"I like to mess with you, Janice. But I really live in the place next door. The Essex Hotel is the name of it. We in the trendy set call it The Sex Hotel."

"Oh really?" She made a face that was supposed to mock astonishment. "Why is that? I think I'm going to be sorry I asked."

"The reason is obvious. That's all I'm going to say."

"Yeah, I bet it's obvious," she smirked. "Sex Hotel, huh?"

"That's very clever," Damien piped up. "Hookers, Sex Hotel, pretty sharp."

"You're always wrong, but on the positive side you're consistent."

Janice began to laugh heartily at Damien's expense. "Okay," she said, "what exactly is it I have to do to find out why you call the place the Sex Hotel? I'm sure you're dying to tell me."

"Go outside?" I said.

She looked at me and shrugged. Damien just looked.

"No, you don't have to do anything," I went on. "But I'm telling the truth. The reason for the name is entirely obvious, completely out in the open. There's noting secret about it, and nothing special you have to do to find out."

"I'm just brimming with curiosity," Damien said, doing his dead level best to be sarcastic.

"I thought for sure, on the basis of the coruscating conversation you were the probing, curious, inquisitive type, Damien."

"You're really getting your money's worth out of that vocabulary, aren't you _Donovan_?"

Looking from one to the other of us, Janice said, "Boys...BOYS." Then again turning exclusively to me, she formulated the following: "Let's say, for the sake of conversation, that I believe you actually live next door. _Why_ do you live next door?"

"My ship hasn't come in, yet. It hasn't even left the dock, on the other side of the ocean. I use what I've got for my own priorities."

"Like, drinks?" she asked, smiling.

"Clever girl. Nothing more important in these troubled times than drugs and alcohol is there?"

"Oh no."

"And time. Drugs, alcohol and time...in no particular order."

"Whaddaya say we finish these and take off?" Damien proposed, only to Janice of course.

Janice glanced down at her glass, which was a quarter full. "Ummm, not just yet Damien. Why don't we get another drink? Please...pretty please?"

"I've still got half a beer here. But I'll get another one for you." He got up abruptly and started for the bar.

"You and Damien really have to stop acting like such _boys_ ," she scolded in a conspicuously girly way.

"But we are _boys_."

She was explaining what a nice fellow he really was when he returned with her drink. After sitting it down and after she'd thanked him for it, he appeared to collect himself before asking in a straightforward way, "So do you have any opinions on all the investments and developments in the not too distant, trendy, Hollywood neck of the woods?" Not so straightforwardly he added, "If that's not too mundane a subject."

"As long as you can get a slice of greasy pizza there at four in the morning, I don't give a shit what they develop there or don't."

"You know, I was down there...you know...in that neighborhood," Janice began, her effort to contribute to the new era of détente, "four or five months ago, and there were all these people standing with candles in front of that tall, weird looking building that's on Vine. I wonder what THAT was about?"

"You mean the building shaped like a stack of records?" Damien asked, against his better interest unable to hide surprise.

Janice nodded yes.

"That's the Capitol Records building, sweetheart."

"Oh."

"That must have been the anniversary," I said, "of the shooting of Lennon. They do that every year on the anniversary."

" _John_ Lennon?" she asked proudly. "The Beatles?"

"One in the same," I said.

"That was awful. I don't actually remember it, since I was, like, three years old or something, but it was an awful thing."

"Yep."

"Let me feel your skin," she said to me out of the blue, and reached her hand across the table, rubbing the back of her hand up and down against my cheek. "Amazing. Such pretty skin," she declared.

Damien rolled his eyes in quite dramatic fashion.

"I have to attribute it," I said, "to years of soaking my face in Ivory Liquid."

"Where do you get this stuff?" she said.

"I don't know. Sorry. I take it back."

"Wasn't there a commercial years ago where a woman soaked her hands in Ivory Liquid? You really learn a lot, really, from Nick-at-Nite. Do they even make Ivory Liquid anymore?"

"Feel free to field that one, Damien."

"I have no idea if they still make Ivory Liquid," he said.

"I remember the commercial, Janice. I'm as in the dark as Damien is as to whether it's still sold."

"I'm going to look next time I go to the grocery store," she said. "I'll let you know."

"Good. I don't think either Damien or I will get a full night's sleep until we find out...right, Damien?"

"Uh huh," he muttered.

"Such a meanie," Janice pretended to scold.

"Nahhh." Since nobody else was ready to say anything, I ventured, "So Damien, investment banking?"

"Is there more?" Damien asked. "Is that your clumsy way of asking me to tell you something about investment banking?"

"Absolutely not. I'd be offended...probably nauseated if you did."

"So I gather, Mr. Temporary Clerical Work, something as lucrative as investment banking wouldn't meet your approval?"

"I haven't given it much thought. I bet banking, real estate and insurance are the bottom three on Kohlberg's Scale of Moral Development, though."

"I don't know what that is, but I guess that's why you brought it up."

"No Damien. I figured you'd be entirely familiar with it, and we'd hash the subject out till it was exhausted."

"I think this is exhausted...listening to all this horseshit has exhausted me. Janice?" he implored hopefully.

"Damien?" she answered, defeating hope.

"Then if I'm going to stick around even longer I guess I should try to learn as much as I can from such a...well, from such a learned man as yourself, Donovan."

"Okay. What do you want to know? Shoot."

Stony-faced, he said, "It strikes me as a real shame, a _tragedy,_ that someone as gifted as you has to squander all of those brains doing simple-minded clerical work. Couldn't you find another job, genius? You've made a career out of office work, and hanging around getting drunk in shitholes?"

"Now that you mention it, I haven't made a career out of temporary office work, though lately, it's had its rewards. I was in a different line of work before that, squandering my brains on something else. But I resigned in order to relocate geographically."

"What line was that?"

"I was a contributor to a reference book called The Encyclopedia of American Political History, published by Pyramid Books, the actual employer." I was ever ready to whip out the old resume.

"Uh huh, you worked on some kind of history book, supposedly. Doing what? You're being pretty vague for some mysterious reason," he said with a clearly pleased chuckle.

I explained the basic procedures to him, and the basic facts, as they pertained to my participation, the way I had explained them to others before.

"I guess I'll have to look at one of them sometime," he told me. "What kind of _topics_ would it have?"

"It's an encyclopedia. It's alphabetical," Janice assisted helpfully.

"Get it, Damien?" I indulged myself with my own chuckle, and added, "A history of American politics in encyclopedia form. Look, I'll write you up an example. I'll do a quick sample of an entry in the encyclopedia, exactly in the form it would be in the book, except the contents will be the stuff I include when I do them just for fun." I explained I would need pen and paper, and though they seemed not fully comprehensive of the endeavor about to be undertaken they kept it to themselves, quietly providing what I'd asked them for, paper from Damien, pen from Janice's purse.

While I wrote, Janice excused herself to the ladies' room. Damien sat there silently, perhaps observing me or perhaps not, none of my attention going toward noticing where _his_ attention was going.

Janice was back at the table and she and Damien were exchanging opinions about the customary amount of ice in Cosmopolitans when I finished writing. "Anytime you're ready," I said, holding the paper up.

"Yaaay," Janice chirped, clapping her hands. Damien only said, "All right," and folded his arms.

"We're consulting the Encyclopedia of American Political History, turning to the entry," I said, "for _The Meese Commission_. Ah, here we are:

##

##

##

## The Meese Commission

_Ronald Reagan, fulfilling his campaign pledge to restore to the nation the Puritanism that once made America sexually repressive, directed his Attorney General Igor, aka Edwin Meese, to appoint himself a commission with the mandate of determining the link of causality between gluing one's eyes to a picture of a female pair of legs spread at an angle of one-hundred and sixty degrees, and chopping off heads with a rusty wood saw. In particular, one of its goals was to repudiate the 1970 Presidential Commission on Pornography, which concluded that a little porn in the average American's basic diet could do no harm; and might even be an asset to healthy living. That commission stipulated that reading naughty text or viewing dirty pictures neither caused one to behave like a horse's ass or to attempt to violate one in a fit of porn-induced bestiality. For his hand picked commission Igor put together a collection of coitus-phobic goofballs, who had excelled previously in the area of producing reactionary viewpoints on a variety of social and cultural issues. They dutifully noted in their final report that the First Amendment was not designed to permit anything as_ _catastrophic to the national welfare as sexual stimulation for its own sake. One commissioner, Henry Hudson, in his earlier role as attorney for an unfortunate suburb of Washington, D. C., received a presidential commendation for shutting down every massage parlor and adult bookstore in his fevered county. Another commissioner, Park Dietz, believed that cranking off to particularly kinky pictures turned one invariably into a bicycle-seat-sniffing zombie, and that detective magazines were Beelzebub's work. Another, Bruce Ritter, a Franciscan priest, later was exposed for buggering boys in his Times Square shelter for runaways, Bruce's Covenant House subsidized by, and Brucey himself used as a hand-puppet by the screwhead right. The final report of Igor's commission caused a profusion of bodily fluid to saturate the groins of two strident, anti-fucking activists from the hard school of anti-testicular feminism: Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the latter Queen of The Woodkillers through the breadth of The Milky Way. During two-day hearings the commission held across the country, anti-friction fanatics generally were listened to with calm appreciation, and always spared cross-examination, while defenders of expressions of sublime manifestations of salaciousness were attacked with screwdrivers and frying pans. The Commission hired a Canadian sociologist named Edna F. Einsiedel to_ _skim the studies already on the library shelves and summarize for the commission, previous studies of inappropriate representations of luridness depicted for the arousal of horny alien creatures, and those depictions' effects on vulnerable yet innocent Earthlings into whose hands such depictions accidentally had fallen. She reported that, "No evidence currently exists that actually links fantasies with specific sexual offenses; the relationship at this point remains an inference." She told them that America's finer pornography products in some cases had been of value to therapists, who had used them to treat their patients. For her trouble the uppity chick had a rag stuffed in her mouth in the form of a gag order obtained by Alan Sears, one of Igor's best and most dominant commissioners, whom nothing aroused more than a_ _submissively gagged and bound Canadian social scientist. Ms. Einsedel's conclusions, apparently written in invisible ink, were not visible to the naked eye in the Commission's Final Report (Ixnay on that shit, Igor decided). The leather-hooded eleven commissioners also excitedly snuffed testimony from social scientists, to the effect that sexual attitudes are formed early on in life, and that wanking material is "a symptom of deviant sexuality rather than a cause." In other words, perverts are born, not made, and that if you aspire to become a pervert look to your nature and not to your nurturing for an optimal result._

In July 1986, when the commission issued the final report, Igor was photographed at the press conference holding the two-volume, 1,960-page dose of saltpeter in his sweaty palms. Some of the brainstorms the commission had for reducing occurrences of porn-fired genitalia, were: government requirements that peep show booths must not have doors, or holes in the walls between booths; nuclear war on America's beloved smut using the RICO Act; and proscribing anything that could potentially make a Tom tumescent, from being transmitted across telephone or cable lines, a cat now so far out of the bag, the bag itself long since has forgotten it ever imprisoned a cat. Of course, since the glory-hole days of the Meese Commission, through cable television, videos and the Internet, Americans have been voting with their libidos in favor of getting themselves off with the assistance of filth. Praise the Lord and pass the AstroGlide.

That's all, folks."

Janice's eyes were big and round, but she was smiling.

Damien said, "You're nuts. What a lot of bullshit. If you ever really worked on any book like that, if there really is such a book, it didn't have that kind of bullshit in it."

"That's very astute, Damien. I told you it was an example...a version of the entries I do for my own amusement."

"Well give yourself all the amusement you want. Who cares about any of that shit?"

"I didn't mind the sexy talk at all," Janice said.

"Well, you said you wanted to learn," I told Damien.

"Go fuck yourself. Come on Janice, what do you think? It's time to go."

"Damien, Damien, Damien," she had to tell him.

Sitting in the booth across from only Janice I had assumed full responsibility for her entertainment. Positioning her hand low in front of her, pointing discreetly in the direction of the bar, she said, "That guy?"

"Yes."

"If he's been in jail so many times...you said mostly stealing and scams and things?"

"Um hum."

"Couldn't somebody here help him with money or give him advice on how to get a job? At least help him figure out how to stay out of jail? You know, use some influence to change his way of looking at things?"

"Janice, nobody else here has any money either. That's why this is their neighborhood. It's not because they looked in Bel-Air and Malibu, but when it came to architectural stylishness, couldn't find anything that favorably compares with this."

"I know, I know. Ease up."

"And this isn't the best group in town to be giving advice on how to get a job. I've tried to use my _considerable_ influence to get him to change his ways. The problem is, well...he's stupid. I don't have any more ideas left."

Taking my hand and beginning to caress it, she said, "I bet you have some good ideas."

I finished the contents of my glass, swirled the ice around, and began to gnaw at the cubes. I said, "I don't miss him yet, do you?"

"Miss who, Damien?"

"Yeah."

She slapped me on the arm and said, "Shut up. He was kind of a nice guy."

"Were you guys, excuse me for using the term...dating?"

"No," she said firmly. "I just met him tonight, early tonight. We were only hanging out."

"Why'd you come here? Somehow, you knew I'd be here, right?"

"That's it. The man of my dreams...I took one look at this place and I knew I'd find him here."

"That happens a lot."

"I'm sure."

"So you just proposed to your newfound escort Damien, that you two check out this little bar next to the Essex Hotel."

"Maybe," she said, giggling. "No, I just happened to pass it."

" _You_ just happened to pass it, not _we_?

"Me, and we...we were playing a game."

I nodded. "Playing a game. All right."

"See, we were coming through the neighborhood, and I saw this place. I was walking up ahead of him. We were playing our little game. I was playing our little game. But he was playing along."

"Hmmm."

"I was making him chase me. I came in here for a drink, and to see what the place was like."

"I sort of understand...as much as I'm willing to."

"So show me where you live. I'm tired of being here."

"Maybe I just want to relax down here and have a drink."

"Whatever," she said, a make-believe pout thrown in to boot.

"Oh, all right," I sighed. "Let's go upstairs."

When we opened the door to leave, before we stepped outside, she put her head close and softly said, "This means I'm going to find out pretty soon why they call it The Sex Hotel?"

"Absolutely," I answered, "any minute now."

We began to walk the brief length of sidewalk to the hotel's entrance. I stopped us, and pointing across the street said, "This way. I want to show you something." We jaywalked, strolled to the corner, made a left, and started walking in the opposite direction from the bar. Halfway up the block I stopped, and pointed high, in the direction of the Essex. "Now you know," I said. She stood beside me, and looked up to where I pointed, until she finally saw what I was directing her to. Above the hotel, visible from where we were, was the red neon Essex sign stretched across the roof. Its first two letters burned out, the sign read: SEX HOTEL.

Up in my benighted barrack the lights had been turned off, but a bit of streetlight made it through the window. We had progressed, or devolved as it were, to panties in the case of Janice, while I was shirtless, but clad in pants as I stretched above her on the bed. I nibbled her ribcage and across her belly. Her arms bent behind her head, her torso rose, and her torso fell. My face hovered over her panties, until finally I tugged them aside, softly licking her there. Covering her again I used my tongue from the outside to push the cloth, which was soaked by now, well inside her. I kissed her thighs, wrenched her legs apart, and buried my face deep in the delicate and maddening crevices. I clenched her panties in my hands and pulled them over her bottom, down her legs and over her feet. She scooped them up with a foot, and gave them a second launch. I lapped between her preternaturally parted legs. She planted her face in the crook of her arm and moaned. In the midst of deep and sonorous groaning she stopped, and said, "Wait." She gasped at me, "Roll over onto your back." Once I had, she knelt above me and slathered me with roving kisses from the base of my neck to the top of my jeans. She undid the belt. She unzipped the zipper. She trundled my jeans to below my knees and took me in her mouth

My eyes were open and I was able to observe her silhouette in the murky light from the street. I was surprised when she stopped the thing she was doing, and began swaying on her knees above me. As she did, she softly emitted the sound, "Ummmmmmmmmmmmm." She would pause, and then begin again: "Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm." I said nothing when she suddenly got to her feet, and stood above me on the bed. Then considerably louder she started to make the sound, "Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," pausing, and resuming, "Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa." On she went, more loudly and elliptically: "Whoaaaaaaaaaaa. Whoaaaa. Whoaaaa. Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Whoa. Whoa."

Easing my pants up I said "Janice," but she ignored me totally.

"Whoaaaaa. Huaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

"Janice? What is it?"

She began to twirl on the bed and to flap her arms up and down, increasing the volume more as she went, "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Whoaaaaaa. Whoa. Whoa."

"Janice? JANICE? HEY?" I yelled.

More "Whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

"Janice? What _is_ it? What the _fuck?"_

By now she was jumping up and down on the bed and screaming, as well as screeching and squealing at the top of her lungs. I attempted to grab her, but she lunged at me with her feet. I tried to pull her down, but her feet were kicking ferociously as she jumped and screamed.

About then there was a banging at my door. I dove under a rapidly moving calf, and onto the floor. Buckling my pants on the way I got to the door and pulled it open. The gaunt freebaser from across the hall was standing there holding a machete in one of his hands. "Hey man, what's happening?"

"This chick is screaming her head off," I snapped.

"What the fuck did you do to her?"

"What did I do to her? I didn't do a fucking thing to her. She's nuts."

"No shit," he said, peering around me.

Out the open door across the hall came Jimmy, the longhaired freebasing partner of the gaunt man already standing in my door.

"Goddamn," he said when he got a look.

"There's only one way to do this," the gaunt man said. "Come on."

Following his lead, Jimmy and I moved nonchalantly in the direction of the bed. Doing as Jimmy did the other two of us charged her with him, and the three of us brought her down. One man, holding her arms and shoulders; another with his arms around her middle; the other wrapping his arms around her legs, we began to carry her like a piece of lumber. She managed to scrape her dress up off the floor as we left the room. We carried her down the hallway and down the stairs. Along the way she yelled, "Put me down," as well as an assortment of unintelligible sounds in between the screaming. As we neared the entrance to the building we put her down, and formed a barricade across the hall to prevent her from returning. But as soon as we put her down, she took off running out the door naked, still clutching the dress balled up in her hand and screaming.

As I and the two other partisans in the fight against female terror made our way back up the hallway, this time headed to the elevator for a calm return, I told them, "Why is it I attract so many of the severely mentally ill ones? I get them right before they have to be institutionalized, or they find me seconds after they've been released."

"That's why," the gaunt man said, "they're always available. You ain't the first man it ever happened to, I tell you that, man."

"Yeah. Damn," Jimmy said.

#

#

#

#

#

# 

# CHAPTER NINE

THE ALGONQUIN CLOWN TABLE

The Pig was the one thing that could get Andrew out of the Essex, and off the block. He would go on pilgrimages there, one man's Mecca, one man's shrine being another's mere rib joint on N. La Brea. Sometimes I'd go there with him, when the mood and the money were in alignment. This time I was working pimperarily in the vicinity, and Andrew had plans to feed. Given our fortuitous conjunction of circumstances, we planned to meet up after I got off work. We'd put the fork in the pork and ride the bus home together when the job was done.

Shambling lethargically up the sidewalk in the aftermath, lard in our feet, we nearly collided with a former co-worker of mine as he was leaving a building. He was one of those persons without a name, whose identity was a set of initials instead. I knew him as T.B. at Pyramid, another of the ink-stained sketchers of political history. His moniker in fact did cause him to encounter performances of coughing fits, and to be summoned or greeted by loud wheezing.

As we stood on the sidewalk, still within olfactory range of cooking meat, he told us he didn't plan to work at Pyramid very much longer. The catalyst for this ongoing change of life had been his acceptance, now his attendance of classes at USC in the creative writing program, "winning" an assistantship, he said. I told him it sounded "really good," though by and large I had no idea what an assistantship was. I believed paper grading might have been involved, but wasn't sure. He went on to put some gilding on his lily, telling Andrew and me how he had impressed a local publisher with a collection of his stories. The stories were "hip stories" he said, "that debunk the pretenses of health food fanatics, hippies, psychology, survivalists and the like."

In a low voice funneled directly into my ear Andrew observed, "Bold targeting," as TB looked around with hope to see if anyone else had been in earshot of his bona fides.

"I was just on my way to meet a friend of mine. You should join us?" he said, clearly inviting the both of us. "He's kind of a new friend. I met him in the writing program. I think you guys would hit it off."

The look Andrew and I exchanged reflected mutual dread of what we had in store, either bearing the onus of doing the thing or of having to politely blow this man off.

"If you don't have anything else to do," he added, "I'll buy you guys some drinks."

The new look on Andrew's face imploring me to answer in the affirmative told me TB had made the sale.

In the car I told TB I was a General Office Specialist now, a career choice that provided me with the time I required for dispersing my memory cells in the California breeze. "If you can't remember it, it doesn't count," I said. TB may have understood.

He asked Andrew, "How do _you_ get by?"

"You get me by," Andrew replied.

"I do? How do I do that?"

"Your tax dollars finance my disability checks. And thanks, by the way."

"You're welcome," TB said, leery of saying more.

TB wheeled his automobile right, off Temple, and onto Spring, telling us, "The café where we're meeting is down on First. The guy we're hooking up with, Stanley, works near there at City Hall."

Even before we parked, we became aware of the swarm of sirens. "Fire somewhere," TB remarked about the persistency and the density of the swarm. When we got out of the car we could smell smoke, and by the time we were closing in on the café on First we could see ugly, brown smoke billowing up to our east. TB started glancing around at the tables clustered on the sidewalk the second we reached the café. He went to greet his friend, as Andrew and I stood staring at an enormous conflagration in the intersection of Main and First. The entire intersection appeared ablaze, prodigious smoke swallowing earth and sky, while south of First, even the buildings on either side of Main looked as though they may have been on fire as well.

"Over here," TB summoned, from a table a few feet away.

"I've never seen anything quite like that," I said, nodding at the holocaust in front of my eyes.

"It's awesome," TB answered. "Hey, Donovan, this is my buddy Stanley, Stanley, meet Donovan, a former Pyramider."

"Nice to meet you." Stanley said. "So you're one of us."

"Us?" I asked, puzzled.

"A literary man."

"Yeah...well, as Muddy Waters would say, 'I'm a man.' The other part of what you alleged is unsubstantiated."

"See, he was fun to work with," TB told him.

"Fuck," Andrew gasped, still staring into the street.

"A gasoline truck crashed into a city bus," Stanley told us matter-of-factly.

"I was going to ask if anybody was hurt," TB said, "but...." He realized Andrew and I were not listening, transfixed by the presence of such a number of ambulances, fire trucks, Jaws of Life, and cop cars, which produced a strobing and swiveling of colored lights practically dumbfounding.

The waiter there to take our orders said, "I don't know how much longer we're going to be open. This is looking pretty serious."

"All right," said TB, "bring us," indicating Stanley as well as himself, "two pitchers of Samuel Adams."

Not one to dismiss a good idea just because another person had it first, I ordered a couple of Stoli rocks. Just as I finished a woman in her early thirties perhaps, reading at the nearest table, sniffed at Stanley, "Literary man?" tilting her head back and laughing from deep down.

"Who asked you?" Stanley sniffed back.

"Who told you you were literary?" she laughed.

"For one, the faculty who admitted me to the USC MFA program in creative writing."

"If you had any sense you'd skip all that and commit a felony. If you want to be a writer stop looking for shortcuts. Do what's required. Do as I'm telling you, and you'll have a book contract in the six figure neighborhood so fast it'll make your wallet spin, I guarantee it. Literary man," she added, laughing some more.

TB looked over his Fumanchu at her, and said, "You won't be laughing after I squirt my GHB into your Shirley Temple, baby."

"Now you have potential," she said. "It's crude, but it's potential."

Just then, what sounded like a single boom of thunder caused us to jump or to bristle to attention. The boom was followed by a series of snaps, crackles and pops.

"Transformers blowing," Andrew said.

In the wake of the boom it felt as though we were sitting in a peculiarly unnatural vacuum. It was a sensation you felt on your skin, a sensation that electricity or concussion had blasted every single molecule out of the immediate area. In the silence of the vacuum, two men who were sitting a couple of tables over could be heard loud and clear. One was saying to the other, "I heard him say that a right-wing maniac had threatened to drive a tanker into a bus."

"I specifically heard the waiter telling a customer, a _left-wing_ maniac...I heard him say anarchist, too."

"I heard from the cashier, who heard it from the cook, who's watching MSNBC in the kitchen," the other one said.

"Fuck MSNBC. The waiter got if off a local radio station."

A very loud and pronounced swoosh rolled across the tables and chairs. Those of us positioned to see, saw a radiant fireball rise from the furnace of smoke and flame at the intersecting streets, then seemingly break apart into two separate balls of fire going in opposite directions.

"Oh, so there's some elevated stature the cook has, but the waiter doesn't?" one of the men at the other table said, breaking the silence again.

Amid a renewed caterwauling of sirens, Stanley said, "What a racket."

The waiter had returned to our table, saying, "Can you imagine, all those poor people riding the bus?"

None of us responded. The waiter then added, "The café is closing. I think the entire area is being evacuated. If you stay, the manager told me to tell you, the café has no responsibility."

TB said, "I've got it," and gave his credit card to the waiter along with the check. This was followed by a chorus of "thanks" from the other three of us at the table.

It appeared the clientele was reduced now to our table of four, the woman at the adjacent table, and the two men. Since my chair was facing toward the intersection I could witness the remarkable number of ambulances lining up on First alone. The sanitary white of stretchers nearly obscured the pavement, as if a school of fish lying belly-up had been dumped from one of the police and media whirly-birds circling above. The steel bottoms of the many gurneys were burnished maroon with reflected smoke and fire. Andrew looked up from doodling on his sketchpad and exclaimed, "Look at those stacks of empty body bags."

"I hope they don't need those," I sputtered out.

The woman at the adjacent table piped up again, this time speaking directly to Andrew as if she had just then noticed him sitting there. She asked, "Are you a literary man, too?"

"Are you speakin' to li'l ole me?" he replied.

"Yeah."

"No m'am," he told her, grinning, "I'm not."

"What do you do?"

"Christ, people keep asking me that lately. You know, I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, 'It's not what you do, it's what you do for fun.' I thought that was pretty good."

She smiled and said, "Yeah, it is."

"He's an unexpectedly talented political cartoonist," I told her.

"You're right," she said, "that's unexpected."

"I never have a cartoon in print, so your low expectations are warranted," he said matter of factly. Rather than answer, she got up from her chair, putting her book on the table but taking her drink with her, and walked around and stood behind him. Taking hold of the back of a chair at an empty table next to her, she said, "Mind if I squeeze in?" Andrew and I opened up the space between us, and she pushed her chair in and sat down. "I'm Kelly," she said.

All around the rest of the table we said our names and hellos.

"How come they're never in print?"

"I don't ask anybody to print them. Not for a long time, I haven't. It could change."

"What would change it?"

"Oh, the right character and the right concept for an ongoing strip, that would change it. I'm just having fun with it for the time being. It amuses my regular crowd of lowbrow friends and acquaintances."

"That would be me," I said. "One of the crowd, anyhow."

"Obviously," she said. "Can I see?" she asked Andrew, pointing down at his pad.

Andrew began to flip the pages, pulled some loose ones out, shuffled them around, and handed three of them to Kelly. "Here are a few panels," he said as he handed them to her. "I'd consider _these_ finished products."

Kelly started to look them over, and shortly thereafter began to chuckle. TB and Stanley observed with obvious interest, watching without comment, though. Kelly went from chuckling to laughing. "Funny. Smart stuff. They're like some hideous hybrid of Doonesbury and R. Crumb. You're kinda talented."

"Aw, shucks."

After she handed the pages back, TB asked, "Mind if I look at those?"

"Go ahead," Andrew said. He shifted the pages across the table.

My attention was drawn to telephone poles now on fire on Main north of the intersection. At the same time, south of First, flames clearly could be seen shooting up from the corner buildings on either side of Main. In the block of buildings in which the building housing the café was a part, smoke and flame were billowing from the roof of the corner building and the building beside it, it seemed to me. There was a new burst of police radios, sirens, and people shouting...a few of them screaming. Despite it, the two men at the nearby table continued to talk.

"Cooks are elitist...back in the kitchen," one of them was saying. "Waiters are mingling with the masses. They have a much better feel for what people do and think. They have their fingers closer to the pulse."

"No," the man across from him said, "It's the opposite, actually. Cooks are performing labor, actual labor. A kitchen is full of workers working. Waiters are mostly public relations, customer service people...white collar, really, except for carrying a few things, and never anything that's heavy."

About this time two vans raced up, swerved to a stop at the curb directly in front of where we were sitting. Men, and a couple of women hopped out, a few of the bunch pulling cords and equipment, sound booms and cameras among it, from the back of the van. Then they all tore up the street in the direction of First and Main.

TB and Stanley both were howling as they read the comics. Stanley began to cough, a cough that erupted quickly into a full-blown coughing jag. "Must be all this burnt stuff in the air," he said when the coughing stopped.

"It does seem smokier," TB acknowledged.

When the pages were handed back across the table, Stanley attempted awkwardly to rehabilitate himself with Kelly. He did this by emphasizing his attachment to TB, who earlier she appeared to indulge more. "We're in the same writing class," he told her, tilting his head at TB.

"Bully for you," she said.

"I guess he gets the leg up because he has an assistantship," Stanley said, as if talking only to himself but loudly enough for all to hear.

"You don't have an assistantship?" Kelly was on it. "Don't you want to work for a university when you grow up, too? Don't you want a university sinecure when you become a great, big writer?" She commenced laughing like the devil.

Turning so that he flashed her the turquoise stud in his left lobe, TB jumped in and said, "Leave my man alone. He writes on the wild side, same as I do, kitten."

"I thought you two were so proud of your little writing club?"

"There's no club. Where'd you get that?"

"How do you expect to write without being associated with a network, an organization of writers?"

"I already write. Huh?"

"No, I don't have any job with the school," Stanley answered, showing the frustration of his wait to do so.

"How," asked Kelly, "can you support yourself without a paid teaching position at an institution of higher learning? How can you expect to make the protagonists in your fiction college professors, if you don't do at least a bit of college teaching?"

"Queen of the Contrarians, isn't she Stan?" TB said.

"I believe she is," Stanley answered, bucking up.

"She makes perfectly good sense to me," Andrew told them.

"I'll make a protagonist a college professor if I damn well feel like it," Stanley said.

"Then you better stay in school," Andrew answered.

"I may not even finish getting the degree," Stanley snapped back. "I may just learn as much as I need and move on."

"To succeed as a writer you'll be needing your school connections in order to attend writing conferences, mingle with agents, editors and reviewers. Don't you network? Aren't you interested in career planning? Didn't you plan ahead for these things when you began your education, with an eye toward a career as a professional writer of fiction?" After saying this Andrew looked out of breath.

"Bite yourself," TB said.

Like a sooty Phoenix moving laterally out of an inferno of smoke, a looter came dashing, running for broke down the street with an armful of new and gleaming aluminum tennis rackets. As he passed us, he conceded, "I've got too many," and let two of them slip away into the street.

"I don't play," I informed my tablemates.

"I used to," TB said, then got up and retrieved the rackets. He twirled one in his palm looking it over back in his chair.

At the nearby table one of the men was saying, "He's pissed at me because I pointed out in print how inaccurate his analysis of Orwell is."

Said the other, "His analysis is as credible as yours, particularly given his background."

"Please."

"He's going to be more important than Murray Kempton, eventually."

"He's got people believing that, but anyone who's well-read, and well-informed, and any judge of _style_ , sees how pedestrian his stuff really is."

"When's the last time you talked to him in person?"

"Ages."

"You've been talking to everybody about this spat for months. You get something about it into every piece. You even managed to get it into the one about the repercussions of welfare reform in Oakland...even the one about what's her name, the dissident in Myanmar."

The other smiled.

There was commotion, when a member of the news squad who had driven up earlier returned in a panic and began frantically and loudly rummaging in the back of one of the vans. He jumped out of the back holding something sleek and black, either a large plug or a little microphone. Noticing us, he stopped long enough to ask, "What are you still doing here?"

At our table, we looked at one another, and then TB answered, "Talking and having drinks."

"Don't you know the cops and fire officials have evacuated everybody but news crews and emergency personnel for blocks and blocks and blocks in every direction from this mess?"

"I think we heard that," Stanley said, looking over at the two men at the nearby table who had seemed to be following developments earlier.

"How come not you?" he asked, looking confusedly at the whole group.

"I guess they can't see us," Kelly told him. "Must be your news vans blocking us from view. Look at how you parked."

He shook his head and said, "Flames are moving down this block of buildings. It's going to ignite this one before long," nodding at the structure behind the tables and chairs on the sidewalk where we sat, before he took off in a sprint.

"I would have explained Cognitive Dissonance Theory to him, since it might have helped...explain this," Kelly said, waving her hand in the air to designate the sidewalk café, and those of us sitting in it, "but I was out of bourbon." She wrapped her hand around her empty glass for emphasis.

"What the fuck is Cognitive Dissonance Theory?" Stanley asked with a scowl.

"How do you expect to engage in critical writing or reviewing, especially commentary on the culture in essay form if you are unaware of Cognitive Dissonance Theory?"

"What is it you do," TB sneered, " that gives you so much expertise on everything, Little Miss Snot?"

"Unlike some people, I don't blab in cafes about what I do."

There was a loud creak, then a piercing snap, and finally a heavy crash somewhere close by.

"You know, I'm out of liquid refreshment too," Andrew said, looking at Kelly.

"I can fix that." She got up and walked over to where she had been sitting prior to joining us, stooped down and opened her purse, and pulled out a fifth of bourbon.

"Why do we chicks always have to bail you lunkhead Y-chromosome types out of every jam?"

I noticed that smoke seemed to have thickened on the section of First Street in front of where we were since my last glance. Kelly, standing in front of her chair poured bourbon into every held out glass.

"Here's to TB Doyle," Stanley announced, raising his glass over the center of the table.

"Who's TB Doyle?" Kelly asked.

"The man standing next to me," Stanley said, with a rejuvenated spine.

"To the next James Gould Cozzens," Kelly proclaimed. "In the land of eunuchs, the one-nut author is king."

"Jesus you're a pill," TB said. "I don't even want to fuck you now."

Kelly placed her hand over her mouth in mock astonishment, then removed it to give her chortling free reign.

"Behave now, class," Andrew admonished. Then raising his own glass he declared, "In the land of hyperbole, everybody is full of shit."

"Here, here," I said.

The sound of a siren was gradually becoming louder and shriller, until finally it felt as though the sound was going to deafen us all, when a fire engine lumbered around the vans in the street in front of us and rolled to a stop twenty yards beyond. Additional yelling, radio communication and general cacophony followed.

One of the two men at the nearby table could be heard again, saying in a louder voice than ever, "Those people never should have expected to be tolerated in Washington. So you're elected and you end up moving here? That doesn't mean people who live here...I mean, D.C...I keep forgetting where I am at the moment...have to like you, or want you here, as opposed to the bunch of toothpicks who sent you here to begin with...or there...whatever."

Since he was standing too, I nudged Andrew, getting him to take a look across the street at the grounds of City Hall. Flames were crawling up the trunks and down the branches of trees.

One of the two men at the nearby table could be overheard saying, "Well I live in Los Angeles now, and god help me, I love it."

I chimed in, "Me too. God help me," meaning the former at least.

"What's with the salon-istas over there?" Kelly said.

I shrugged to indicate an inability to answer. Smoke was actually beginning to find its way over the tables and chairs onto the sidewalk now, moving along in what looked like medium-sized brown puffs.

"He's a crypto-syndicalist," one of the men at the two men's table shouted.

"What," Andrew asked Kelly, " _is_ a syndicalist?"

A telephone wire running along beside the grounds of the municipal buildings on First, suddenly popped, broke in half, and then the two halves fell to the street sputtering. All through the air on the grounds themselves, sparks were fluttering like blinking fireflies on a humid Georgia night in June. A gang of the media came charging down the street, yanked the doors of a van open, and dove in. Then the van made a U-turn in the street and floored it going west down First.

Now the smoke truly was _rolling_ in. I saw one little trickle of flame, discreetly creeping along the eave of the building adjacent to the building housing our café. Stanley looked at his watch and said not quite clandestinely to TB, "Charlie Rose starts in twenty minutes. Do you think we have enough time to get all the way back to Downey?"

"All right. It's time for me to be going," TB stood up and announced.

#

# 

# CHAPTER TEN

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG BURGER

The meeting had been called in order to deliberate matters of the most critical import for the future. If not Life and Death, at least the concerns to be addressed fit the Life and Hoping to Sustain Something More Intimate and Rewarding than the Vacillation Between Simple Clinical Existence and Proactive Hedonism, category. The meeting was in a place one could enter in the midst of any full-blown out-of-body experience of inebriation, and still be brought back jarringly to lucidity and Earth by the penetrating strength and brightness of its fluorescent lights. I was convinced it had been designed by the preeminent architect of prisoner of war camps, if such a person existed, given its capacity to take one from happy warrior of pleasure, to involuntary submissive whipped back to the remorselessness of reality in clear-eyed focus. We had come to Bob's Big Boy, the one located in Burbank, the first of its kind in the beef-eating world.

For Lila and me, this was another visit with the purpose of re-solidifying our spiritual, intellectual, and physical bonds: an edge to the physical perhaps, if candor is required. In other words, we would hang out together for a couple of weeks, my longest Valley sojourn yet. Once again, it was a getaway for me as much as a conference on Lila's and my continuing joint endeavor, and the specifics of our endeavor in weeks to come. I decided at some point along the way to refer to Cynthia's house, where again I was shacking up with Lila for the duration, as "the country house."

Though this time 'round the car was in running condition I had volunteered to take the train in order to meet up with Lila as soon she was back from work. Before the conference commenced, I stopped off in The Now Voyager, a septic tank of a bar for pre-deliberation cocktails. I walked out of the place and up the sidewalk to Bob's, a cheerful whistle one of the fruits of my stopping by. The metamorphosis one underwent from guzzler in a dark, dank bar, to eye-popped discusser of practicalities and life-planner in Bob's was stark. Drunks walked in, but retina-shocked straight arrows stumbled out.

Lila had told me in our most recent regular telephone conversation that she had amassed nearly $1,200 for our nest egg, The New Habitat Fund. I reported to her in that same conversation that I had stashed something in the vicinity of ninety-four to ninety-six dollars for the fund, depending on the accuracy of my counting of ones, in which I had somewhat shaky confidence. "Two months," she said, "and we'll have enough. A month," she added, "if you would speed up your generation of income or improve your saving ability to that of an average sub-normal." I was also to confer with persons presenting an employment opportunity, who happened as well to be, as far as they had been described, political confederates. Turning my visit into a working vacation, so to speak, could be a key Lila believed to the advancement of the timetable for realizing our humble, new dream of acquiring our very own corner in a multiple-family dwelling.

As I sat there on the first evening, it quickly became apparent to me that while sitting in a booth in Bob's I might well be sitting on the Next Big Thing in Los Angeles nightlife. It turned out to be a visionary moment. After a few more visits it would become evident the place was always crammed with patrons. When the bars closed it began to overflow, drinking night owls the natural trauma victims of the Big-Boy whammy on a personal buzz.

Lila and I were pawing one another a little under the table, while discussing prospective LA communities in which to land, a range of reasonable rents, and expectations for our future income when the two people we were awaiting joined us. Both of them appeared to be in their late twenties, one a longhaired male in a brown tee shirt, the other a longhaired female in a blue one. Following the introductions the two wanted to pitch in on the topic under consideration before they arrived. One of them lived in Silver Lake, which he proudly boosted as "A cool neighborhood with a good scene."

"You've put your finger on the reason I don't want to live in Silver Lake: scene. I've paid my debt to scenes," I said.

"Yeah? There's a lot, you know going on, is what I mean. Good bars and stores, and restaurants, and other things. The people are cool."

"Cool, in the real estate sense usually means expensive and dopey, with a heavy lemming population," I explained.

"It's pretty in Silver Lake," Lila said, "those pretty hills, good clubs for music," hoping to sand down a little of the pointed edge of what had gone before. The female told us she lived on Franklin Street in Hollywood, her exact location another fashionably overpriced boho district, no doubt housing a number of soon-to-be artistic superstars of the new millennium. I didn't say anything but I grunted in the negative, and they were able to decipher.

The fellow asked, "What's your goal?"

"A one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood with depressed homicide statistics," I said. "Some trees would be nice."

Lila dispersed the toxicity again, telling them, "Quiet. Affordable. Necessities nearby. That's about it." Matching the amalgamation of particulars in our stated criteria with an actual place in the city, due either to their lack of knowledge of places, or their lack of interest in that set of particulars, exceeded their advisory capacity, and the subject dropped.

Our tablemates and my prospective employers were working on behalf of a petition drive to bring a proposition before the voters of California. The two of them actually worked for a private business, a professional signature gathering company, which in any given campaign, in any state or locality paid the signature gatherer a dollar per valid signature, which was in fact, the pay scale for this petition drive. As they explained it, the proposition, Prop. 909, would generate a law requiring that ten percent of the wood in each and every surfboard manufactured in the state of California must be wood from a California lumberyard. The law would be the same whether the surfboard was principally made of wood, such as balsa or spruce, or made from foam, in which case a piece of wood was situated between two pieces of foam that were clamped together. The purpose of this was to sustain the level of wages for unionized workers in lumberyards that competed with lumberyards in other states. My first impression was that it was a decent cause, while for Lila the cause was completely irrelevant; the compelling factor being that it was a way for me to generate income hanging around at strip malls during the time she worked, enabling me of course to lob some extra coinage into the kitty.

As we drank Bob's beer, ate his nachos and chatted, Big Boys continued streaming out of the back on trays, Big Boy Deluxes with cheese and fries, carried by waitresses who didn't look like they were on the acting track, or behave like it either, tender mercies both.

"I have a feeling this place has the potential to become a _scene_ itself," I said, veering off the subject, or backtracking perhaps. "There are probably a ton of people here all hours of the day as it is. I'm keeping an eye out for signs of chic for the next two weeks. I'll have to split this scene back to my own neighborhood after that," I told him, and winked.

"Interesting experiment, if you look at it like that," the male said, "waiting for Bob's to turn into something other than what it is already. You know, it's really popular now. I understand you're talking about a different thing."

"Good," I said.

My new comrade-employers were aware I was currently a temporary General Office Specialist, though they hadn't heard about my position with the Encyclopedia of American Political History. When told, they didn't seem very impressed, conspicuously unimpressed in fact. I could sense they regarded the composing of such encapsulated presentations as easy as pie. It was only sitting, looking at words and writing them down. I wanted to say, "I can feel your scorn." Of course, anybody could do those things: reading, writing and sitting. It looked easy. Actually, it wasn't hard. There was a question however, of whether it would be easy for _them_. I was about to demonstrate the craft when Lila put a stop to it in the name of diplomacy and prospective income.

When Lila and I were alone with one another in the booth again, full of the warmth of contentedness and beer, we decided to extend our stay out on the town together, and to order another round at Bob's. The hum from the multitude of voices was like a bee in your ear, and the white intensity of the lighting affected your eyes like exposure to heavy concentrations of chlorine. Yet these elements aside, the place at this time of night was a multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, class-straddling tribute to late-in-the-night die-hardedness. Our Bob's was at the same time festive, unselfconscious, predatory, loaded, giddy, sex-crazed and wholesomely congenial in the way its characteristics were embodied by its patrons, all thrown together in a pot or a boiling deep-fry. With our two little friends gone their own way, my name signed on the dotted line committing me to the job of signing other names to other dotted lines, Lila and I teased, provoked, and tickled each other, and occasionally ranted, all as we had done in the days of yore.

We stepped outside to have a smoke, seating ourselves on the base of Bob the statue. The air was mild, the street was still busy, probably no more than a third of the cars that passed patrol cars, as patrons continued to flow in and out the doors. Just before we sucked up our final dizzy doses of tar and nicotine and pressed the stubs into the bucket of pebbles, a group of five or six men and women in interchangeable sandals, tie-dyed tubes, and tanks and tees, passed in front of us and went inside.

As soon as we got back into our booth I asked Lila for pen and paper, both of which she reliably shoveled out of her purse. Straightaway I began to write. This was fine with Lila, for she had no problem sitting and taking in the surroundings, not having to talk. When I was finished, I silently read over what I had written:

### First Annual International Day of Nuclear Disarmament

_On June 20, 1983, the Livermore Action Group at Berkley declared an International Day of Nuclear Disarmament, which took the form of rallies, demonstrations, and civil disobedience in more than fifty cities across the United States. It might have been the official end of an era, when a group making a large public countercultural fuss, could have even a negligible effect on the body politic in any way. It was a damn good cause, abandoning a budget-killing, hair-raising, psychologically wigged out proliferation of nukes, whose increase was based on a set of lies, phony rationales, cockamamie scenarios and fanatical premises, and whose use, if it ever occurred, would be full bore, damn the torpedoes, and damn the radioactive half life of a hundred years, in the war to end all wars, and every other human endeavor, along with the deeply flawed and silly humans themselves. It was simply that you could not sell peace and sanity on their own merits, especially by proclaiming their virtues with a moralistic tone to boot. Things had reached the stage where you had to say to the country: "Look, you dumb bunch of motherfuckers, your wallets are being vacuumed in order to purchase an egregious redundancy of world destroying weaponry which can never be used, the purchase of which will offer no enhancement whatsoever to your security and safety." Such a statement would need to be accompanied by one directed to the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as to the entirety of the military industrial complex, along the lines that, you were of the inclination to tear them a new and improved rectal orifice and to continue tearing it as long as they continued to pursue the stockpiling and development of nuclear weapons. On the First Annual Day of Nuclear Disarmament the unfortunate frequency of photographs of infants on signs held aloft by crowds, along with the phrase, "Russians Love Their Children Too," displayed in televised images was a sign that poured-on syrup was the cause of snap, crackle and pop in the Rice Krispies giving way to sogginess. Another problem: the eighties hippies, though well meaning, had none of the old scarifying and boisterous pizzazz of their sixties' predecessors and more a redolence of incense and homemade bread. Most importantly, the crowds no longer inspired jealousy and resentment deep in the_ _hearts of current reactionaries, as the behavior of the original freaks had in their Sixties' counterparts, still pissed to this very day about the degree of head over ass fun hippies had over all those years; not to mention, their discernible cultural and political impact. And most aggravating of all was the flagrante longhaired men delighted in with beautiful women of the era during the longhairs' location at the advance point of the cultural edge. Of course, Rightists tried as hard as they could in the Eighties to elevate "portfolio" and "welfare scum" to the level of cultural catchphrases like "peace and love" and "off the pigs" years before, but as "hip phraseology" they never took._

I declined to read it for Lila right away, otherwise preoccupied as I was with returning to soaking up Bob's prosaic spectacle. I told her I would love to read it for her as soon as we got back to the country house. The suspense wouldn't kill her, she said. Unlike what such sentiments could lead one to believe, in fact Lila frequently professed her remarkable enthusiasm for, and unrelenting support for these indulgences of mine, whether the fanciful entries, or something deceptively ambitious. Without Lila hearing it, my hastily scribbled bastardization of the encyclopedia format, though possibly less humorous, and perhaps more true than the genuine article in the area of content, incited a conversation between us about the place and importance such activity might progress toward in my future; or return to, depending on how she was aiming. She started out saying, "Occasionally I think about how much I liked it when you were writing poems...even plays sometimes, remember that?"

"What kind of question is that? Why in hell wouldn't I remember?"

"You would. Just another way of saying I think about it sometimes."

"What I don't remember is you liking it _all_ _that_ much."

Not flinching, she said, "I didn't necessarily like the side effects of you being so consumed with it; not on my account, but because it seemed to cause you all that anguish...the perfectionist part, pushing to excel, or to satisfy your own standards, or whatever it was, seemed to be fairly painful. On the other hand, I liked the excitement and enthusiasm you had when you were doing the work. I liked the fact that you seemed to get so much satisfaction. It was something I liked being around."

"In a galaxy far, far away."

"I enjoyed reading everything you did and I thought it was very good, naturally. I know you always knew _that_."

" _Obviously."_

"Ever think about starting it up again? I don't care, I'm just curious."

"You might remember that other than actually doing the thing, whether it was writing plays or writing poems, I hated everything else about it, and everybody involved. That seemed like as good a signal as any to cease and desist."

"I remember. But you didn't mind writing for the Encyclopedia."

"Hack work for drinking money suited me better. A skill put to worthy use."

"I understand. But potentially, also a talent wastefully rendered dormant."

"Well it _was_ high-brow hack work."

"Yeah, I suppose it was. You like doing your little faux entries. I can tell how much you like doing them."

"So?"

"Nothing. I like them myself. It takes a certain creative impulse and motivation even to do those."

"That's only compulsion. I wouldn't dignify it by calling it anything as rarefied as creative impulse."

"I'm not sure they're all that far apart. And, I don't know that I would classify creative impulses as rarefied."

"You'd be as good a judge as me, since you not only have them, but still act on them in a serious way."

"And anything you acted on in a serious way would be taken seriously. Besides that, you might even get a decent payoff once in a while; maybe even a sizeable windfall down the line. That would get you out of offices, and _paid_ for doing something with greater value. I'm not bringing it up because I really give a damn, but because it occurred to me...it occurs to me every so often. "

"I think word processing and customer service are regarded as having greater value."

"Well, maybe just on the scale my work gets out there a tiny bit...small financial payoffs to go with larger satisfactions."

"Your paintings have broader appeal."

"You have more blarney at your disposal. You have obnoxiousness, and you're not afraid to use it."

"That's only in my _personal_ life. I don't believe in using it for artistic self-promotion. Better to do something that really can't benefit from promotion, something dead on arrival. Confucius say this give man with artistic tendencies a happier life."

"That's really stupid."

"I can see that."

"Either way, no one regarded the stuff you did as anything other than the work of a talented person, so the self-promotion angle is a little overplayed. Probably the fact that so many people liked the stuff required you to stop doing it."

"Not exactly. You know me really well, but you still make mistakes."

"All right. I like your plays, and I like your poems, so I remind you of it every once in a while when I feel like doing it. That's all."

"As for plays, I don't even read them anymore; and they cost too much to go see. So why should I bother writing them? And poems? Fuck, everybody writes them, but nobody reads 'em. So who gives a flying fuck? College teachers write them, rappers who want to be poets, or poets who want to be rappers are slamming their little _hearts_ out. Those worlds are the only homes for poetry now; which would render anything I wrote essentially homeless. Where's Francois Villon or maybe Ogden Nash when you need them?"

"I think all the institutions and people and official culture you loathe so much, and see as so devalued and corrupted by opportunism might be more accommodating and more capable of change than you think."

"I don't loathe anybody's opportunism, I'm just maybe bitterly envious of people who possess it."

"If you say so."

"I admit it. I'd get more satisfaction knowing they didn't have any of the stuff I wrote."

"That's you all right."

"I'm only kidding, kidding about everything. The fact that I never tell the truth is what gives me the dependability you count on. There's a moral consistency people are drawn to."

"I really don't care this goddamned much. Forget it. Screwy son of a bitch."

"Look who's talking? Pot, kettle, black."

"If there's one thing I don't want to be, and one thing I'm not cut out for, it's a motherfucking cheerleader, Donovan."

_________________________________

I had brought a folding chair with me in order to have recourse to a sitting spell when the effort of solicitation had become too taxing, or when the intimacies of first-person democracy had become repulsive. I had the sense before I left Cindy's for my second day at Ralph's in North Hollywood to take my reading material of the moment with me to the grocery store. It turned out that I became so engrossed, even in what was only a re-reading of an old favorite, that I failed to beg for signatures for half-hour stretches at a time. I would pull my head up and remember the steady flow of customers marching in and out, its continuation verified by a quick glance. Each such spell resulted in my losing out on the opportunity to accost forty or fifty shoppers at least, and the potential forty or fifty dollars to be transferred into my bank account due to their civic participation. Naturally, concern for my own possible losses was secondary to my concern for the loss of forty or fifty potential allies for the unionized lumberyard workers of California.

The culprit behind my inattentiveness was the Bulgarian writer Elias Canneti, whose book "Crowds and Power" had called to me from a pile on the table back at the Essex, that this was an opportune time for yet another reading. One thing that made the book so sticky when it came to adhesion to its pages, was the way your mind shifted from Canneti into your own recollections of comparable situations. Every few paragraphs Canneti related an interpretation of, or the dynamics of an incident for which you immediately found a congruent incident with similar dynamics in your own experience. While many theoretical explorations slowly dragged on your wakefulness the way a mule might pull the plow you were behind through a field of mud, this one created its own narrative fascination with a continuous splitting of theoretical hairs into finer and finer strands.

Cocooned in my chair at Ralph's rapt with Canneti, the daily business of grocery shopping retreated further and further. My distraction turned into irresponsible non-observance of the per capita dollar bills that were shuffling by, in the persons of those passing in and out the doors...in full possession of their signatory capacity. My mind had been hijacked by the question of whether there could be many among us who had never found themselves drawn to, then trance-like, standing in front of the fire, one with the crowd, separately and together suffused with sensations of incendiary or incandescent power. Any man or woman of the world, especially one who now, or had ever inhabited a large city, surely could say to him or her self, "I've seen some real fire-breathing, subsuming organisms pull in the crowds in my day."

Of course, Canneti wasn't the only distraction from the work at hand. There also was the crusade to spread the word of Bob, to tell the world about the new allure, and the new cachet of the home of the big one out in Burbank; not to mention, giving a word to the hip about the virulently infectious growth of its crowds. Still, the primary mission was compiling as many John Hancocks as humanly possible on pieces of paper. Like many a reasonably mentally functional person, my reaction had always been to flinch at the approach of any petitioner. Now with the clipboard in the other hand (mine), I initially was extremely unambitious in pursuit of signers for the cause, and for personal profit. Once however, I was on my toes, and thinking about my duty, I began to sidle up to any and every ambulatory creature making their appearance, at least for thirty or forty minutes at a time. After the first day on the beat I was able to discern some things about the process and to quantify them with statistics; or, in lieu of actual statistical research approximations of statistics. About twenty percent of those approached signed without more than a cursory explanation of the proposition, because, from what I could tell, doing so produced a feeling of momentary mitigation of their sense of futility. Another twenty percent signed, it appeared to me, because they enjoyed being in the position of being asked, of exercising the authority to please, or to displease by saying yes or no; and in that vein enjoyed a conversation with the petitioner. Within this group the willingness of some to sign, appeared hinged on a hunch that getting in on action of some, or any kind had to be a positive thing. Perhaps five percent signed because they understood the issue and agreed with the proposition's purpose. Five percent explained why they were refusing to sign, the explanation being that the proposition and its agenda were part of a tall and wide heap of manure. The remaining fifty percent regarded me as I would have regarded myself, had I been them, as a nuisance, and an obstacle to the already odious chore of shopping, veering away as if evading a disabling and grotesquely disfiguring contagion.

The referendum, which admittedly I had given little thought to since I'd agreed to pitch it, and since I had been rattling off its intentions and specifics by rote, I continued to regard, if unthinkingly so, as an innocuously favorable contribution to the grand scheme of things. At a point when I had haphazardly lapsed into reflection during my tenure at one of numerous groceries, pharmacies and Target stores, out in front of which I plied my carny feats for the eastern San Fernando Valley, my mind inadvertently wrapped itself around the substance of the proposition. Gradually, I immersed myself with real commitment into considering its merits. What I concluded was that I didn't like the idea of the proposition at all.

I was pretty sure I had a bead on the ramifications of this proposed law. Ten percent of whatever wood was used in the manufacture of any surfboard produced in California must originate from a California lumberyard. Naturally, if a surfboard manufacturer could import wood from another state or even from another country at a cost cheaper than that of wood from California, most manufacturers would do so, resulting in surfboards sold for generally lower prices. Of course, this practice necessarily would result in lower sales of wood from California lumberyards, cutting, and significantly so perhaps, into the lumberyard's profits, resulting in diminishing of wages, and loss of jobs for workers in the lumberyards. Therefore, in an effort to protect its rank and file the unionized workers of California's lumberyards had mobilized.

The problem was this: good as it sounded for California workers, the good, or the not so good likely to befall these Californians as the result of the proposed law, depended upon which worker's lot exactly was being measured. It was true that the law would directly help the members of the lumberyard workers' union. It was true also that it would not be terribly detrimental to surfing members of other unions, or to well-paid surfing Californians of any kind. And likewise, it was true that non-union surfing workers, and not so well-paid surfing Californians not only would not benefit, but would see a rise in the cost of their surfboards in order to guarantee higher wages for fortunate members of the lumberyard workers union, surfing, or non-surfing. It seemed unfair that the result for those unfortunate surfers at the lower end of the income spectrum whose workplace, if they had one, paid poorly, or had not, or could not be unionized, would be a rise in the price of their boards...a result of Proposition 909, upon close inspection, the defective product I was currently peddling. What this indicated to me was a clear and present danger of surfing becoming a pastime only for the privileged in California, meaning my position was in fact the truly compassionate one, regarding the least fortunate of the state's surfers.

Initially, after this re-evaluation of the consequences of what I was gainfully employed to hawk, I chose to merely read, rather than to approach people at all. Given that I was only paid for valid signatures, this was not an avenue that could by any stretch be considered a fast track to wealth and riches. It did however guarantee a considerable amount of open-air reading. In this vein, to the degree the reading was carried out in sunshine, unfiltered sunlight being an excellent source of vitamin D, mine was a healthy endeavor at least. Later, I began approaching shoppers again, telling them why the proposition was such a big mistake, but asking them to sign the petition anyway so that I could get my buck. In the end, I became a force for undiluted goodness actively dissuading people from supporting Proposition 909 at all.

I didn't mention my conversion to the "nay side" of the issue during a mid-week meeting with my Supervisor of Petitions so to speak, at Bob's. I didn't mention it to Lila, either. Lila and I had become fixtures at Bob's: in the house at "our table" every single night; though the table wasn't really a table, but instead a booth; and it moved from night to night. As for the proposition, it was like anything else that on the surface looked good for "the people," but was bad news for the majority of them. Sadly, it is commonly understood how easily so many left of the centerline are cowed by fear of public repudiation of their liberal cards, due to a position on a given issue. This reflexiveness, sometimes sincere, sometimes not, can betray the interests of the people progressives traditionally attempt to help, whose true well-being should be the paramount concern. The lesson may be, to paraphrase, as well as to butcher Mencken, no one ever failed to get laid overestimating the magnitude of liberal vanity.

I reverted to making my case to my Supervisor of Petitions, whose name, really, was Tucker, for the increasing cachet of Bob's. In my opinion, it was there before your eyes to see. I pointed out one of those Culkin kids who was seated at a table on the patio out front. Tucker looked, said he thought the guy resembled a Culkin, though Tucker claimed he wasn't convinced the guy on the patio was an actual Culkin.

"Either way," I told him, "Bob's is going on. You have to admit you see a transformation. I could smell it the first time we were here, and Lila and I've seen it all the nights every night since. In fact we've talked about it with other people here. Some of them said they'd noticed us."

"You think people are coming here because you're here? And by the way I think that's onion rings you were smelling Donovan."

After taking a conspicuous whiff of batter sizzling on the griddle, I said, "I know we definitely have our foot in the door of a trend. People _could_ come to see Lila you know. Not me. I'll give you that one. But _she_ looks like she could be somebody."

"You're somebody too," she said, mocking me, and everything else.

"What about me?" Tucker wanted to know.

"Look," I said, preempting an answer by singling out a table of Doc Marten-footed, and thick-framed glasses-wearing youthful men and women, "those guys are temporary émigrés from Los Feliz, or one of those other groovy burgs in town."

"Who the hell knows?" he said.

Later, unduly influenced by the aromas around us, we commandeered a hefty plate of onion rings to accompany the continuing succession of beers. At a point when all three of us had our hands in the plate swabbing ketchup up with onion rings, I drew Tucker's attention toward a man who had just sat down with a female a few booths down.

"Isn't that Jay Mohr?" I asked with a certain air of vindication.

"Might be," was all that Tucker would concede.

"He's a solid B level celebrity."

"Yeah, he is. But I saw him at Trader Joe's last month buying beer, so I don't know if this sighting is all that important. He's probably been coming in here for years. It's the nature of the neighborhood, the nature of the town."

"The word is out," I said. "People are willing to tunnel their way with salad forks and credit cards through the Santa Monica Mountains into The Valley in order to mix it up in the scene at Bob's."

"You're delusional," he said.

Lila told him, "I think he's right that the place is catching on with a different group of people. I see that potential same as he does. I'll agree with you he was over-the-top on the last one."

"Bob's is trending trendward, as we downtown Hollywood folks like to say," I told them.

Lila and I stayed about a half-hour past Tucker's departure, before we picked the check up off the table, and made our way to the register, where in fact, and no surprise to me (which I would have told Tucker had he still been there to hear it) there was a somewhat long line. While we were standing waiting Lila asked, "Do you still go down to Joseph's?"

"Not since we moved from Bob's...our Bob's."

"Why not? You're not that far away from it where you are now."

"I don't feel like going through the whole explanation of the autumn _unpleasantness_ , which is what I'll have to do if I show up there. I want to just go into a place and start to drink. Where I am now all I have to do is go downstairs, and next-door. It's easy. I still tell somebody _there_ every so often that I go to Joseph's."

"Why?"

"Well, I used to. Same thing."

"On _your_ unique metaphysical plane I guess it probably is."

_______________________________________________

Though I had flipped my position on the proposition, Lila, who had been kept in the dark about my defection, still expected me to go out on the hustings every day wrangling signatures while she did her turn at work. She'd take me with her when she left, and drop me off at the designated strip mall or shopping plaza for that day. Unless we arranged for her to retrieve me on her return trip I would call a cab to come and ferry me, and my clipboard, and my folding chair back to the country house. Naturally, it was rarely that I would screw my feet into the parking lot or the store entrance for so many consecutive hours, since the collection of signatures for liquidation was now moot. This gave me the option each day of assigning the ratio of time to be spent doing the Lord's work: retailing the sins of 909; and also roaming the valley, which some days entailed an occasional drink. Whichever way the two activities ended up divided, I would get home earlier than if I waited for Lila.

While the cool mornings with their brilliant sun made reading way too irresistible, I sometimes would allow duty to propel me toward one of the riper looking shoppers in order to convey the substance of Proposition 909, and to delineate its ramifications, after which, if the listener was not stunned by boredom into quiescence; or out of reach on a cloud of indifference, or twitching with annoyance, or tangled in perplexity, he or she might ask me why I was out there doing what I was doing. At times their glimpse of a petition fastened to a clipboard caused them to ask for a closer look, discovering upon inspection that the desired goal of said petition was in fact the opposite of my reverberating spiel. Of course, when Lila dropped me off I always had the petitions with me, seeing as how the nullity of my money making endeavor would have been exposed had I failed to bring them along. If the button-hole-ee asked for an explanation, I would elaborate some of my personal circumstances and advise them not to sign a similar petition at another store, or discount hangar. In some cases, they wished to sign in order to help me out financially, but vowed to vote against the proposition if it made the ballot. In these instances, I cheerfully accepted the generosity of their collusion.

One day as morning was closing in on noon, a van from Channel Seven entered the shopping center at Verdugo and Hollywood Way and began to cruise slowly around the parking lot. My sole activity at that exact moment was staring into the parking lot. I was in my folding chair, the book in my lap. There had been a strong, loud harrowing wind the previous night and throughout the day, powerful Santa Anas, surely. I had stopped reading in order to just simply look at every object not thoroughly fastened down blow all over the shopping center. My reading concentration had been interrupted countless times before by bings, bangs and gongs, from things blown over, or else crashing into other things. At times dirt and sand from the residential neighborhood across the street would be blasted sideways at a high velocity, strafing me and everyone else in the open, with small caliber mineral fire.

The news van pulled to the curb directly in front of me, and a baby-faced woman with a pug nose, and wide-body hair asked, "Are you collecting signatures for the lumberyard workers initiative?" As soon as I said "yes," the woman's door popped open, as did the driver's. While the driver went around to the back of the van, the woman, by now standing in front of me said, "I'm Megan Molloy from Channel Seven News. What would you think about me asking you a few questions about the signature gathering process, maybe get you to relate a few reactions to the proposition from people you've talked to so far...for Seven's evening news programs?"

"Go ahead."

From the back of the van, two men, one with a camera on his shoulder, the other holding a sound boom advanced on my position. After some jargon-laden jabbering among the three, the woman planted her feet beside me and said, "Ready?"

"Ready." I answered amiably.

She primped for a few seconds before she signaled, "okay" to the cameraman, as the soundman hovered the boom above our heads.

"I'm here at the Albertson's on the corner of Hollywood Way in Burbank, with a gentleman who is asking for signatures for petitions seeking to place Proposition 909, the lumberyard workers initiative on the ballot next fall." Turning to me, she said, "How long have you been out here collecting signatures?"

"At this specific spot?"

"Well, altogether, and at this specific spot."

"About a week altogether. This is the second day I've been here."

"Have you had much success getting people to sign the petitions?"

"Some."

"How many would you estimate have signed so far?"

"Twenty-five, maybe."

"Really? That doesn't sound like a lot."

"I guess it's not."

"Why do you favor putting Proposition 909 before the voters of California?"

"I don't."

"You don't? But you're out here asking people to sign petitions for the purpose of doing just that, putting Proposition 909 on the next ballot. Why?"

"I need the money. I'm paid by the number of signatures I get."

"So, even though you're opposed to the proposition your collection of signatures would put on the ballot, you have a job collecting signatures that will put that proposition on the ballot?"

"Right."

"That's interesting. Do you find it at all difficult trying to persuade people of something you don't actually support yourself?"

"No, because I'm not really trying."

"You're not trying? But you're out here."

"Yeah, I'm out here."

"Then what are you doing when you're out here?"

"I tell people I think the initiative is a bad idea, but that if they'd like to sign a petition it would help me out personally. They can always vote against the proposition if it makes the ballot."

"Well, since you _are_ against the proposition, maybe you could tell us the reasons for your opposition?"

"All right. If you can't find a cheaper surfboard built with cheaper lumber imported from another state, a lot of people of modest means are going to have a difficult time affording a board. The law this proposition would create only helps one small sliver of people, people who are members of the lumberyard workers union. That group is at the relatively high end of wages and benefits already. So, basically, surfing low-income workers who for whatever reason don't have union representation, and the people with less money in general who surf, end up subsidizing a small minority of surfing and non-surfing union workers who already make more money than the people who are subsidizing them. Understand?"

"I believe I do," she said uncertainly, and a little glassy-eyed.

Unprompted, I continued. "Just think if it were cars instead of surfboards. If the United States congress did that with a necessity like automobiles, made a law requiring that say ten percent of every car had to originate in the United States, so that cheaper imported cars suddenly became more expensive, some of those lower on the economic food chain would have to fork over a larger portion of their income in order to drive; or perhaps, end up unable to afford a car at all. It doesn't seem fair that lower income, and lower middle-class people should be put in that position in order to sustain high wages, and high benefits for Detroit autoworkers, who have a great deal more income than they do."

"Yes." the reporter said "And a car really is a necessity here in southern California," winging it with a hopefully strategic smile.

Unprompted again I added, "I thought in parts of Orange County a surfboard _was_ classified as a necessity. In those places it might be more necessary for survival than an automobile."

I was thanked for my cooperation, though hardly anyone likely would have described the thanks I got as profuse. Nevertheless, I told Megan Molloy and her crew before they left that Bob's in Burbank was the place to be.

Tucker saw the piece when it ran on Channel Seven, or someone else saw it and told him about it. A meeting was called at Bob's for Wednesday night, the phone call giving notification coming to Lila Monday evening. Tucker and his female cohort Freely, condemned my transgression from the moment they sat down. I explained I'd had a change of heart, but thought it would be easy enough to kill two birds with one stone: making money, and providing dead-on political insights at the same time. Their point of view was that the commitment to the mission must be one hundred percent or the cause abandoned. Besides the ideological imperative, any lessening of focus could put the acquisition of a maximum number of signatures in certain jeopardy, the two complained. I reminded them of the cause at hand: "I'm trying to protect surfing for the workers, boards for the people."

The gist of their challenge to this rationale, in a nutshell, was that the capitalist imperatives of the signature gathering company and anyone working for it, trumped any and all socioeconomic and political goals. As the result of our exchange they deemed it best that I take an early retirement from the company to be effective immediately. This was fine, but they exceeded their quotient of good will, and the protection they derived from it, as well as their better judgment, when after I accepted their accelerated retirement program they continued to quibble with me about politics in general. At some point Tucker said to me, "You don't have any understanding of how politics work." I told him that I knew twice as much as he ever would, after which Lila began to remind them of my employment with the Encyclopedia of American Political History. This failed to cauterize their disputatiousness as thoroughly as one expected, so Lila summoned an example of an Encyclopedia entry. Called back into service as a historical condenser, I smilingly and dutifully accepted pen and paper from her purse.

Monday had been the day of reckoning with her, when I confessed the meager number of signatures that would be forthcoming, and the meager pay. Lila was not easily surprised when it came to me, and presented with these facts, she wasn't. I explained my political reasoning, with which she found no condemnable flaws. Besides which, for as long as I had known her she had been an exceptionally good sport. It was a relief to have her taking up the cudgel with our argumentative tablemates while I was left alone with my composition. Refueling, by way of a fresh beer, and a pack of soda crackers was required for me to complete the task, but when I was done I made the announcement, Lila having explained the nuts and bolts of the Encyclopedia already. All that was left for me to do before reading it was to introduce it: _The Michael Dukakis Campaign._

## The Michael Dukakis Campaign

_In the Year of Our Lord 1988, the Democratic Party, with an excellent chance of reacquiring the executive branch after an eight-year run of Cauliflower Conservatism under Ronald Reagan, nominated as their candidate one Michael Dukakis, the sitting governor of Massachusetts, a man with the earnestness of a Sunday school class treasurer, and the charisma of laundry detergent. Offered a gift of an opponent in George Herbert Walker Bush, who in his years as Vice-president to the Vegetable-in-Chief was compared to items as diverse as macaroni, steamed prunes, and runt canines with an obsequious streak, he still couldn't cut the cheese. One of the gargantuan goofs of his Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts ensconced advisors, was to believe that Mike's positions, which were entirely reasonable, would not be vulnerable to unreasonable attack by the greasy opposition, on the_ _grounds that voters, like the eggplants conducting the bull sessions up in Bean Town were manifestly reasonable people. Wrong. If the reactionary scum told the population that the Commissar from Massachusetts wanted to puree American flags at a manufacturing plant in Havana, Cuba, and then sell the contents in jars to witches in Transylvania, the population just might believe it, if you didn't offer them a fierce rebuttal. This rebuttal would have been along the lines that, any effort to pursue a constitutional amendment banning the toasting of flags was a heinous abuse of the nation's apathy, of congresses'_ _preoccupation with parking spaces and office supplies, and terribly, terribly stupid, even for Republicans to bring up. Someone other than the Harvard schmucks might have told the nation that people assaulting the patriotic fidelity of the good governor of Massachusetts needed to take a bath in lye, and had demonstrated nothing less than their alienation from American values; and were, by the way, the moral and intellectual inferiors of species living in the yards of barns._

Similarly, if the poisonous huckleberries on the right told the country that Moscow Mike thought that copies of the Pledge of Allegiance should be shredded by kindergarteners, defecated upon by student bodies in K thru 12, and pissed upon by everyone else, it not only was in your interest, but absolutely required that you present an alternate exegesis of the Massachusetts court case providing the fodder for the Bush coven's putrescent misinformation and deception. Unfortunately, the Dukakis pros demonstrated themselves brainiacs on the streets, but chumps in the sheets, so to speak. Give them credit for making history, by running a presidential campaign that landed them in the Museum of Clowns for perhaps the worst campaign of all time. Considerable blame certainly fell to the party faithful, whose votes in the primaries made him the party nominee. Among their boners was voting in the primaries for a well intentioned, effective New England governor, who was a rock formation on the stump, and had surrounded himself with Ivy league-blinkered counselors. Likewise, choosing a candidate because of his high scores on the party's strictest litmus tests ended up another case of liberal self-gratification that precluded scoring for real.

_One stunningly egregious flop in the campaign was when, during a debate with Poppy Bush, a media questioner presented the candidate with a hypothetical scenario in which the Dukakis spouse was sexually assaulted and murdered. The candidate was asked whether this could cause him to become a proponent of capital punishment_. _His calm and bloodless reaction to the hypothetical killing and raping of Kitty Dukakis, while intended to convey that he was unflappable when presented with hyperbolic bait, in fact made it appear that the gruesome demise of his lawfully wedded wife would not cause a fuss for him if it was done at a reasonable hour, preferably with prior notification, and if all involved were dressed appropriately. Of course the Bush paterfamiliadufus won the election, putting in office another blue-blooded asshole, willing to wear a cowboy hat, and eat beef jerky in order to become Queen Shitkicker for a Day. As expected, he ran the feudalist and authoritarian agenda up the flagpole for four years, in the process systematically putting the shitkickers and the rest of us into the shithouse, and pissing the shitkickers and the rest of us off mightily. On the bright side, in the next election he got reamed like a Tijuana hooker holding a five hundred dollar retainer from a fraternity house._

I suppose the response of the two sitting across from me accurately could have been labeled subdued. Tucker's salient feedback was to tell me his older brother voted for Richard Gephardt in a Democratic primary once. Freely admitted her father once had played golf with Poppy's Secretary of State and Medicine Man, James Baker. There wasn't a lot more to it than that.

When we came out of the political battle fog we all began to notice how bustling the place had become. It was noisy with conversation, boisterous with laughter, and redolent of adoration of The Burger Deluxe. The fashion sense, in the sense of fashions purchased on Melrose, or at the Beverly Center was markedly up. I pointed out to Tucker the two limos parked in the street out front, and while I was doing so, another one swung around the corner going in the direction of the parking lot. Like any other temporarily tres groovy pit stop, there was more than the usual flaunting of good looks, perhaps because now there appeared to be more of the good looking actually present; their actions inspiring flaunting by the rest of the crowd keeping hope alive.

My case was further bolstered when a procession of expensively but casually dolled-up females passed by us, the cutie rag mop in front almost certainly the actress Calista Flockhart, paired up with what must have been a gal pal, trailing behind them two conspicuously solicitous flunkettes.

"She looks like her," Freely said.

"Who?" Tucker asked.

"Ally McBeal...Ca-Ca-CA-lista what's her name."

The tittering that rippled through the booths following Calista and company's progress reinforced Lila's and my increasingly buttressed assertion of Bobby's gentrification.

Tucker told Freely to get the attention of the waitress the next time she walked near. Lila excused herself to the ladies' room. As soon as she got back she told us, "Back there, when I was walking back, sitting in one of the booths was that dumb girl, that really, really dim bulb, the teenybopper whose picture is always in the LA Times...the hotel heiress who shows up at every pre-fabricated soiree...Hilton Hotels, named after a city? "

"Buffalo Hilton," I said

"All right," Lila told me, along with the finger slicing across the neck routine.

"It's Paris Hilton," Freely confirmed. "She's going to be gracing us for a long time, don't you think?"

"Naaah," Lila and I assured together.

"Aaah," Freely squealed. She'd caught sight of the waitress, and she managed to signal to her to come to the table.

When the waitress got there she apologized for the extended gap between visits, telling us, "There's this whole big bunch of big shots in the booth over there," tilting her head, and lifting her eyes, to direct our glances over her shoulder and a little beyond, "that I had to take care of. One's the chubby guy with the beard who makes Silent Jay and Bob movies; and the manager says, some movie business guy by the name of Diller or Stiller...I never heard of him; according to him, the woman is the editor of a magazine...I don't know who she is; and then Sabrina, Sabrina's with them...you know, Melissa Hart, Sabrina. Phew. They had me hopping."

Tucker asked her for his and Freely's check.

"What in god's name is going on?" Freely shrieked.

Tucker looked over their check, then looked up at me and said, "Maybe you were right."

The white, wide, brilliant beam of a klieg light was sweeping back and forth across the building as though we were at a major premiere. Looking through the glass, squinting away the reflection in the window, of packs of people huddled into booths, filtering out the signage of the taco stand, and the tanning and nail salons across the street, I singled out a man straddling a motorcycle on the sidewalk in front of Bob's. While he talked to a couple beside him he was holding the handlebars, and he was aimlessly turning the front wheel of the motorcycle from side to side, its headlamp crossing back and forth across the glamorous façade of Bob's.

___________________________________________

Now that I was no longer collecting autographs in front of grocery stores, Lila and I were able to have a more relaxed visit, primarily meaning I was more relaxed when she returned from work. In the area of economics, our prospects undeniably were less rosy than we were expecting them to be the week before, but not wretched, although, if I had a gift it was for remaining relaxed when facing less than rosy, even wretched economics. We removed Bob's from our evening schedule in as much as it had now "changed." Closer to the truth, was that we chose to spend more of the remaining time together sequestered, the two of us cozy inside the country house. This was our twosome's vacation from the capricious habits of humans, each of us enough of a comfort and a challenge to the other.

I interacted with Cindy more out of willed bonhomie than anything else; and her reciprocation was in the same vein. These interactions tended to occur when I passed by, in transit from the kitchen, or coming into the house, and I would join her in the living room as she lazed on the sofa watching what I believe was called the Home Network, programs on landscaping, decorating, or renovating and the like. The will behind my bonhomie was seldom able to sustain itself through the battering inflicted upon it by recommendations on patio construction, barbecue tips, and ideal flowerbed locations. Once this happened, the country house would become a house divided. We would fight, Cindy challenging the horror of my choice of clothing, and the disintegration of my moral fiber, accusations so overused against me that the shots were not merely cheap, but completely devalued as legal tender in any attempt to purchase a wounded reaction in a war of words.

Soon enough though I would be back in the stable of my pimperary, hitting the streets, or at least the offices within the circumference of a fairly large loop encircling my hotel room. The goal set by Lila and me was to be far enough in the black after about a month, to begin searching in earnest for a place to live. After that, our joint incomes would provide us with the tawdry, yet culturally overheated style of life to which we had become accustomed. As the CEO of the operation, Lila directed me to keep my eye out in the coming weeks for housing prospects on my own side of The Big Social Status-Determining Mountain. She would cover the ground, on what for the moment was her own side, and we would jump on the first inhabitable place available, like squatters on a just condemned building. Condemned buildings were off our personal list, but only barely. Someone at the Essex, or at one of my job sites had tipped me off to a prospectively "hidden jewel" of an apartment in the vicinity of Beachwood Canyon. But given the gloss on real estate prices in that desirable sector, unless it was invisible to naked eyes other than mine, I wasn't getting my hopes up.

We spent our last few days of cohabitant bliss doing the things each of us was happy doing separately, but doing them alone together in the same room. This sort of loving, benign indifference surely was the key to our romantic success. When the time came, I got back on the Red Line holding a bag of buffalo wings from Cindy's refrigerator, hauling a few of Lila's sketches to put up in my room, and with a warning not to talk to strangers. I waved goodbye to fire-tested, in-the-clinch companionship and connubial-like affections, and thirty minutes later waved hello to something else.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FRYING PAN, FIRE, NIRVANA

Accidentally as always, afternoon tea convened in the bar in order for the members of our loose society of hotel neighbors to lick their respective wounds received in the heat of what battles they'd enlisted in the night before...or before that, if the wound was of sufficient severity. Penelope was the only one who ever drank tea, doing so to soothe her voice, as singers commonly do. There was the mournfulness in the room that often accompanies the metamorphosis from evening bon vivant to morning fool. In the case of afternoon recoveries, the extra time isn't kind to the day's perception of the evening's achievements in idiocy.

Penelope was at the bar, waiting for the Professor to finish boiling the water for her tea. Andrew and I already were in the booth. I was sipping on a large Diet Coke, which studies at the National Institute for Health have determined is the preferred treatment for the discomforts of anything and everything. Andrew was pushing egg rolls incessantly through a plate of plum sauce before finally putting the besotted items in his mouth. Penelope wheezed, and then was bent over hard by spasms of an ugly hacking cough. She could be overheard telling Andrew, "I need a highball to go with that. No, make it a shot of Jack, with water back." He poured the Jack into the glass and handed it to her, telling her to go on over to the table and take care of herself, and he'd bring the tea over to her when it was ready.

"Have you ever seen Penelope perform?" Andrew asked me, while Penelope knocked the shot back, and doused it with water before joining us in the booth.

"I never have. Meant to I don't know how many times."

"I think she writes about three quarters of the material herself. She's good. I saw her once solo, and another time with a band. I believe she mostly performs with the band. Maybe it's not officially a band...drummer and bass."

"Where was it you saw her?"

"A hole in the wall coffee shop up on Sunset. She was solo for that. I saw her one other time, with her band at Johnny Reb's."

Penelope slid into the booth beside Andrew, in the process pushing out another stream of wretched hacks.

"That's a vicious cough," Andrew told her.

"No shit. I'm not crazy about the chills and fever that go along with it."

The Professor made it to the table with the tea, setting it down before he sat himself. Penelope took up the cup immediately, and after her sip, said, "Ummmmm...that helps." Ten seconds after she said it, she erupted with another torrent of sneezing and coughing that finally began to sound as if she was strangling to death, then ended with an eerie rattle.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Fuck, does that sound all right?" the Professor said. "It sounds serious enough to be looked at by a doctor."

"When those things get settled deep into your lungs, they can turn dangerous before you know it," I told her.

"I'm okay," she said.

"I wouldn't go that far," answered the Professor. "Have you thought about going to the emergency room...at least to get a prescription for some antibiotics?"

"Or the Emergi-Care," Andrew added.

"Yeah, right. How much are they? Seventy-five, eighty bucks? I'll live."

"You should keep an eye on it though," I told her. "I've seen these things turn really ugly before. Life threatening ugly."

"We're gonna keep an eye on you," the Professor told her.

Penelope took another small slurp of hot tea. "That really helps the throat."

"Worried about your voice?" the Professor asked.

"I have a job tomorrow night. And I'm also worried about the pain. I'd as soon not have my throat hurt."

"Where's the job?"

"Tackyderm's. Since that's your night off from the ringmaster job here why don't you come and see us?" Turning to Andrew and me, she added, "You guys too...you might enjoy yourselves. Afterwards we can go across the street to Oscar's."

"I might," said the Professor. "I don't know about the two specimens of Drunkus Sedentarius sitting next to us."

"Pity the man who has to work in the place where Drunkus Sedantarius get their juice," Andrew said.

"I like that," I told the Professor. "Personally, I'll feel less embarrassed about coming in here if you can come up with a good one like that every once in a while."

"You embarrassed...there's a concept."

"Okay, this specimen might tag along with the Professor," Andrew said.

"Great. What about you slick?" Penelope asked me.

"Slick, the Drunkus Sedentarius. Maybe. Probably. It's kind of pricey for the likes of us, though."

"Two at the most there," Andrew said.

"No kidding," Penelope concurred. "You think I'm in any better financial shape than you?" Again, the end of a sentence segued into a succession of coughs.

"You going to be able to perform in that condition?" the Professor asked.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm planning to get a lot of rest between now and then."

"I hope you survive," I said, "now I'm starting to look forward to seeing the show."

"I'm inspired," she said with a weary smirk.

___________________________________________________

We slashed through the coagulation of women's perfumes and men's hormones clogging the entrance to Oscar's, keeping the little knot of our foreign delegation from across the tracks in tact. As we did so, Andrew said, "Last time I was here, every other person was Sally Fields."

"Naturally," Penelope said.

After getting close enough to the back of the large room we were able to find an open table. Nodding toward the stage, Penelope said, "Voila."

A tall, effeminate, thirty-something man in a sweater vest was standing on it reciting the following: "...and I wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it and I can't deny the fact that you like me right now, you really... like me!" The crowd offered up its huzzahs. The man stepped down from the stage and the female hostess, a young blonde in a cocktail dress returned. "Exactly," she said. "Great job by Timothy. Sally Fields, Best Actress, 1984."

Before long we appeared to be barricaded from any clear passageways by people standing. A waitress materialized from the circle of black and blue fabric ringed around us. Penelope asked for a Bud Lite, a shot of Jack, and a couple of aspirin. After the waitress had taken all the orders she parted the sea of customers and asked them to keep the passage clear. I could see to the bar, above which was an enlarged replica of an Oscar statuette, and a sign that read: _Oscar's, The World's First Oscar Award Karaoke Bar._

"Hell hath no fury like you up on stage performing, darling," Andrew said to Penelope. "Let me just tell you again: wow."

"Author, author," I said.

"You like me, you really like me," she cooed.

"No kidding, your songwriting only gets better, Pen," the Professor told her.

"Hear hear. I wish we had some glasses to clink together," I said.

Up on stage, a tiny woman in thick glasses was reading the teleprompter and reciting: "...although some might say it's a little soon to be giving this to a guy in his early 40's, uh, I, to have known that I was going to get it particularly this year with all the...it's been very helpful around the house. I must say that, you know, if you had your choice, say Thalberg or the White House, I think I'd stick with this. I..."

Andrew nodded toward the door and said, "Look over there."

We looked. Then we looked at him.

"Know who that is...guy with glasses wearing the blue blazer...with the other guy, and the woman?"

"Looks familiar," I said. "Can't get a bead on who he is or what he was in."

"No," the Professor said, "he's not an actor. That's what's his name. What the fuck is he doing here?"

"I think he was supposed to have been on Maher tonight," Andrew went on. "I bet the gang over there tipped him off to groovy places to go."

"Who is it?" Penelope snapped, understandably out of patience.

"A guy named Michael Isikoff," Andrew told her. "He's a reporter for Newsweek. Smarmiest of the smarmy."

"Right," I said, looking at Penelope. "He was one of the first to blow the lid off the crime of the century...Clinton getting some biff."

"The name means nothing to me," she said. "He does look familiar though."

"For a while there he was on television every time you turned around," the Professor chimed in. "Hardball, CNN, Geraldo, blah blah blah...whoever would put his shamelessly opportunistic ass in front of a camera."

On stage, the small woman with glasses read: "...if I may, pay tribute to the memory of my mother Kathlyn, my father Ira, and to the people who nurtured me as a child in Virginia with my sister Shirley. And beginning with..."

"Every right-winger in the country," I said, "fed him like a Holstein for about a year, and he faithfully regurgitated it like the dependable bovine he truly was."

Andrew said, "He never met a source he didn't find credible. Reminded me of those Washington Post and New York Times reporters on the Whitewater stuff...shaken down by every rube with a tale for sale in Arkansas."

"If he wasn't leaving I'd offer to buy him a drink," the Professor said, "for driving Clinton's popularity ratings into the upper seventies."

Choking on a spate of coughs, and looking very exhausted, Penelope said in a damaged voice, "I must have missed him. Guess he's not going to be my newest superhero."

The little woman on stage went on: "It doesn't work. You have to throw it out. You gotta pick one. It just...they'll never believe it. So I would say to you, don't worry. I don't ever expect another evening like this..."

"I wish I'd had a chance to ask him what it was like to be Linda Tripp's bestus buddy and biggest megaphone," Andrew said.

"If she's still unemployed he owes her a job at least," I added. "Answering phones at Newsweek sounds about right."

The waitress brought the drinks, and set them up around the table. On stage, the tiny woman in glasses finished up: "Thank you very much from way down here."

The hostess hopped the stage again, and effused, "Excellent job Suzette. Warren Beatty, Irving Thalberg Award, 1999."

"I guess if Benjamin Bradlee could conjoin the names Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate," Andrew said, "to make the name WOODSTEIN, old Isikoff at least deserves to be known as WORMSTEIN." He turned toward the door and shouted loudly in his best Jason Robards imitation, "WORMSTEIN!"

In the meantime, a man with spiked green hair, and wearing a t-shirt, leather pants, and a dog collar was up on stage reciting: "...one of those people that tries to mention a lot of names, because I know just two seconds ago, my mother and father went completely berserk...and I'd like to give some other mothers and fathers...that same opportunity."

"NO PULTIZER FOR YOU, MIKE," I yelled toward the door, though Isikoff already had departed.

"Meryl Streep, Meryl Streep, Best Actress, 1981," the hostess declaimed from up on stage. When I looked away from it, Andrew and the Professor were staring worriedly at Penelope. Her hair still matted with sweat, and pale, she had slumped beside the Professor and fallen asleep.

"This girl is really sick," I said.

"She sure is," the Professor said lowering his voice. "I think this thing is right on the edge of turning into pneumonia."

"If you let it go, you can die from that incredibly fast, once it settles in," Andrew warned.

"We ought to finish these drinks and take her home," I said.

"We should. Next time I see the waitress I'll flag her over. I'll savor this extravagantly and maliciously overpriced drink in the meantime," Andrew said.

"Don't worry about the price of the drinks," said the Professor. "They're on me."

I saw the waitress looming, and yelped, "Waitress."

She swiveled and barked, "Watcha need?"

"Go ahead and give us the tab," the Professor told her. He looked down at Penelope and added, "We've got a sick girl on our hands."

"Awwww." She handed the check to the Professor who looked at it, then handed it back with a lump of bills. She thanked him, said goodnight to the rest of the table and left.

"Thing is," said the Professor, "I don't think we should leave her alone...not until she's doing better. She probably needs to go to Emergi-Care. But without her permission, and considering how much it would cost, the best we can do is watch over her until she's out of the woods. Then, if she starts looking like she's getting into serious trouble, we can take her there, or the emergency room, STAT."

"I'm willing," Andrew volunteered. "I tell you though, I don't see how we'd be able to pay for Emergi-Care. If nothing else, looking after her in her room will give us some time for figuring out how to go about scrounging up that amount of cash."

"We need," I said, "to cough up...oops...to come up with the money at least for a bottle of Tylenol and a bottle of expectorant."

"At least," the Professor said.

"I guess we could watch her in shifts," Andrew suggested.

"Okay, if you two guys will take the first two shifts, overnight," the Professor said, "I'll come in tomorrow at the crack of dawn and watch her a fair amount of time before I go to work at the bar."

"I can sit with her for a couple of hours when we get back," I offered.

"Since the crack of dawn is about when I normally hit the sack, filling the time between you two guys will be about right for me," Andrew said.

"We're assuming," I told them, "she's going to go along with having us in her room all that time. You know how serious she is about her privacy. She hates living with roommates so much she's living in that place...among the other reasons."

"I think she may be too sick to object. If she does," said the Professor, "we'll give her the choice of watching over her in her own room, or going directly to the emergency room. I'm pretty confident she understands we wouldn't be so concerned unless we thought she could be in danger."

"All right," Andrew said, "wake her up."

As the Professor began gently jiggling her arm hoping to arouse her, a large, muscular, heavyset man, say two hundred and forty-five, two hundred and fifty pounds was taking to the stage and beginning to recite: "...wealth, the great firmament of your nation's generosities this particular choice may perhaps be found by future generations as a trifle eccentric, but the mere fact of it . . . the prodigal, pure, human kindness of it . . . must be seen as a beautiful star in that firmament which shines upon me..." Penelope groggily began to come to. As Andrew and the Professor softly urged her to greater alertness, I could hear the man on stage as he recited, "...at this moment, dazzling."

____________________________________________________

Penelope's boots were on the floor at the foot of the bed where they had landed after she'd yanked them off. Each boot was resting on its side as if pointing in the opposite direction of the other. Two suitcases, a hairbrush, and a container of resin kept them company there. An open guitar case with no guitar inside leaned against the wall. Next to it, was another guitar case, this one closed, and next to it a black-bodied electric guitar with a bright red pick guard stood. The boom box on the dresser reigned like a monument over the landscape of the dresser's surface amidst a litter of notebooks, pens, books, magazines, and a scattering of guitar picks and CD's. A puppet hanging on the wall across from me seemed to be staring directly at me (giving me the evil eye). The bedside table made a creaking noise, though it managed to accommodate without collapsing, a large glass of water, a bucket of ice, a bottle of expectorant, a container of Tylenol, a box of Kleenex, and a small bong.

I had improvised myself a chaise lounge by plumping a pillow behind my back, and stretching out on a metal trunk, placed lengthwise against the wall parallel to the bed. A jumbo take-out coffee was within my reach, and a pack of cigarettes. Despite my temporary nursing assignment in the hotel's newly opened respiratory unit, smoke from my thirteen or fourteen cigarettes in a row had accumulated near the ceiling, and formed images of prophets and depictions of the Creation worthy of Michelangelo.

Penelope was on the bed clothed, a quilt covering her up to the waist. I managed to read using the little light from the bathroom able to squeeze through the partially open door.

Penelope began to toss. She flipped from side to side, flopped over onto her back, and spread her arms out and pulled the cover up under her chin.

"Are you warm enough Penelope?"

Still from a distance well inside her slumber she responded, "Huh?"

"You warm enough? Need any more cover?"

"I'm alright," she grumbled.

I continued to read. Three or four minutes later Penelope opened her eyes. She looked around, took notice of me, then began to pull herself up in bed until she was practically sitting. She lurched into a pitiful convulsion of coughing, during which she reached for a Kleenex, and held it to her mouth. She sighed, threw the Kleenex onto the table and leaned back against the pillow.

"You guys really _are_ staying."

"We really are. How are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling like death on a fucking cracker." She had barely finished when she began sneezing like a winter nor'easter.

"Bless you."

Afterwards, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and sighed again. "Thanks. What's that you're reading?"

"Novel. _South of Heaven_ by Jim Thompson."

"What's it about?"

"It's about a bunch of derelicts, alkies, ex-cons, and basic n'er do wells putting down a gas pipeline in a shithole part of Texas during the Twenties. Jim Thompson was a moderately famous, notorious crime writer who specialized in psycho psychology and lurid behavior, and particularly evocative noir atmosphere. He lived a kind of shitkicker life that..."

Penelope had been staring at me in an odd way, and finally she interrupted. "I know...I know who Jim Thompson is, got it ace? You're not the only one who reads. I honestly believe you think you are. Don't you..."

"All right, all right. I've got my hands up. I'm fucking surrendering."

"Good. I think I've got the plot."

"Good."

"My eyes are going to be too heavy and tired for me to read for a while anyhow."

"Hold on a second." I was excusing myself to the bathroom, but since she'd resumed the violent flinging away of the insides of her lungs I didn't wait for any kind of acknowledgement. When I had completed as precise as possible a repositioning of the door in order to allow just enough light to enable reading, I turned, and saw her head was tilted slightly to the side, and she was sleeping soundly. Before I could get the pillow scrunched up satisfactorily again to put behind me, someone knocked. I made an effort to walk to the door as quietly as I possibly could. When I opened it, Andrew was standing there.

"I'm here," he said at a normal volume.

"Shhhhhhhsh." I shooed him away from the door and out into the hall. "Keep it down. She's sleeping. She woke up for a minute, but now she's back asleep."

"Oh."

"Make sure she takes the Tylenol as close to six or six-thirty as possible. Give her three. The important thing is keeping the fever under control."

"Check."

"And make sure she stays warm. If the blanket's off her and she looks cold, put it back up over her. If she seems hot, and she wakes up, get her to chew on some ice."

"Right."

"And you know...if she's having any serious difficulty breathing...or if the fever seems to be getting way out of control, it's time to get her to the emergency room...we'll have no choice."

"Gotcha. Now, can I ask you a question?"

"What?"

"Can I go in the room?"

"Yeah. But do it quietly."

I was asleep no more than ninety seconds after I shoved the household appliances and pleasure-related contraband off my bed and laid down, and began using it as it was designed to be used. I woke up late in the morning, only doing so then because of a racket outside my window sounding as close as anything possibly could to a gas-powered leaf blower eating a pigeon. As there was no work that day, once up, I made soup, and assuaged my liquor-insulted physiology. No actual cooking was involved, though the hot water in the sink was required to run for a very, very long time. I sat at the window, looking out as I usually did at breakfast, this time casually searching the sidewalk below for pigeon feathers and oil spots. As I was slurping Ramen there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, a portly Hispanic man wearing a white shirt and a yellow tie introduced himself as a representative of the United States Department of the Census. And to think, the day had started out with soup. Once across the threshold of my cheery domicile he said, "this will only take twenty or thirty minutes of your time." At this point I mentally recorded the following note to self: always ask who it is before you open the door. If the voice on the other side answers by informing you that he or she is a representative of the United States Bureau of the Census, tell them you would like to participate, but unfortunately you are currently bedridden with a life-threatening case of lice; or you're in the process of putting black tar heroin addiction in your past, and are presently hurling your stomach contents every twenty seconds.

I pulled the hard-backed chair away from the desk, and scooted it into the meager patch of open floor space. I sat down on the bed across from him, resigned.

"Is this required? In other words, is there any kind of punishment for not complying with this?"

"Well...technically, there are fines...I believe a hundred dollars for failure to respond, and 500 for providing false information. I think it's rare it's ever enforced."

"Uh huh."

"I'll be with you in just one moment." He zipped open a black valise, and yanked out a stack of paper. He put a form on a clipboard he also took from inside the valise, and began jotting things on it with his pen. He verified my hotel room number then wrote some more on the form in silence. He lifted the pen, looked directly at me and asked, "How many people were living or staying in this room on April first of this year?"

I looked directly at him a little longer than was necessary, before answering, "One. You believe me, right?"

"Yes," he said without smiling.

"Okay, is this hotel room: A. Owned by you or someone in this hotel room with a mortgage or loan? B. Owned by you or someone in this hotel room free and clear? C. Rented for cash rent? D. Occupied without payment of cash rent?" Then he looked across at me as he awaited my answer. Involuntarily this time, I looked directly at him a little longer than was necessary before answering, "Usually C, but occasionally D."

"I need for you to specify one or the other if you could."

"C."

"Fine."

"How am I doing so far?"

"Fine."

Next he wanted to know my name, which I provided, spelling it out slowly. Having completed the name section of the questionnaire he looked at me and inquired as to my gender. Normally, this might have offended me, at least a little, but in this hotel it wasn't out of the question to do so, and probably the most thoroughly conscientious way to go. As he was writing down the response, another visitor started pounding the door.

"Oh shit. Is this how it works? There's a good census cop and a bad census cop?"

"No," he said flatly, "just me."

I opened the door and found the Professor standing in the middle of the hall.

"You're late," he said. "I have to get downstairs and open up, and it's your shift to stay with Penelope. Your shift was supposed to start at noon. You coming?"

"Yeah, I was planning to, but I've got company." I moved aside so he could see inside the room.

"Who's that?"

"Census taker."

"No joke? Man, he must be the worst, or the unluckiest census taker in the United States to get sent to this place."

"I doubt the guy they sent to Watts feels that way."

"That's true. So what about Penelope?"

"Go on down to work. I'll be at Pen's in a minute. I just need to clean up a little, and think of a way to lose the federal government."

"All right. But don't take forever."

"I wasn't planning to."

"Now listen," he said. "She's sleeping now, so you need to make your entrance as quiet as possible, and settle in without a lot of noise."

"Aye aye."

"Don't wear headphones or anything, because you won't be able to hear what her breathing sounds like, or anything else."

"Right."

"And you can't smoke in there anymore."

"Gotcha."

"And don't let her smoke either."

"I won't"

"Remember to give her THREE Tylenol. Do it as close to two or two-thirty as you possibly can."

"Please go to work."

"I'm going."

After I'd closed the door, I asked the census taker if he would excuse me for just a minute. He signaled okay. I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, took my clothes off and washed myself as fast as I could, then dried and dressed. I dampened my hair, and quickly combed the coif into presentable style. Back in the room, I looked around for South of Heaven, snatched it up and turned to my local census representative and told him "I have an emergency. I'll be back. You're welcome to wait here as long as you would like."

"I don't know if," were the last words I heard him say before I was out of earshot and dashing for the stairs.

I enthusiastically embraced a return to the oil fields of south Texas, with their intransigent soil, and their transient humanity saddled with dilapidated prospects. Penelope's sleep was so sound she hardly stirred at all. I uncoiled myself, rose up off the trunk and interrupted my reading only a few times. Those times, when I helped her drink came after she'd awakened with obviously painful coughs, revealing an alarming congestion densely and thickly ensconced deep down in her chest.

I explained the severity of Pen's condition to Andrew in the hallway before he began his shift. I told him I had been struck by an idea during my latest performance of the Florence Nightingale routine.

"I was thinking...where is the office this week?"

"Does this have something to do with your recreational activity between shifts?"

"Not this time Sherlock. Do you know?"

"Yeah. It's...let's see, 2...0...right, 208."

"I'm thinking it's possible he might have, or might know somebody who has some forged scripts...the kind prescriptions are written on; or know someone who is able to forge them. We don't have time to wait, or the money to get them off the Internet... or a computer, for that matter. If we could get a hold of something for not a lot of dough...then it's a way to get antibiotics without having to pay the expense of seeing a doctor."

"I have no idea. If you want to ask him about it, there's nothing to lose."

"I think I will."

"Let me know."

Forsaking the elevator, I hit the door to the stairs running, and wended my way around the landings. At 208 I thumped at the door.

"Yeah?"

"Elmo. It's Donovan."

In his standard office apparel of sneakers, shirt and errant shirttail, he let me in.

"Hey buster. Howz ya doin'?"

"Good. Good."

He shuffled back to his chair in front of the window. Along with the laptop on the bed, and the briefcase, which now was on the bed also, a small television was on the dresser. "What can I do for you?" he inquired as usual.

"I doubt it's anything you would have yourself, but I figured if you didn't, you might be able to steer me in the direction of somebody who does."

"What is it you're looking for?"

"There's a woman who lives here...a couple of us here hang out with her a little, who has the mother of all respiratory infections. She ought to go to the doctor and get a load of antibiotics, but nobody has the cash, not at the moment anyhow. I've heard of people who hit doctor's offices and boost those pads they write prescriptions on. Would you know by any chance anybody who might have one with a forgery for an antibiotic, willing to sell me one, or to forge me one...on your recommendation naturally...one script...so we can get this chick some medicine?"

He shook his head in the negative. "I hate to tell you, I know a person who deals in those, but there's not much bread in underground antibiotics. You can get a prescription for them off the Internet without much trouble. That would be my suggestion."

"We don't have a computer, or a credit card, and if we need them it's going to be in the next twenty-four hours, and by the time they send them here, even if we paid for the fastest delivery, it could be too late to keep her from getting really sick. But it's not a bad suggestion...we might have to look into it if she takes a turn for the worse."

"If anybody would bother with medicine like that, it'd cost you a whole lot more than to go to a doctor AND to pay the pharmacy for the medicine combined."

"Really? Hmm."

"You know what kind of shit you're in for nabbing one of those things?"

"I can guess."

"What they do to you for trafficking in that stuff is worse than what they do to you for trafficking in this stuff," nodding at the briefcase as he spoke. "The people who heist those things don't take that kind of risk for chicken scratch. Besides, people want to use those scripts for heavy duty shit...when the cash isn't really a problem...maybe a shitload of Seconal, or maybe cyanide, to off somebody....a lot of the time, themselves. People get shit like liquid morphine...the really hard stuff that only the pharmaceutical companies can afford to make."

"Fuck."

"Fuck is right. Who is this woman, anyway?"

"Her name is Penelope. Cool girl. Good musician."

"Like me."

"Cool girl or good musician?"

"You knew I used to be in a band."

"I thought you used to sell...wasn't it furniture?"

"Yeah, I sold furniture, and before that I sold insurance, and before that I was doing music. I played bass in the Fisters."

"That's right. Hardcore punk."

"Fuckin' A."

"Oh well. Guess we'll have to try a little longer to get her healed up without the meds."

"I'd like to check out the girl's music some time."

"If the opportunity presents itself I'll introduce you."

"What kind of stuff is she doing?"

"Kind of raw...no Miles Davis pun intended. You might call it hard folk."

Instead of listening to me, Elmo was zombified in front of the television. Pointing his finger, he said, "Another car chase on Channel Five." He got quiet when he resumed staring, then forty or fifty seconds later exclaimed, "Is that the 101? Man, I have to get home on that sonofabitch."

"Exposure to news on the local channels is without any question at all one of the lower circles of hell. All you do is watch this same car chase...that same dumb motherfucker keeps going and going...and he always gets caught."

On my way to the refreshment stand next door for a brief respite from the hustle and bustle of hotel life, I checked in at the front desk for any messages before trotting out the door. There was one from my pimperary, which had left word of an assignment awaiting me the next day, a three-day job in fact. As usual, I was to call back in for location and times and rate of pay.

In the meantime, bleary-eyed from reading, but with no appetite for conversation, or even company, I chose to eschew the bar and sit at a table alone. Early evening was neither my customary, nor my favorite time for a visit. It generally featured the after work, or after looking for work, or after sleeping all day crowds. This night, seats at the bar were mostly taken, and about half of the tables already were in use. Mr. Orlov, another hotel resident, was seated at a table some distance away from the cluster of tables already occupied. My desire to likewise place a buffer between myself and other recreationists caused me to take possession of the table next to him. As the tables began to fill, both of us were soon surrounded.

De-carbonated in spirit, but benefiting from the anodyne effects of vodka and inner life I couldn't help but eventually become susceptible to involuntary eavesdropping on the increasingly voluble conversations around me. The more vodka went down the hatch, the further into the well of my preoccupations I fell, and alternately, the more distracted by nearby conversations. The first I began to pay attention to, as one would expect, was that of a couple sitting at a table to the side, and a little in front of me.

"It's amazing how attractive Marilyn Monroe still was when she killed herself...I mean, she didn't look anywhere close to fifty-seven."

"It's too bad you know, the suicide machine invented by Dr. Spock wasn't available for her to use, instead of a butcher knife."

"Did you know there's an artery that actually comes up out of the body...sort of like a subway train that comes up out of a tunnel, and runs on an elevated track, an artery right above your armpit near your back...it's right there outside your body, an inch or two long. It's really hard to get to, but you can just cut that thing in two and kill yourself...pronto."

Mr. Orlov had brought along his portable tape recorder, which I could see was sitting on the table in front of him. I had seen him with the recorder before, carrying it with him as he walked, sitting in the bar, or at one resting place or another out front. His demeanor was a mixture of gentleness and weariness, and in my few encounters with him, he had been both polite and diffident. Each time he had been well spoken enough. I watched him for a moment. He was a thin man with thick, dark hair, sunken cheeks and the remnants of a poor complexion in youth. He was drinking the bar's coffee, which was always free. Tonight, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, with its effect of emphasizing the gawky slenderness of his arms, which were long, scrawny and pale.

Near me, conversation from the same couple was still as impossible to ignore as it had been before. The man, who had referred to himself more than once as a physician was saying to his companion, "My point is, that when they tried banning the sale of laxatives during prohibition it was entirely unsuccessful. On the other hand, it did lead to the process of extracting juice from prunes invented by Dr. Pasteur."

"Yes, I remember all of that from my course in Early Twentieth Century American History at Duke."

"And no one has ever _died_ from ephedra use," the man continued.

"Of course" the woman said, "it's hypocritical to ban the sale of laxatives while allowing the sale of Columbian coffee in stores offering the sale of muffins. But since ephedra's only use is as a date rape drug I see no reason why it should not be banned."

"No, the Surgeon General's office recommends it as a part of any sensible weight loss program. For people interested in losing weight, ephedra, along with ensuring that the largest meal of the day is the final one...and that the meal is eaten as close to one hour prior to bedtime as possible...those are the keys."

Another conversation close by, slowly began to bleed into the one I had been listening to, until it had entirely superceded the first .The new one originated at the table over to the right, and slightly ahead of where the couple was sitting, the table directly in front of mine. The occupants were two men and a woman. The woman was saying, "It's romantic to think in those terms, to go on believing art is able to have an effect. But I can think of no painting, or piece of writing that has ever done it, not on contemporaneous events, or on the politics of its time. For all the intensity and power De Kooning invested in Guernica, it had no effect whatsoever on the Spanish invasion of Poland."

"It didn't prevent England from stink-bombing Dresden near the end of World War Two," offered one of the men.

"Updike wrote Slaughterhouse-Five about his presence in Dresden," added the other man, "at the time it was stink-bombed, which didn't prevent Hubert Humphrey from carrying out the Christmas bombing of Taiwan in 1972."

"But," said the first man suddenly excited, and directing his comments toward the woman now, "I think I have an example for you. I believe you could make a case that the movie about a Russian power plant, that the lessons of "The China Syndrome" may have, at the very least, prevented a recurrence of problems at the Chernobyl reactor in Outer Mongolia."

"Perhaps," the woman answered. "I got quite a bit out of The China Syndrome. I enjoyed the movie. But films like that in Russian with English subtitles take too much effort for me to watch most of the time."

"What about Flaubert's writings concerning the Dreyfus Affair?" the second man interjected.

"That wasn't art, it was journalism," the first man answered. "If you want to change the discussion to what artists have done as individuals to produce change in the world, I'm fine with that, but it's a different discussion. Besides, the Dreyfus matter had to do with anti-Catholicism and anger toward Rome. I'll give Flaubert credit for bringing to the fore the problem of hostility from the Jewish majority in France toward the Catholic minority."

Nothing had gone into my stomach since the morning soup, and nothing solid the entire day. The relaxing effect of the vodka was certainly expedited on an empty belly. I felt a kind of alarming skepticism at just that moment, as to whether I would be able to get as relaxed as the day so far, as my world was making me feel I probably needed to be. I got up out of my chair, and approached the bar, as I did so flashing the refill sign to the Professor when I caught his eye. Standing waiting, I turned my head slightly to the right, as I followed the Professor to the vodka bottle, glancing down to see what looked to be a coarse mop of white hair that had grown in under my chin. Stu's head was there, and he was standing so close to me we were nearly conjoined. The old guy said, ""Got one for you."

"All right Stu. Let's hear it."

"What do you call the result of a meal shared by a Catholic priest, a Jewish Rabbi and a Protestant minister?"

I nodded my head. "Beats the hell out of me, Stu."

"An ecumenical movement."

He grinned. I laughed. "Give Stu one on me," I directed the Professor.

I returned to my seat, setting down my drink, laying a fresh pack of smokes beside it. Back at my table, back in the vortex I went after the vodka at even a more immoderate pace than before. I peered through the smoke sailing out of my mouth and quickly was entranced again by snatches of conversation near me, these coming from the table slightly to my right and closer beside me than the table where the other three continued to hold forth. The two men, each wearing a cap bearing the name of a soft drink company across the front, conversed over the tops of frosted mugs.

"I heard it while I was driving in. I was stuck in traffic, and there was nothing else to do but to sit there and listen to the radio. He said the reduction in the ozone layer above the Rock of Gibraltar has to do with greenhouse orchids being grown all over the place. That's the cause."

"No, on the 700 Club they said it was whorehouse gasses, unregulated whorehouse gasses."

I stubbed the cigarette out and rattled the ice in my glass as a way of temporarily blocking out the sound. I stopped, let the sound back in, two women in business suits catching my eye before I'd caught a lick of their conversation. They were facing one another with unnervingly proper posture, sitting at the table directly next to me on my right. There was no question these dialogues were moving, or at the least, that I was only able to pluck them out of the bar's cacophony in a circular fashion: conversations that moved in a precisely clockwise motion around me, me at the center, the middle of the swirl. It was not merely that I could only focus on a single discussion at one time. But that audibly isolated pieces of conversation were available only in that way.

One of the women next to me could be heard saying sharply to the other, "It's easy to stop drinking. It isn't even such a bad addiction, really...alcoholism. You're only unable to stop if you're incredibly weak."

"And there's no such thing as addictive and non-addictive personalities. It's not just a genetic thing, or luck, or body chemistry that allows some people to enjoy things such as alcohol without developing uncontrollable dependencies. It's just a matter of character, of using self-control...the way I do," the other explained.

"Exactly. Whining about heroin's addictiveness is simply a giant excuse. If you have the proper values, you'll never end up in such a situation. Goodness, heroin is less addictive than popcorn. It's just that people who enjoy eating a lot of popcorn are of a higher quality. Billy Graham was a regular heroin user before he became a Christian. And prayer was all he needed to end the habit."

"Exactly. Junkies who find the Lord have no use for methadone. Besides, it doesn't even work on Caucasians."

"JFK wrecked that boat during World War II and he needed pain killers the rest of his life...that's the kind of thing a real man never would have needed."

"I've told you about my brother in-law, the really poor one, haven't I?"

"Oh yes."

"Well, he'll spend money for Novocain when he goes to a dentist, but he never has enough to fix the broken glass in the windows of his house. The wind just blows through. If they simply have to freeze, that's the way it is. He moans about it all the time, just for show. But I know for a fact he could care less."

"The way some people live. If everybody worked as hard as my husband does, and as I do part-time, nobody would need to complain. I bet he's barely made any investments at all in the market. Money is wasted on people like that. They barely pay any taxes at all, while people like my husband and I are paying upwards of seventy or eighty percent capital gains tax every time we liquidate."

"He's quite a specimen. You know he's a courier, and hey...probably ten or twenty percent of the country has at least one prosthetic leg. He could have two. But he only has one, so that tells you something about the lack of ambition. You know how crumby the money for those kinds of jobs is."

"That's the sister who has to use coupons just to get groceries to feed them, isn't it? People like that get a kick out of standing at the cash register handing over those coupons getting all the attention... everybody feeling so sorry for them."

"I'm ashamed to go with her. I never would. All they eat is canned food, and reduced meat. They have no clue when it comes to choosing the best, or the highest quality."

The overlapping of this conversation with a conversation from the table just behind me made both of them incomprehensible, until the overlapping stopped, and the one directly behind me prevailed. I edged around in my chair, crooked my head and got a peek. A large, black youth in a sweatshirt sat across from a man twice his age in a business suit, a de-facto price tag hanging off its sleeve that read: exquisite. The younger man was saying to the older man, "You see this blue? You know where I'm from, don't ya? Blue on that block? You know what it about. I hear a brother works for the president...like, his butler and shit, was a Crip down there, too. Nigger did three in Pelican for settin' a brother's hair on fire."

"You mean, the president on the TV show?"

"TV show?"

"So you were saying?" the older man said, abandoning the mission.

"My boy Pinkie, he the scariest killer down there, Holmes. Last night, he blowed a cartridge of M & M's up their asses over at Twenty-second. Got two grandmas, three baby strollers, a dude in a wheelchair, two blind street vendors and a little brown dog. They knows who is boss now."

"Yeah...good stuff. What I was saying was that any pissant actor can get ten, fifteen mil for doing any motherfucking lousy flick. You wanna live larger than that, you certainly can. If some pussies putting music out for other companies wants to settle for that let 'em do it. And there's another thing we can offer you in OUR contract, similar to life insurance...in this case, it's jail insurance: you get in trouble, DA can't lay a hand on you, can't touch you...no sir. It's one of the most popular aspects of the contracts we are currently offering. Rabid C and T-Bag...it's the reason you see them handing out music awards instead of peeling potatoes in Corcoran."

"Dang."

Another perfectly good glass of vodka was shot to hell, so I got up and strolled myself to the bar again. As I passed Mr. Orlov on my return, I saw him speaking into his tape recorder. Then I watched from my seat as he maintained his hands cupped around the microphone, keeping his body hunched defensively around the recorder and his back to most of the other tables as he spoke. I couldn't hear him, but even if I could have, I doubt he would have interrupted the flow of conversations from other tables. In fact, talk from tables one over from the circle of tables closest to me, the tables whose variety of pronouncements, declarations and persuasion already had reached my ears, and seemed to seek them out in fact, began to flood me, too. The first I heard from this outer circle was a man explaining to two women, "Bill Gates began the work on a water-resistant, floatable personal computer with me, over at Cal Tech. He first tested the product by sending it over the highest falls west of the Mississippi, which is the Rose Falls on the Pasadena River."

"Oh," said one of the women, "I know. I read about that in Popular Mechanics."

"It works on the Pythagorean Theorem of quantum physics I think," the other woman added.

"When Jefferson wrote the Magna Carter..." I heard, not from the table where the three were sitting, but the table in front of them, realizing that the spiral of conversation around me was speeding up.

"When I was a Cardinal in Rome, we went daily into the streets and fed the sick and homeless, mopped the public restrooms, and carried out the tradition of waxing the legs of prostitutes in the Piazza del Popolo," a man was telling a woman at the table next in the ring of tables.

"I believe that is so beautifully addressed in the Bible, in a passage from the 23rd Psalm, where it speaks of Jesus chasing the lepers out of the temple," the woman replied.

Irresistibly, my attention was hijacked away by things that were being said and things that were being done at the table directly in front of the table that was directly in front of mine. "How much are the plastic swizzle sticks," asked a man of a woman carrying a tray that was held in front of her by a strap going around her neck and shoulders.

"Twenty-five dollars," she told him.

"I'll take one of those," the man said.

"How much for a cocktail?" another man at the table asked.

"One cocktail, a single, twenty dollars. We have a special though, a double for seventy-five."

"All right. Let me have a double Ocean Breeze." Before I knew it, what was being said at the table adjacent to the one where this activity was taking place, had virtually leapt in front of the interaction at the other, and drowned it out.

"...same as during Vietnam," I heard a woman telling another, "when General Westmoreland said to Ho Chi Minh through the press, "You light up my life all the way to the end of the tunnel." And before another word was said, the talk from the table directly behind the table directly behind mine was rising above the talk from the table where the two women were discussing war and peace.

"And that reminds me of the quote," a bearded man in spectacles was saying with absolute solemnity to a younger man, also with a beard and spectacles, "by Immanuel Kant when he said, 'golf is a good walk spoiled,' only seconds before he was killed by Schopenhaur on the back nine at Pebble Beach."

I was able to hear the squeak of a chair, and turned to see Mr. Orlov get up out of his seat and begin walking slowly in the direction of the john. I heard a voice waft above the drone of others, from somewhere I couldn't place, which said, ""My show is syndicated on one-hundred and thirty stations."

Aware of a jostling beside me, I turned to see a man I had never seen before standing at Mr. Orlov's table, peering down at his tape recorder. Another man joined him, a friend it appeared. The first man was reaching down, and when I heard sounds coming out of the tape recorder I realized what was going on. The first man stopped the tape, pressed another button, and I could hear the machine as the tape rewound. The first man switched the tape to PLAY again, he and the other man sharing a snicker when he did. "My show is syndicated on one-hundred and thirty stations." Initially, I bent forward in my chair a little in order to better hear. But there wasn't a need. The words were loud enough. It was Mr. Orlov's voice I could hear next: "...beginning a diary entry. Still the same day as previous entry. The spool is turning, so I know there's energy still left in the batteries. I can't replace them. I just finished my appointment at Robinsons-May. I...I was humiliated by the man who does the hiring. I've already talked about how hot it's been for about...about a week, now. During this week, the two clean shirts I still had left both got soiled with perspiration. I guess the shirt I'm wearing smells, because the man at the store said to me that in the future I should wear deodorant, implying that he could smell me. No one's ever said anything like that to me before. I had two dollars and sixty-five cents this week. There still isn't near enough altogether to have enough that I could use on laundry. I was going to wash the shirt I was going to wear today in the sink, but I was afraid it would still be wet by the time I was supposed to go. I'm going to soak all of my shirts, but one, in the sink after I finish this. Still...I guess the harm is done. When he said that to me, it almost felt like I had been hit with a fist. It shocked me, because, you don't expect someone to say anything like that to your face. It was embarrassing, extremely embarrassing. I've never been humiliated like that before. Ever. I don't remember anything ever like that, feeling so humiliated like that. What else can I say? That reminds me, I should finish reading the essay by Isaac Babel, stop walking around so much, and finish reading the essay. If all my shirts are soaking, I'll just stay inside and read. And sleep I guess. I wonder if in the larger scheme of things my trouble is really significant in any way, compared to others'? It is worthwhile to wonder...the kind of thing I should really think about. Nothing is ever worse than being too self-important. Of course, that sounds silly, when you say it in a city like this I guess. I guess it makes me silly, to say something as ridiculous as that. I ought to finish reading the essay."

I tilted my glass, turning it almost upside down above my mouth in order to get the last of its contents pouring into my mouth, and rolling down my throat. I thrust my chair back demonstrably, and the two tampering with the tape recorder went skipping out of the bar, like junior high school girls dismissed from cheerleading practice early. After hearing what I'd heard I had the strongest desire to locate my head on the platform of a drill press, where it would be several seconds and a spinning bit away from removal of consciousness.

I went out into the street and down to the market for a pint of vodka before I returned to Pen's. I'd promised Andrew to spell him for a little while, to do a mini-shift in the middle of his regular one so that he could watch a show about an Antarctic explorer on the History Channel. We conferred in the middle of the hall outside of the room before I went in.

"She's been in a deep, deep sleep for hours, so whatever you do, don't wake her up," he said.

"Not a chance."

"Take her temperature as soon as she gets up," he instructed.

"You can count on me," I said.

I tiptoed into the room and made myself comfortable on the trunk against the wall. I pulled the vodka bottle out of the paper sack, the crinkling causing Penelope to open her eyes and look at me a little startled. I sat motionless, in case the moment of wakefulness should pass and Penelope's eyelids should droop back down. But she was awake, and it was the real thing.

"You had to wake up some time," I said in a sheepishly softened voice.

"Very profound," she said.

"Yeah well." I cracked the seal of the vodka, removed the cap and refreshed myself.

"Jesus, I feel a lot better," she told me.

"Before I forget it, let me take your temperature."

"You don't have to take my fucking temperature. I can put a thermometer in my mouth." She poked around on the bedside table until she found it. "I already can tell my fever is gone," she added.

"That's good news."

"I'm starving too."

"Let me see," I said, on my feet again, and opening the plastic bags at the end of the bed. "When we bought expectorant and Tylenol we thought ahead and bought you cans of food."

"The canned stuff...yum."

I knelt down and ferreted through the selection. "We've got soup...um, beans...here's some chili."

"Looks like it's going to be a Hormel evening."

"Only if I can find a hot plate to warm it up. I wouldn't make you eat cold Hormel chili even if you weren't sick...or already sick."

"I appreciate that."

"Hang on. I'm gonna go looking for a hot plate."

"You guys are really troopers...no kidding."

"Yeah...troopers."

I spurted out of the room, dashed down the hallway, then took to the stairs two at a time to the next floor. When I reached the door of the gaunt tweaker whose room was across the hall from mine I banged hard. The door flew open, the gaunt man standing there in his tee shirt waving the machete in his right hand.

"Hey," he blurted.

"Sorry man. I wouldn't bother you, except a friend of mine...this girl who lives upstairs is pretty sick. I was hoping to heat her up some food. You wouldn't happen to have a hot plate would you?"

"Is this that same crazy fucking coconut we carried outta here screaming like a tortured animal?"

"No, fuck no. This is somebody else."

"I don't have a hot plate. You want a hot plate? That what you said?"

"Yeah. A hot plate. To cook on...you know."

"Yeah, I know. My buddy Jimmy down the hall, he's got one. Try him. He might let ya borrow it." He pointed down the hall. "Next floor up, last one on the right."

"The long-haired guy?"

"That's the dude."

"Thanks boss. I'm really sorry to bother you."

"No problem."

I reversed course, climbed back up the stairs, and knocked where the man upstairs had told me to knock. Jimmy opened the door but didn't say a thing.

"Jimmy, right?" I asked him.

"You're lookin' for Jimmy?"

"Yeah. You're Jimmy?"

"Yeah. Jimmy."

"Your buddy down the hall told me he thought you had a hot plate you might be able to loan me for a while. I want to cook this friend of mine who's sick a little something hot to eat. You think that might be okay?"

"Yeah...alright. Come in a minute. I gotta unplug it."

I followed him into the room, which, in terms of order, even for the Essex, was something of a living cubist painting.

"Smokey in here," I said.

"I was on the pipe," he declared, in a manner that was the obvious antithesis of defensive.

"Sorry to interrupt."

"Don't matter. I can go back."

Jimmy unplugged the hot plate, lifted it up and handed it to me. I was carrying it cradled under my elbow, the cord dangling down behind me. As I headed for the door I said, "I'll get it back to you pretty quick."

"Ain't no hurry."

As I neared the door, I glanced down and noticed the crack pipe resting on the table. Noticing me noticing it Jimmy picked up the pipe and said, "Here. Have a hit. It's already loaded."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Catch a bolt."

"Don't mind if I do." I lifted up the glass pipe, put it to my lips, and let Jimmy graciously supply the flame. I drew in the smoke and held it.

"You getting' it?" he asked.

Hissing out a faint residue of dingy smoke, I answered, "Definitely."

"Feelin' it now?" he queried again.

"Nice."

"Go ahead and do one more."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, here." He once again was my provider of fire. "Got it?" he needed to know, yet again.

"Excellent," I said blowing out the smoke, doing my best to grin from ear to ear as visual confirmation. "Thanks. I'll get your hot plate back as soon as I warm up the food for my friend upstairs."

"Ain't no hurry."

My hand was inches away from the door when Jimmy yelled out to me, "Hey man."

"Yeah?"

"You got a pot to cook in?"

"Uh...no I don't, as a matter of fact."

He went over and picked up a white-enameled saucepan from the table where the hot plate had been and brought it to me. "Here you go."

"I really appreciate it."

"Dude, no problem."

I tried to stay on top of the chili while it was warming, stirring it around every forty or fifty seconds. Penelope was under the covers again scrunched up on her side. I found myself tapping out a little rhythm on the side of the metal saucepan with the metal spoon: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. Penelope wallowed over onto her other side, finally twitching over again and resting on her back.

"Jesus."

I realized what I was doing and stopped. "Oh. Sorry."

"Boy, you came back awfully perky," she said.

"Yeah," unable to suppress a chuckle. I picked the spoon up again and started to stir the chili. I noticed that after ninety seconds or so the spoon was tapping on the side of the hot plate again, and then tapping on the rim of the pan, going back and forth. I heard a groan, and turned to see Penelope twisting herself over onto her stomach, holding the pillow over her head with two hands. I checked myself again, and decided the time had arrived to remove the chili from the source of heat. I put the pan on the floor and went over to unplug the hot plate. I got a coffee mug from Penelope's dresser, ladled some chili in, and walked it over and served it to her in bed.

I stood at the window, looking out, and tapping on the glass with a pencil while Penelope ate her chili. Someone turned, or pressed a switch in the room above us, and music thundered overhead like the wrath of Buckethead.

"Not a quiet place left on the face of the Earth," I snarled.

"Holy God," she exclaimed, looking up at the ceiling, the spoon in her hand frozen beside her.

"People who like to have a little quiet are the last fucking abused minority...or, one of the last."

Penelope didn't say anything, but she raised her spoon in solidarity.

"Wait," I announced. I walked to the door and flung it open, stomped to the end of the hall and took to the stairs again. I got to the door of the room manufacturing the offending decibels and pounded it with my fist. A lanky black man wearing a black tank top, a thick gold chain around the neck and red boxers lapping at his knees, opened the door. Behind him I could see two women, a raven haired woman and a brunet beside her visible sitting on the end of a bed, one of them Asian, wearing only panties; the other white, and completely nude.

"What is it, bro?"

"It's your music, bro. It's too fucking loud. A friend of mine who lives downstairs, in the room right below yours, is pretty sick, and she's trying to get some rest. With your music playing at that volume it's going to be impossible."

"Hmmm." He rubbed the side of his face with his hand as he stood there. He glanced back toward the bed where the women were, turned back to me, and said, "Tell you what, blood, why don't we step out in the hall a minute."

I stepped back, and he slipped out the door and shut it behind him.

"Thing is my man, we weren't gonna be playin' no music much longer anyways. We wus partyin' a little before we get ourselves back to business. Lemme ask you, you real busy right at the moment, bro? Shoot. Wait here." He turned around and went back into the room. Not too many seconds after that the music was switched off. He opened the door, shut it behind him, and joined me in the hall again.

"Thanks. If my friend wasn't sick, you wouldn't be seeing me."

"Naw...is awright. I get what your situation is. I tell you what, though...my thing is this," and he lowered his voice a little, "I gotta uncle, see...he distributes these tapes we make, amateur video...adult shit, ya know?"

"Um hmm."

"You just shoot it on a video camera. You'd be surprised all the money's in it, man."

"I don't think anybody would be surprised," I said with a laugh.

"Yeah... it's good," he conceded through a reticent grin. "Thing is, if you was interested, for the hell of it, cause I can't be payin' nothin', you could help me out runnin' the camera a li'l while. Might be some fun...gettin' to watch you know."

"Running the camera in amateur porn, huh? That's a career choice I've overlooked in the past."

"I'm just saying..." he answered, before I interrupted him.

"So this is on the job training basically, sort of an internship without pay, that it?

"Exactly."

"What would I be doing specifically, should I accept the offer?"

"I already got Saffron and Belinda together, and me gettin' it down with Saffron, but if you was to help me, I could get the three of us, me and them at once...see what I'm saying?"

"I do. But it's my own busy season at the moment, and besides, I'm looking after a sick friend."

"Either way. If you wanna come in anyhow, I got some righteous chronic make the hair stand up on da backya neck...some smooth wine cooler, too."

This warranted a pause for consideration. I couldn't be expected to provide high quality health care if I didn't take the occasional break.

"I'll stay a couple of minutes."

"Yo." He took a big stride toward the door and opened it, then stood in front of it to let me go inside first. The two girls on the end of the bed stopped talking and stared. He closed the door, looked over at the girls, then turned to me, and asked, "Hey what's your name?"

"Donovan."

"Donovan. All right. Glad to have ya, Donovan."

"What's yours?"

"Mine? I go by Flipper."

"Flipper?"

"Yeah. Flipper. F-L-I-P-P-E-R. Flipper."

"Okey doke."

My initial survey of the room revealed skirts, boots and bras strewn on the floor on one side of the bed, a backpack, a tote bag and a gym bag dumped on the other.

"Whose room is this?" I asked, as I looked around.

"Mine," the white girl told me, "for a week, just a week."

"Oh."

"That's Belinda," Flipper told me, after which Belinda duly smiled.

"And Saffron." The Asian girl simply nodded.

When Flipper took the pipe in hand and began to scoop vegetable matter into the bowl, Belinda shouted, "FLIIIIIIIPPPPP-ERRRRRRR. Hand me that pipe, sweetie," and laughed heartily at her own hilarity.

"Naw...now we got to serve up our new guest first," he said, tamping down the bowl, and handing it to me. I took my hit, then walked the pipe over and handed it to Belinda.

"Thanks, sweetie."

Flipper said, "Check on this," and I walked over, and watched as he put some ice in a cup, took a bottle out of the mini-fridge and poured the cup full of Bartles and Jaymes Fuzzy Navel Cooler. As I took the cup I detected the sensations on my scalp that are the early signs of the process of vivisection indicative of higher quality marijuana.

"Tasty," I said, after a small sip.

Flipper went over and sat on the bed with the girls, so I followed him over. The bud was so powerful, I was almost certain I was hallucinating, unless Colonel Sanders happened to be in the room. I wasn't paying much attention to the other three, when I spotted the camera sitting in the corner behind the door. Suddenly, feeling a surge of community spirit, above and beyond the other surges, I decided to repay my comrade in THC, Flipper, for his hospitality by operating the camera a while. Flipper was profuse in his delight. Though buzzing like a florescent light, I comprehended the instructions he gave on the use of the camera. Flipper pulled his shirt off and dropped his boxers, and approached the bed.

"Ya'll start," he instructed, aping Kurosawa no doubt. "Saffron, let's see...lay back...Belinda, get down on her, then I'll come in on you from behind. Dig?" Belinda didn't answer, but she and Saffron complied with the instructions given. Once the girls got going Flipper turned to me and said, "Kick it."

Flipper performed the scene he had informed me out in the hall he meant to perform. He had instructed me before I turned the camera on to hold it steady as possible, then to turn it off, move as quickly as possible to another place for another angle, and then turn the camera back on, and begin to film again, which is what I did. In the tradition of great cinematographers, I used every technique I was capable of to enhance the quality of the production. After fifteen or twenty minutes Flipper and his partner in the scene Belinda, collaborated to produce a poignant money shot.

Job done, I relaxed smoking a cigarette, sipping B & J and interpreting a dried dollop of guacamole Rorschach on the refrigerator door. Saffron was in the corner next to the bed talking to Flipper. He turned, and walked to the bathroom door, took his wallet out of the pants hanging on the hook there and removed some bills. He walked back over, and handed the bills to Saffron. Then he stepped over to the music box and cranked the music way up again.

Saffron came in my direction, and poured herself a cup of Bartels and James. She leaned back against the refrigerator and said to me, "My shift is over. What about yours?"

"I guess that's up to the director over there...the auteur on the bed."

She smiled and said, "I have homework to do, but I really don't want to do it."

"You're still in school?"

"Not in high school, if that was what you meant. Glad I look young. Shocking I know, but I'm a part-time college student."

"A little surprising, but shocking, in this town?"

"Probably true as far as this town."

"Everybody has to make some dough."

"Definitely true."

"Where are you going to school?"

"USC."

"Hmm. That's impressive."

"It is? Where did you go, if you did?"

"Brenda's University of Cosmetology. Class of February."

"Right," she said smiling, and turned and poured another cup of J & B.

"I've never asked anybody this question before, but what the fuck, I've always wanted to...what's your major?"

"It's not such a bad question. Mine is Eastern religions," she said, "and philosophy."

My eyes must have been unusually glazed, or maybe spinning counterclockwise, because she asked, "Did you like the pot?"

"Pffft," I blurted, and burst into guffaws. "I'm so far off the ground, floods, fires and earthquakes aren't a worry."

"Yeah, it's prime."

"Eastern religions, huh? Understanding the Buddha and such."

"Yes, well, Hinduism, Buddhism, a number of philosophies. We're studying Sanskrit at the moment. But we deal with metaphysics, get into wave structure, Quantum Theory, Cosmology."

There was a thudding at the door. Flipper strutted over and answered it. Initially, he stood in such a way as he talked, that he blocked the view, making it impossible to see the person to whom he talked. Then he slouched for a moment, and I could see Andrew looking in. He saw me the moment I saw him.

"Hey," he said over Flipper's shoulders, causing Flipper to turn around and see who was receiving a greeting. Andrew brushed by Flipper and a foot away from me, bellowed, "Why are you STILL HERE? Penelope said you came upstairs an hour ago."

"I'm working."

"Working? At what? Drinking out of a cup? I know you have experience at it, but..."

"Naw," Flipper told him, "he volunteered to help."

Andrew looked around bewildered. "Volunteered to help with what?"

Flipper nodded at the camera sitting at the end of the bed. "Cameraman."

Andrew looked at it and said, "Huh? Him? For what?"

"Andrew," I said pedantically, "guys, girls, a bed, a camera...and Saffron here," looking directly at her, "not wearing anything under her robe?"

He just stared at me for nearly a minute and a half, and the other three of us stared at him. "Oh," he finally said.

"Might have sumpin' for YOU to do," Flipper said to Andrew.

"I can't really stay much longer, so you can fill in for me if you want," I said.

"Yeah," Flipper said with a big smile, "that right."

"Who's stayin'?" Andrew asked.

I shrugged.

"Belinda's in the bathroom," Saffron volunteered to no one in particular.

"Look here," Flipper told him, putting his arm on his shoulder, "look here at this camera," gradually walking him over beside the bed."

Saffron tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey. You want to do something?"

"Maybe," I said. "Like what?"

Just then, Belinda moseyed out from the bathroom after scrubbing up. Flipper waved her over to Andrew and himself, and said, "Belinda. Com 'ere. This is Andrew." Belinda strolled over uncovered and joined them.

Saffron thought about my question a second before she said, "Go somewhere."

"Okay, make a suggestion."

She paused again and asked, "Do you like watching movies?"

"If they're decent movies."

"We could rent some videos and take them to my apartment. I'll let you pick them out. We could get two, two I haven't seen that you think I'd really like. I'm trying to see good movies that I missed, you know?"

Flipper, his voice loud enough for us to hear, was telling Andrew, "I wuz plannin' just on doing the girls together, then each of 'em by herself, then you know, me hittin' it with 'em both. Maybe we be gettin' you in the act," he offered, gesturing toward the bed.

Deciding the time was beyond right, Saffron and I proceeded to leave.

"Give me a minute to dress," she said. She grabbed her tote bag off the floor, and took it into the bathroom to change. While she did, I went to inform the rest of our intent. I got only the slightest farewells, the three clearly dedicated to strategizing the following scene.

Saffron reappeared, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. We waved, shot out the door, and shimmied down to the lobby in the elevator. After leaving the Essex we walked down the block to get to Saffron's beige Saturn.

"It's too late to buy it, but I've got a little booze at my place," she told me once we were in the car.

"I'm still skiing on the ganja," I said. "But it's good to know."

About a half mile away, we turned left into the lot of a twenty-four hour market and video emporium, the outside of the building wrapped in a mesh of multi-colored strung lights.

"I have a card for here," she told me, putting the car in a space.

There were more people inside than one would expect, with the hour well beyond last call, though there was ample elbowroom. I didn't feel like staying in this big, jellybean decorated box the entire night searching out the right choices. I did however, want to meet the criteria Saffron had stipulated, which was seeing some of the finer movies she had yet to see; meaning older ones I presumed, that due to youth or inattention had been missed. Staying away from Recent Releases, I found a couple of relative jewels in the drama section. "These two," I said showing her Altman's "Nashville," and Warren Beatty's "Reds."

"I've heard of both of those. They'll be interesting. See, they're exactly the kind of thing I had in mind."

When Saffron took her membership card out as we approached the counter I asked if Saffron was her actual name. She smiled, and answered, "No. But let's use it anyway," she added.

In the car on the way to her place we started to talk a little about our origins. When I asked how long she had been in the United States, she told me, "Since birth." She had come to California from Wisconsin, she said. I described part of my journey out of the South, looking for political asylum, and cultural liberation in cities of the North before the final bounce into sunny paradise.

In some ways her apartment had the look of a place too civilized for me to be inside. A possible exception, though not one necessarily was the large collection of video porn. "Research," she said as I checked it out. "In this case, it really is." There were things mostly reflective of a college student's fixations, copies of paintings and CD's. There also were antiquities, artifacts and amenities one would expect to find in the home of a college dean, or an Upper East Side of Manhattan patroness. But this wasn't so far afield, considering her eventual goal was to be a college professor.

"Which of the two should we watch first?" she wanted to know.

"Let me think about it for a couple of minutes."

"You do that while I make us drinks."

She returned from the kitchen carrying the glasses, and set them down on the table in front of the couch. I was standing in front of it with a movie in each of my hands, while evaluating the two, as though I were determining each one's actual weight.

"Let's go with Reds," I told her as we stood there facing one another. I explained that Reds was, "a great depiction of early Twentieth Century hell raising and freestyle living...all the Bohemian virtues."

"I'm into that."

"Oh yeah, Henry Miller is in it."

"Henry Miller the writer?"

"Yeah."

"Henry Miller's a trip. What's he doing in a movie?"

"He's part of a kind of chorus of real people who give descriptions of, and stories about the time and the place and the people in the movie."

"Neat. Give it to me."

I handed her the movie and she walked it over and shoved it in. I sat on the couch, but after putting the movie in she continued walking to another part of the room. There, she bent over a small machine that appeared to be a humidifier, doing something that made a clicking sound. As she turned to join me the machine in the corner began to hum.

I was telling Saffron before we started the movie about Emma Goldman, radicalism, the Village, John Reed and Louise Bryant and other subjects of interest in the film.

"Jack Nicholson plays a mean Eugene O'Neill...literally, a mean Eugene O'Neil." Just as I said it, I noticed a sort of mist floating out of the corner coming from the machine. Looking at it I said to Saffron, "Humidifier?"

"Nope."

"What is it?"

"Don't worry. It's fine."

"You say so."

Before we started Reds Saffron, expressed an interest in Nashville all of the sudden. She was familiar with Altman, and a fan of Short Cuts, the Player and Kansas City."

"Did you see Cookies' Fortune?" I asked.

"I luuuuuuved Cookie's Fortune," she said.

"McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Long Goodbye ought to be on your list. They're like Nashville, from way back there in the Seventies. "

"I tend to work my way back in time, usually," she said. "Doing this is a deviation from my normal habit."

"The negative effects of jumping out of sequence ought to be minimal," I told her.

"I'll get around to the other two...Mrs. Miller and Mr. somebody, and the Long something. What's the big deal about Nashville though? I mean, besides being good, why is it so highly rated by all these critics?"

"I don't know if critics were unanimous about it or not. Nashville is where Altman really started piling up the characters and story lines, turning things he did in MASH, like people talking over the top of each other into signatures of an Altman film."

"And you have been involved in movies in some way in the past?"

"Nope."

"So you see everything?"

"Not for a long, long time. Well that's wrong. There was never a time when I saw everything. There have been times when I saw a lot...a lot of things of interest at the time they came out."

"You just happen to have this avid interest in movies and coincidentally to live in LA."

"I swear on the King James. I'm really not all that interested in movies in general. But yeah... it's just coincidence, like you say, and really not that uncommon a coincidence here, do you think?"

"No, it's not."

The mist, gradually dispersing from the machine in the corner, now had completely enveloped the room. It had a taste, and it tickled my throat some as I breathed it in.

She asked, "Both movies are kind of long aren't they?"

"Yeah. Both of them are three hours or longer. That's the only reason I got them. Gives us a whole six hours," I said, with what was the best rendition I had of a sweet smile.

"All right, let's start Reds."

We started the movie, and when the geezers recalling the era of Jack Reed began their recollections, I mentioned to Saffron that this was the chorus I had told her about. Since the speakers are not identified, it fell to me to attempt to name as many of them for Saffron as I could. As we watched, I noticed the mist, which seemed more like steam to me as it thickened throughout the room was not so much tickling the throat, as irritating it more strongly, then increasingly had the texture and taste of smoke, rather than steam. At the same time I felt a wave of balminess wash across me.

Around the time the characters were gathered together at the beach in Provincetown, a scene in particular where a group of them are rehearsing an O'Neil play, Saffron said, "I like it so far."

"You don't see movies about this group of real people, or people like them, do you?" I said. "Course in all fairness, there's not really a public uproar for that kind of movie. But back when Beatty made it, there wasn't any independent film alternative to really speak of. And Beatty could have blown this thing about a thousand ways; but instead he did an excellent job...I think you're going to like the rest."

"Me too. Now shut up."

The feeling I had, the sensation I experienced was progressing from a covering of balm to a wholly benign regard for my surroundings. When Paul Sorvino and Warren Beatty were shouting at one another in a union hall, the feeling had escalated to what might be called a feeling of utter peace. My throat and lungs had ceased to sting.

I watched a snowball fight, and had the urge to light a cigarette, then decided I was much too contented to do it. I saw the beginning of Intermission but not the end. There was snow again, and I felt, not only suffused with contentment, I felt what only can be described as dreamy. I had a glimpse of Diane Keaton and an icy body of water. There was ice again and Finland.

I awoke, and Saffron was leaned peacefully against the far side of the couch sound asleep. The television screen was filled with snow, the movie now ended, the tape itself already burped out of the VCR. Light was faintly detectable behind the window shades. I grabbed my cigarettes off the table, and softly closed the door.

___________________________________

I was awfully sick. Penelope explained to me when I was still groggy right after waking up, that it had been four days since I had failed to show up for the temporary job, instead of three. But it was all water that had washed the bridge away, now. I had swallowed lots of orange juice during the illness, whatever the number of days it had actually been. Penelope watched over me, though often doing so as she was doing today, while hovering above her Stratocaster, not plugged in of course, but strumming it, today strumming along with Nick Cave's version of Stag-O-Lee, from the Murder Ballads album, as it punched its way out of the CD box.

Today too, she had made majoun, and we were just done nibbling away on it until both of us were satisfied. Each of us had read about majoun in the novels, and travel writing of Paul Bowles, and decided we ought to try a batch. The cakes of majoun are along the lines of Moroccan Fig Newtons for the Tangiers stoner set, apparently a significant chunk of the population. They're a concoction made from dates or figs, walnuts, honey, and cannabis of course. She had baked them up at a friend's apartment.

For days, my chest had been drowned in liquid, my nose had been swollen up to the size of a fat piñata, and I'd felt from head to toe as if the LAPD had bopped me around with a bag of oranges. But I was feeling better today. After sitting up in bed for a while, finishing off my juice, and pastry, I slid back down in the bed to luxuriate. Penelope joined me, removing her boots, but leaving on her shirt and jeans. She had been nestled against me for a minute or so, when she said, "It's hot," and unbuttoned her shirt, and took it off. She put an arm across my chest and a hand behind my neck and then she started to kiss me. Juice, figs. Tea, and yes, sympathy.

#

#

#

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# CHAPTER TWELVE

#

CABINESSENCE

#

Even in Los Angeles the seasons change. A lot of things may not, but the seasons do. Some people never change, and yours truly would be one somewhat embarrassing example of the fact they don't. But in Los Angeles, leaves turn gold and fall to the ground even if not as voluminously as they do in other places. In the better corners of Hollywood, where I would find myself walking occasionally, mostly recreationally, and naturally, some distance from the more familiar streets of my neighborhood, yards glutted with deciduous trees would send the leaves down to cover yards, and to dapple streets, and to fluff up gutters. Looking up Vermont Ave. in parts of Los Feliz for instance, you might easily believe yourself to be staring up West Thirteenth Street, or Seventh Avenue in the West Village, that is, if you'd been flown around America blindfolded and dropped from out of the sky. A little coolness, a bit of crispness would start to creep even into the honeyed air of LA around this time of year. Change was in the air, about to blow around the corner any minute you had to expect. It wasn't too terrible to contemplate.

One change, falling on the wrong side of autumnal change was the Pimperary's decision to boot me off their roster of available workers. I tried to assure them they retained my loyalty, and that my loyalty was a great deal more impressive than my actual presence. But they were immune to the philosophical sophistication of as a fine a point of distinction as this. Eventually though, I was able to squeeze onto the bottom of the list at another place.

As promised, the new Pimperary had me swimming in the deep end of the work force extremely soon. At the end of another stretch of work, for another employer with the audacity to pay me what I was worth I waited on a corner in Hollywood for Andrew to arrive. It was another of our regular meet-ups, when Andrew, in this case out for his medical check-up, and I, done with a day of working for wages rendezvoused for drinks and a meal in environs of Hollywood beyond the Essex. Though I stood in a patch of grass marking the border zone separating gas station asphalt from city sidewalk my mind had set off elsewhere. The fall mystique, present for me, if for no one else instigated my reflection. I had theorized that the general lack of somber reflection among the natives of Southern California must be caused by an absence of strongly distinctive seasons...in particular, the inconsequential impact, relatively speaking of fall. It was the season of looking back, of looking inward, and of taking stock. Not however in LA. Yet my theory was an exculpation of sorts of the renowned Southern California superficiality, adjusting a notion that there was a prevalence of sunny dispositions by virtue of prevailing sunny skies, to the better one, that insubstantiality of the autumnal equinox was the climatic factor to blame.

Though not widely present in LA, in me fall tendencies had an atavistic persistence. A typical question one asked one's self during this time of year was, "Where has so and so GONE?" The question refers to the persons one no longer sees in places where previously one had regularly seen them. For me, as I stood on a busy corner of Highland, the whereabouts of Fred the composer got me wondering. Had he finally self-delivered? Had he migrated to greener sidewalks? Had the value of one or more of his compositions received a decent measure of recognition, bringing his vocation as a composer to life...as a result, springing him from our demimonde? My hopes were for the latter, my hunch was either of the former. It hadn't failed to occur to me that I might have visited. When there had been an immediate concern the day after he had missed suicide by cyanide only by the grace of a drunken nap, it had seemed acceptable to drop in. I'd been there at his invitation only the night before. But by and large, it was my belief you had to leave people alone. I would have elevated it to a principle, but I had no intention of slapping it with a jinx. In other words, if someone were to ask, "Have you checked on Fred lately?" and I were to answer, "I would never drop in on anyone out of the blue as a matter of principle," Fred would drop dead.

A corner gas station on a scruffy stretch of Highland was an excellent place for making observations on the human race. The return of my focus to my surroundings caused me to notice people in passing cars often would stare with glassy-eyed curiosity. I could only speculate that such random curiosity about no more than a man standing at the edge of a filling station parking lot resulted from a deep and pathologic boredom. Some in our species have a stunted capacity for interest. A male face hanging out the window of a silver Mustang stared. I tried to send back the look asking, "Why are people such as you so dull?" Two females in the front and back windows of an Expedition passed, dimly gaping. I muttered, though I should have yelled, "It's a man standing on a corner, you dull, bored fucks."

Then there was the issue of the male stare, that male-to-male challenging stare. They had envisioned me inflagrante with their wives or their girlfriends, was that it? Was it cowering they expected? In that case you felt compelled to shout, "I'm skeeered." The goal of your return glare meant to convey how certain you were of their insecurity, and how out of touch they were with their inner pissant. But before the cheerful indifference of my normal outlook could be brought to ruin by temporary urban angst Andrew showed.

He was complaining of a raspy throat, demanding tea and honey and lemon. Sickness abounded, apparently. It was decided the ideal place for a stellar tea would be The Bourgeois Pig not too far away on Franklin. It might be reasonable to assume Andrew had an affinity for places with Pig in the name but it wasn't true, I didn't think. I knew for certain the Bourgeois Pig would deliver a hot pot of tea to your table.

We asked for the window, but we got the table just across from the counter, and more specifically, the server's stand. This entitled us to a constant stream of male and female dreamboats with the actor's gleam in their eyes, attempting to balance teapots on tiny trays as they passed. We stared. They stared. It seemed to be the theme of the day. Andrew confirmed as much, when he addressed the unsuitability of the seating with, "It's been that kind of day."

Andrew launched into a raft of complaints about the insensitivity of the medical profession and dehumanization of the office visit. I countered with my tale of woeful mistreatment of the stationary pedestrian, the presumed loiterer, simply trying to wait for a friend without the inherent, if unintended hostility of inane stares.

"They don't even look you in the eye. It's just poke, prod, jab and prick," he said. "You're not much more than a spigot of testable fluids."

"Not a pretty picture."

"They have that way of making you feel like a chicken hung from its feet on a conveyor belt waiting to be plucked."

"Yep. Ugh."

"Everybody's just got to make you out a fucking freak. Makes them feel that much grander about themselves I guess. Look, I know I'm The Medical Miracle, shot to hell but functional, functional in appearance at least. So fuck me. FUCK me."

"I felt like a specimen myself out there on the corner waiting. Got examined by every rubbernecking brainiac who can ride in a car. Undressing me with their eyes, but only in the medical way, of course. And fortunately under the circumstances."

"Thing is, earlier in the day I was looking out the window of the bus contemplating how much I love this place, dig this city...how cool the world can actually be. Life is such an odd mix, ain't it? I mean, of good and bad? It's awful, it's beautiful...feels like hell, feels wonderful?"

"It's exactly like that. It feels good. It hurts. It's gorgeous. It's ugly. Can never tamp it down. Roll with it, I guess that's what you do. And then you get to my stage and the seasickness sets in."

"Right. I have a touch of that."

"Can't be cured. Medicine helps, as you know already."

"Yes, despite the best efforts of prevailing moral and governmental humbugs, there's still mercy in the form of pills, weed, booze and various white powders for the lowly and the lowly at heart. Halle-fucking-leullah," he yelped, getting us a lot of attention.

"After a pause, I said, "There is also becoming an apparition...like me. I walk through reality the way spooks and goblins walk through walls."

"I think I'm missing something."

"It's another method, in this case, a complementary method of insensate living. You can look at it also as merciful equanimity."

"Hmmm. I'd still benefit from a little more articulation of your thoughts there, friend."

"I don't exist."

"You look like you do."

"I consider this a good-looking corpse, and nothing else. Memories, my natural traits, what interests me, things billowing up in my imagination, my lies, my sensitivities even have been so scrambled with the passage of time my entire insides have frozen up. It's similar to a computer's memory getting overloaded, then the desktop freezes. There's nothing here. This person's vamoosed. Casper the Ghost. Sometimes I wish it wasn't the case. But then others, I'm extremely grateful. Either way I see no likelihood of going forward or back. For good or ill I think it's a permanent fact of life. There's no rebooting. My personality has become intangible.

The tea arrived, and each of us took a few sips from our cups. Then Andrew announced, "I have to crap."

"You're good to go as far I'm concerned."

"I ought to be better after I get back."

"I tell you what. While you're gone, I'll write up a little encyclopedia entry to give you a boost. You like those."

"Couldn't hurt."

I pulled out the pen pilfered from the day's employer, and flipped the paper placemat over. I wrote at breakneck pace until I saw Andrew coming out of the bathroom quicker than I'd expected.

"How do you feel?" I asked.

"Lighter."

"So, better?"

"Lighter."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. So listen to this:

## The 1992 Election

_Breaking the twelve-year Republican stranglehold on the American presidency, Bill Clinton chased Republican snakes out of the White House in 1992. Poppy Bush did everything short of exhuming the body of Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in his effort to tar Clinton as the coming of Red America. No one bought it, other than the inbred mutants who had believed it from the start._ _Little Loopy_ _Ross Perot and his Insane Clown Reform Party proved themselves immensely amusing._ _Pat Buchanan and his Border Patrolling Pitchfork Army simply for their antagonizing of Bush of Kennebunkport were doubly amusing._ _Poppy's, "I won a war, let them eat cake," approach to a decomposing economy landed him in the dustbin of one-termers._

Clinton's Balanced Budget Act of 1993 passed by Congress by a single vote, none of them Republican was denounced by the Reactionary Brethren as the sure precipitator of The Great Depression II, which was to commence in as little as three, but not much more than six months into the future, according to them. Eight years of unprecedented prosperity followed, demonstrating that Republican political voices were as good as gold and as right as rain at identifying what would happen in the future by predicting its exact opposite.

_Anti-Clinton hysteria soon swallowed the right side of the road in its entirety. The circus was in town to stay, but Billy beat the Bad Boys like a drum twice (three times if you count impeachment) and there was, and never will be, a goddamn_ _thing anybody can do about it (though for more intransigent segments of the backward set, weeping through eternity seems to be the substitute of choice)._

Democrats who could accept a centrist president, lived happily ever after, or for two consecutive terms; and Republicans had an eight-year nervous breakdown. Still, they, like everyone else enjoyed themselves immensely, if perversely, and there's no denying it...especially by them."

Andrew laughed throughout the reading. That had been my purpose. "I figured _that_ one would cheer you up."

Soon, libidos overwhelmed all other considerations for the both of us, activated by the presence of female faces and physiques destabilizing to vulnerable male glands. The ensuing conversation, and discussion of the exigency of Andrew's lust led to mention by him of a dalliance of mine on a recent evening. I confirmed that it was an encounter that would live in infamy, and fondly, causing him to ask, "But you still like your woman in the Valley...or not?"

It had never occurred to me anyone would think otherwise, despite the longing, liberty and enticements of separation, and despite the liberties taken, the opportunities indulged, the pleasures not rejected and the senses actively seeking and receiving attention. Besides, neither of us was capable of jealousy, entitlement or possession, fundamentally, constitutionally incapable. We were also lazy, yes. We were also jaded, yes. We were also inured to a lot, yes; and even over the bend on the skimpiness of our realistic expectations of others and of the world at large, yes, yes, yes. But still, these petty obsessions weren't part of the make-up of either one. I reiterated this to Andrew, for I'd told him all of it before. I also reaffirmed that Lila and l remained a lovesick, if sweet and sour item, and were so simpatico we likely would remain so as far as the eye could see.

"I understand that people just need to DO IT, no matter what," he said.

"There's more to it than that, I think there is anyhow, even though, you're right."

"What's the rest? I mean, I believe you, but what do you think it is, really?"

"I thought you were going to explain it to me."

"Well, women are too wonderful. I know that's part of the problem."

"Way too wonderful. But I wouldn't call that a problem, exactly."

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, too wonderful."

"In too many ways. But I still don't think it's an exquisiteness thing entirely. The part about there being more to it...that to me has to do with what I'd call...life chemistry, or chemistry of life, or something, whatever makes the whole dance with women, in our case, too powerful to be resisted...definitely to ignore. It's like the most normal behavior, doing what you're doing. I guess that's what I'm trying to say."

"Life chemistry...I like that."

"I suppose a better way of putting it would be that what's beautiful to us is beautiful to us for a reason...there's almost a feeling of committing a crime in wasting that feeling, in not responding in a natural way. I think what it really is, the need for closeness, the desire...all of it, it's another form of the medicine. We need it to get by, a lot of us do...need the eggs, as Woody would say, no matter _what_ our _situation_ is."

"I don't know if even I could come up with rationalizing that flowery. Not bad. Sort of 'Love is the Drug.' But I'd add: the strength of this impulse with women, even when you're involved with somebody else already, even if you're married, even if you're too old to do anything about it for instance, has to do with the power of curiosity. In this case curiosity could be synonymous with vitality. There's a sharp, really sharp desire to find out what a person you're attracted to or you find enthralling in one way or another is like, up close...who they are. The scenario of establishing intimacy followed through, is to some degree what it is to live; at least in a sense, it's the essence of life distilled. What it leads to may be as illusory as everything else, but it has an incredibly strong pull."

"Don't sell yourself short on flowery rationalizations," Andrew said with a laugh. "Curiosity could be synonymous with vitality,' I like that," he complimented.

"Mutual admiration," I said.

"As long as we're admiring, you and what's her name..."

"Lila."

"Lila...you and Lila are very enlightened."

"There's hardly a choice."

"Why not?"

"Because the conventional model doesn't hold up against the way things are anyhow."

"Some of the time it does, some of the time it doesn't. But I'm with you. It's easier and even makes more sense to beat your head against a convention than a fact of life."

"That's how I see it."

"On the other hand, like a lot of us you're beating your head against quite a few of those."

"Concussions and skull fractures are a small price to pay for peace of mind, remember that."

"I will. Along with 'curiosity is an aphrodisiac'. And by the way, how often has that curiosity led to discovery of a personality interesting enough to warrant your curiosity?"

"Ha."

"I was a little serious."

"What would you expect? It varies. Sometimes you're more perceptive or more considered when you make your overtures than at other times. And some times you look harder than others, and for longer," I told him, smiling."

"Yeah, over and out in what is, coincidentally, an overnight stay."

"That coincidence has occurred, yes."

So much dissection of the human condition and our own inner parts created an appetite for red meat, so we took a bus to the place Andrew liked to call, "The Meatery," on Santa Monica. Afterwards, we took another bus back to our own neck of the burg. We had walked six or seven blocks from the bus stop and still were a couple away from The Essex when two men in sweatshirts and hoods running, plowed between us, and sent us sprawling all across the sidewalk. Our exclamations and expletives quickly were drowned by sirens.

We walked the two more blocks left to the Essex, where not far from the entrance a small phalanx of cops raised their arms and told us, "stay right there."

Three or four police cars were parked in the street, lights swirling and sweeping across the scene. Two ambulances squealed around corners at nearly the same time, snugly threading the needle of patrolmen and rollers. Looking past the policemen in front of us we saw two people with their arms spread, stretched out on the sidewalk, blood trickling out of each of them onto the concrete. I recognized the face of one of them, a hotel resident I'd seen around but didn't know. The woman beside him I had never seen. Both were silent, at least from where we stood.

Very quickly, men in white coats as well as cops had engulfed the pair. The stretchers were pulled across the curb, and rolled up through the circle, which parted in order to open access to the victims.

"Shot?" Andrew asked a cop.

"Knives," the cop said.

When Andrew asked him who did it, the answer he got was, "Thieves? Junkies? Beats me."

"Bad guys."

"Bad guys," repeated the cop

When the stretchers were being shoved into the ambulances Andrew said, "There but for the grace of God we go."

We smoked, and waited till the rigmarole was done, the police had let the sidewalk open for business again and bolted inside the bar. As we were going in, others who had been huddled at the door to look through the tiny window were bulging out. Three drinkers were manning the stools at the bar. Before we could sit down the Professor said, "I know, I know," as if the frisson of proximity to crime had faded quickly.

"No insights here on why it happened?" Andrew asked him.

"The best explanation I've heard so far is 'thugs'," reaching up to the shelf for the appropriate bottles.

"We heard that one," Andrew said.

"Oh," the Professor said, as if remembering something while he poured. "I did hear one other theory."

"The theory being?" Andrew said.

"A guy in here...I guess he left or went outside...said he heard this man and woman talking down the street...not talking actually, basically raving, pissed off about getting caught in the shuffle. He claims he heard them say something like, 'somebody in this neighborhood is gonna take a hit.' I doubt somebody pissed because of getting bounced at the end of a cycle, would just randomly stab a couple of other people, even though in this neighborhood, who knows."

"That fucking 28-day shuffle...motherfuck," Andrew snapped.

A deliveryman wetting his whistle a few stools down looked from the Professor over to Andrew, then back to the Professor again. He caught the Professor's eye first, asking, "What's the 28-day shuffle?"

"Hotels," the Professor said, swabbing the bar with his rag, "residence hotels like the one next door...though that one doesn't engage in the practice...make tenants vacate their rooms after twenty-eight days. People can check back in after a day or two, but in the meantime, they usually have to stay in a shelter, or stay on the street, or get a room on a single night basis, which costs them more. They also have to find a place to keep their stuff."

"What's the point of _that_?" the deliveryman asked.

Andrew wanted in, and told him, "Here's the point: if they stay as long as thirty days they become official tenants, instead of hotel guests, meaning they are entitled to certain legal protections that tenants in other forms of housing get."

"It's not legal," the Professor interjected.

"If it's not legal, how come they're able to do it?"

Andrew faintly smiled, and told him, "Surprising as it may seem, illegal things sometimes can persist."

"It gets reported to the Housing Authority," the Professor said. "Sometimes they actually take an action, sometimes all they do is send a threatening letter. Neighborhood groups and some city council people hound them about it. It's better than it used to be."

"I doubt gutting people on the sidewalk is going to help a lot."

The professor rolled his eyes. "Good point."

"The way the two people knocked us flat, I'd swear it was two men instead of a man and a woman," I chimed in.

"Who knocked you down?" the Professor asked.

Andrew answered for us. "When we were walking back from the bus stop a couple of blocks away two people in sweatshirts, the kind with hoods, were tearing up the sidewalk...ran right between Donovan and me and knocked us both down."

"Jeeez-US. I guess if it was the people who did the knifing, IF it was, you're pretty lucky."

"But for the grace of god," I said, paraphrasing Andrew.

"It may have been them, and it may not have been. Like you said," and Andrew looked at the Professor, "in this neighborhood, who knows?"

" _Somebody_ stabbed somebody," the deliveryman said.

"I think 'thugs' is the likeliest explanation," the Professor quipped.

\----------------------------------------------------------------

I'd just walked through the door of Savon, making a drugstore pit stop after temp work for the purpose of buying razor blades and a tube of Crest. I caught the profile of a man with long stringy hair and glasses, and it struck me as vaguely familiar. He was standing beside the pharmacy counter, though he was turned away from it, seemingly staring into space. I stopped at the end of the aisle I was heading into and got a closer look. It was Bob.

I approached my old buddy and landlord and tapped him on the shoulder before I greeted him.

"Bob?"

He didn't recognize me for thirty or forty seconds, which was par for the course.

"Donovan?"

Upon recognition he seemed extremely pleased.

"Why are you here?" he asked, smiling broadly.

"I have to be _some_ where," I told him. Then I proceeded to educate him on my whereabouts for the last ten months.

"All right, why are you here?" I wanted to know.

Creakily turning toward the pharmacy counter and smiling, he answered, "Medication. You know."

"Yeah. I know."

"There's more now...new." He told me he had been diagnosed with "heart trouble" while in Arizona. "I have to take heart medicine now," he said. "Two different kinds of pills."

"That doesn't sound good."

"He told me, this doctor, not to smoke...to change my diet a lot."

"Did you?"

"I need to quit...I guess...smoking."  
"He said to cut down on the meat and fat, probably."

"Yeah, that's what it was."

I smiled. "Have any luck with that?"

He smiled back. "No, not really...that's what I really like, so..."

"I know."

"What about you Donovan? You still smoke and everything?"

"Yeah, I still smoke, and I still do everything."

"Oh," he laughed, "well that's good. You're still the same."

"It works for me. So where are you living? Are you only visiting, or are you back?"

"I'm back...back now."

"Where?"

"The ocean. But it's in Ventura County."

"That's a pretty vast area, Bob."

"Not too far from Santa Barbara County."

It turned out Bob had in fact bought a house on the ocean. Among the details were that he had returned from Arizona with most of the money from the sale of the other house resting safely in the bank. It wasn't precisely clear whether the owner of the house, or the house itself was what he'd discovered first. The owner had been a single man, and the house he'd built was a modest and a fairly small one according to Bob. He divulged he had spent less for the new house than he'd received for the other one on the Westside, which wasn't surprising. I made the effort again to elicit specificity on the location of his new place.

"It's between Ventura and Carpinteria," was the most he could tell me. "I don't drive, so I haven't noticed, exactly. All the paperwork is Ventura County."

"What are you doing here, in this store, in this neighborhood?" I asked.

"I have a cab...it's outside waiting, " and he turned his face toward the store entrance. "My lawyer's is right around that corner. He needed me to sign a bunch of papers...that's the reason. I was waiting and I wanted to get my refills."

The image of a medicine cabinet so crowded and volatile that the door suddenly blasts off, the way the door of a bank vault does when it has been blown with explosives, transfixed me for an indeterminate stretch of time.

"Oh, I need to tell you something, "Bob blurted with a mixture of excitement and alarm that startled me. "Before I forget."

"What?"

"In case you wanted a place to live."

"Uh...what? What about a place to live?"

As Bob explained it, the previous owner, often solitary out in his house beside the sea had converted his garage into a small cottage. He had done so in order to provide his friends a place to stay when they came to fish and to socialize. He explained that it had a bath, a stove, and a refrigerator, a self-contained "little cottage, small, but nicer than the guest house at the other place." His proposal also had the unique appeal of offering sanctuary rent-free.

"You should, " he said, "you should do it. I'd like the company sometimes," he said, a little less than elegantly.

"Maybe later," he continued, "you could help out just a tiny bit...a really tiny bit, you know," which was fair enough. And I knew the aforementioned "tiny bit" in fact would be a tiny bit, and remain so. He went on to explain what an enormous convenience it would be to have us available for hauling him on his errands, emphasizing the mighty benefit of the savings in taxi fares. He appended his pitch with long, laborious examples of what he hoped to be spared should we take him on his junkets.

"I'll need to call Lila and run it by her. I like the idea, myself, though."

"All right. You could move in any time, soon as you wanted."

"Do you have a phone?"

"Uh huh."

After ninety seconds I said, "Bob, tell me what your number is."

"The telephone?"

"Yes."

I walked him to the cab, which was to take him back around the corner to the lawyer's. It was agreed I would call as soon as I had a decision. He crouched to enter the cab, tightly clutching the plastic bag of pharmaceuticals.

I spent the trip back to the Essex mulling the pros and cons. The cons were few. The place was out there, some distance from the reliable corruptions I'd depended on, and other perquisites of metropolitan life. Of course, that same metropolis was virtually a new frontier in the advance of banal, consumerist one-upsmanship, and, as always, and to be expected littered with the intellectual deadwood it was famous for. The heart-numbing bearing witness to authentic life forms snuffed by raging waters of overbearing facileness on a daily basis was not a plus for the city, which was more the pity, since they were waters surging through streets actually paved with gold. Though my standards and expectations were accommodatingly low, even I, with my encrusted bonhomie was more and more often beset with gastrointestinal recoil. More likely though, since there was an ample fondness for the place as well, was that I was, surprising as it might seem, fed up with people altogether. That is, other than the few with whom I shared my company, and those encountered while intoxicated, admittedly an overlapping group most of the time. What had changed I wasn't sure.

That evening I made the call to Lila. I had no idea beforehand what her opinion would be, surmising only that suitable shelter free of the burden of rent only could be viewed as an overwhelming positive. As for retreating to the wilds of coastal Ventura County and the attendant consequences of such a move on work and play, what her opinion would be I couldn't venture. Whether solitary life would possess for her the momentary appeal it did for me, was a question as well.

"I ran into Bob," was how I broached the subject, "our Bob." Then I dumped more or less all of the information at my disposal all at once, getting it out before she had her chance to comment. "I kind of like the idea, but it may not be that wise a move, all in all," I offered lastly.

"Are you kidding?" she said.

"What do you mean?"

"What do you mean, 'what do you mean?' What language should I ask you in? Were you serious or were you kidding, what you said about it not being a wise move, or whatever it was?"

"So no matter the reservations you might have, you're telling me, you think it is a good idea?"  
"Uh, yes."

"Great."

"And what reservations are you talking about? I don't have any reservations at all. What reservations would I have about a place at the beach absolutely free, with a chance for peace and quiet, and a stretch of free time to do nothing whatsoever but paint? I mean, if you can think of any..."

"No. Only that it's a ways out there...you'll be a long ways out of the city, that's the only potentially negative thing occurs to me."

"I think I'll be able to manage. Yes, I've thought about it, and I'm pretty sure I can manage," she wised off before entirely breaking up.

"Yeah, yeah...yeah, yeah."

"Maybe we can find a better deal," she said, still afflicted with giggles.

"Hey, I never know. You're awfully particular about a lot of things hotshot."

"Not _that_ particular."

"Then great. We're both in favor."

"'Reunited and it feels so good'...especially when it's at the beach."

"It ain't exactly Pacific Palisades up there, sugar."

"All the better."

"I suppose we should go up and look at the place before we let him know for sure."

"Maybe. Not necessarily. It would be nice to avoid having to do that. You're sure he said the appliances are fine, and everything's in decent shape?"

"That's what he told me."

"No cracks in the windows or holes in the roof...you know, wind off the ocean blasting through the place or rain falling in the living room?"

"There's no living room, it's only a room."

"I'm aware of that, funny man. It's a figure of speech. I tell you what, give me the number he gave you and I'll call him."

"Be my guest. Here it is."

When I called her back later in the evening she said that after an hour or more of hashing things through with Bob, she was convinced the new hacienda was going to be hunky dory. She said her questioning had been extremely thorough, and her many inquiries answered to her satisfaction. After hearing exhaustive details, she'd concluded the cottage, its furnishings, and its appliances were in tolerable, even excellent condition, and the place was ready to inhabit any time.

"I don't think the cottage has been as much as touched, since Bob moved into the house. He found it in pristine condition he said... his word, 'pristine.' The worst he could say about it was, 'it's probably dusty.'"

"He's the expert there."

After further discussion between the two of us we decided we'd make the move in a week exactly.

"I've got a lot to do," she said, "between now and then."

"Yeah...I guess I don't."

\----------------------------------------------

I had a few things of course that needed attending to. Most important was spreading word throughout the circle of neighbors, and other enthusiasts of pleasurable dereliction, that while there would remain at least one shoulder nowhere near a wheel, there would be one less leaning against the bar there. After being informed on an individual basis, the broadest sentiment appeared to be an initial dread of a farewell gala requiring them to pony up. I resisted the idea of any officially celebrated sayonara, even though no one had proposed as much. It was clear however among confederates, the intent was there to be as thorough in the pursuit of diminished senses, embarrassing overindulgence, and sentimentally excessive alteration of mood through chemical means during the final week, as the pending change warranted, even to the point of neurological damage, as a souvenir of a series of memorable evenings.

Andrew and I shared our Last Supper at The Pig in the middle of the week. At some point during it he told me, "I've got to get out of there _some time_ ," referring to the Essex, naturally.

"This doesn't sound like you."

"The Donovan who's going to be living at the beach isn't like the Donovan I've come to know and tolerate."

"I'm a rolling stone and a rambling man," I told him with a ripe grin.

Proffering the sweetest smile he said, "Maybe I lost my head. But I still have some closet ambitions too."

"Likewise, guilty as charged, as you would be the first to know. But I'm sure to be back here. Put it at five to one...fate."

In those "final days," I collected the last dribs and drabs of pay from the Pimperary, and got a little money of mine returned from the Essex. I took my valedictory walks around the neighborhood. By the end of the week I was dehydrated as well as tired, a little relieved, already slightly missing my present clan, and truest kin perhaps, and anticipatory at the same time.

The final night after closing, the professor locked us in. He kept the glasses full, though by then Andrew, Penelope and I were taking it easy. On the television behind the bar we were watching clips of Larry King moderating a discussion, though at lowered volume, among Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader: all great men, each destined to someday save the nation in his own way, I had no doubt. I wrote the phone number for Bob's at The Beach down, and passed it out to the other three, making me easily accessible in the afterlife.

"Already trotting out the human interest Halloween news bites," the Professor interjected, commenting on our CNN friends. "They run that same clip every year, I swear."

"Halloween here...I mean, why?" Penelope said.

"I'm dressing as a Salvation Army soldier this year," Andrew claimed. "I need suggestions on where to buy a kettle."

Though we were taking it easy, we weren't stopping, and the Professor was urged to reaffirm his comradely spirit again by causing glasses on the bar to brim anew. There was the obligatory request for me to be certain to join them from time to time when I came in from what was now routinely called my "vacation home." Penelope reiterated that her upcoming string of jobs performing on the road would keep her out of town a while, but that she was sure to "be here by the time you come around. " I congratulated her again for bagging the mini tour, and for what it bode for her spreading notoriety; and what the notoriety should bode for her as a working, performing, eventually recording musician. All three of the rest of us reminded her again how much we admired both her perseverance and her talent. This caused her to grumble with the expected gruff discomfort. But we could see she was pleased.

When the bright eyed and bushytailed CNN morning anchors christened the launch of a "new day," in the east, we accepted that our night was done, and the surprisingly elegiac occasion to which it had been devoted. The final words of the Professor's to me, to summarize, were, "It's been a pleasure, financially and otherwise, selling you lots and lots and lots of liquor. But think how many people will become regulars here only because you aren't around? Be careful out there, Donovan. You're going where it's truly dangerous." He followed with a simultaneous handshake, and pat on the back.

From Penelope came a tender peck on the cheek. "Until I see you," she said. "Here, or at a gig," she remembered to say. "Bring the chick," she said.

I reminded Andrew one more time he'd have to come and spend a couple of days with Lila and me; but he made a disgusted face again at the thought of the lengthy travel. "Look, I don't like the ocean, the sun, OR the beach. But drop back by here when you're in the neighborhood. And...I do want you to keep in touch you know."

In the morning I stood on the sidewalk in front of the Essex waiting for Lila in brilliant, white sunlight, my ragged backpack at my feet. Everything with me for nearly eleven months still would fit inside it, what was worth retaining that is. I had given away some things to a few of the Essex's neediest. I planned to begin anew with a refreshed set of toiletries in my soon to be refreshed life, so I'd dumped the old, along with a pair of gangrenous sneakers I'd refused an eager recipient for purely hygienic reasons, unloading them in the bin with the rest of my poor man's pathetic detritus.

The sun was so bright it seemed to boil the dinginess of the neighborhood up to the surface. It was not so different from a glimpse of the worn but sensuous woman from the night before visible in the light of day. I didn't mind. It didn't matter.

From there a vision: the Hollywood sign...palm trees sprouting from concrete. Shiny cars, blue skies; the midways of a declining, hence, very entertaining civilization at your fingertips. Lila pulled up, honking the horn. She pulled to the curb, and smiling, reached across the seat to unlock the back door in order for me to toss my backpack in. I felt a twang of nervousness as the thought crossed my mind that maybe the Professor had been right.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It didn't take that long, learning to sleep with waves breaking against the rocks. Best of all was fog that tumbled in from the sea at night, hanging like a muslin curtain, and securing our sense of isolation a good part of the morning that followed. There were the occasional withdrawal symptoms associated with the giving up of smog inhalation, in exchange for salty, fresh air; but I had the strong support of a surrogate family. As if a reminder of my smog eating past there was just a little west of us, and a little ways out to sea, an oil platform at the end of a long, thin pier; though we had yet to see any activity on the platform. While ineffective as an actual pollutant, it was often extremely picturesque late in the afternoon viewed in relief against the sun setting in a mauve sky.

Reaching our little oceanfront homestead required one to do nothing more than take the narrow and worn asphalt road from Pacific Coast Highway, drive about a quarter mile, then turn again onto a short dirt road to the plot of coarse grass surrounded by sand on which were located the rectangular house Bob inhabited, and the smaller outbuilding Lila and I were in. Further down the dirt road, and further down the hill, there were several other properties a distance to our east. On the ocean side of "our" plot, there was a wooden porch behind the main house, a slender yard, and then wide wooden steps that descended to the sliver of beach. Our only door was on the side of the highway, while the wall on the ocean side of our little cottage was comprised almost entirely of a bank of windows looking out to sea. There were rocks that began to rise from the shallow water slightly off shore.

We had something of a small windfall at our disposal now, with money not spent on deposits and rent and furnishings. The plan was to live austerely, and utilize the time. Austerity was not something we would be forced to learn. "Now with artists, austerity is a lost art," Lila had memorably told me. She was taking complete advantage of the time afforded by ours. An overbearing fragrance of paint thinner in the cottage was testament to her devotion to buckling down to painting. We had discussed our plans to work "outside the home" again. But we intended to think about exactly where we would do so for a good long while first...approximately until a week before the budget expired. My work initially consisted of reading in quietude, though I began fiddling around again with my new avocation as a writer of encyclopedia entries, for an encyclopedia of political history extant only in my own mind. I got in the habit of driving every few days up to the market, a small one on the road one reached after taking the second exit up the PCH on the way to Carpinteria. The market was surrounded by a sandy parking lot and was across the street from a shady grove of eucalyptus.

I liked the walk from the car through the parking lot into the market, which was located on a windswept hill, making you feel as though you were afloat in a grand expanse, and with the illusion of clouds close enough to nuzzle, lending you the fleeting approximation of Olympian perspective. But both inside the market and out, things were slow moving. There was a mixture of people from the coastal hamlets, the occasional tourist or traveler strayed from PCH looking for gas or food, and well heeled visitors from snazzy homes in the adjacent mountains and foothills.

There were times when I would pick up groceries, and others when I would get a bottle of water or a box of raisins and then go stand outside ten or fifteen minutes watching cars go by and the occasional shopper going in or out of the store. Appropriately, given my recent migration, I began to see what appeared to be a homeless gent hanging around in the same general proximity I was hanging in. Eventually, he began to ask for change, from me as well as other customers. He looked more like a superannuated surfer or a castaway living on a desert isle than those leading the freestyle life over in Hollywood. He was the most dignified spare changer I'd ever encountered. Naturally, he reminded me of the old neighborhood. Eventually we established the understanding that I would say hello in passing on my way inside, and hand the coinage over on my way out. He no longer made a request for a contribution as I walked in, but only said, "hello."

One afternoon as I stood outside the door of the market fighting my way through a barrier of impenetrable plastic protecting an assortment of nuts I had just bought, I watched a man in a red golf shirt and yellow pants scuffing up a lot of dirt walking hastily to his gargantuan ride, then spinning up a great deal more wheeling around in the parking lot at fifty miles per hour or so before blasting out of it onto the road. I held the open bag of nuts out to my friendly neighborhood panhandler with one hand, while scooping a mound of silver out of my pocket with the other. As I handed him the money, and stared at the spreading mushroom cloud of dust at the edge of the parking lot I said, "That dude sure was in a rush. Maybe he's on a pilgrimage of some kind to pay his respects to the course at Pebble Beach?"

"The hill people usually _are_ in a hurry, from what I've seen."

"The hill people? Who are the hill people?"

"That would be the wealthy types who drive the big jeeps or spor-tility vehicles, or whatever they're called. They live up in those big houses hanging on the sides of the hills or over the edges, up at the tops...up there," he said, gesturing toward the mountains and foothills."

"That's good," I said, laughing. "That's really good," I added, still laughing.

"I call them hill people...other folks who live around here call them that, you see. Billy, the guy inside at the register...he calls them that."

"That really hits the pin on the head," I said. "You and Billy are wise and observant men, indeed."

We ate some nuts, and then he told me, "The guy I mentioned, Billy, the guy at the register...the other day when I was inside, I mentioned to Billy...he's the son of the owner you see, that you were always nice enough to give me more assistance than anybody else who's ever around when I'm around. And he said something to me, like, 'He's of the do gooder liberal variety.' Really though, he's the do-gooder I'd say...not that you aren't. But thanks for the help just the same. That's what I really wanted to mention."

"To tell you the truth, I'm of the NO-good liberal variety. I wish I were one of the do-gooders because they actually do some good. You can never have too much of that. I _should_ be one."

"Well in any case."

"My pleasure."

Lila and I were well settled in our habits. What started out as a deviation from our normal domestic routine but became a habit in and of itself, were the drives together up to Carpinteria, where we would stretch our legs around town. I liked the place quite a lot, even though the "downtown" was one of those that seemed built from a model of a pre-Revolutionary War settlement somewhere in Virginia. We drank, smoked and laughed obscenely in various public places, finally eating enough fish and chips to require a change of citizenship. In a nod to the pastoral life, we then would take a stroll around the campgrounds beside the ocean, giving me the chance to strut around like a country squire with my belly full.

At home, during breaks in her day there was nothing Lila liked to do more, and did do more than sit somewhere outdoors looking out at the ocean, maybe on the chaise in back, or perched on the little bluff, or planted in the sand on our mini-beach. Her pleasure came in looking out for, in observing sea birds, pelicans most of all. She was captivated by the swooping gulls, the gliding albatross, diving pelicans. I couldn't tell one from the other. What I saw were birds flying or birds heading vertically at high velocity in the direction of the surface of the ocean. But Lila saw and understood. She would patiently await any appearance of porpoise visible above the water. She could gaze for what seemed inordinately long stretches toward the horizon at ships at anchor or passing by.

For me, living where we did stirred perhaps unexpected, but nevertheless strong associations rooted in geography. They fell under the description of what could only be called Wilsonian associations. I hadn't been able to stop thinking about the Brian Wilson music from the glorious era of Pet Sounds. This wasn't Orange County, thank God; but it _was_ the beach. What would transpire when the lure of the oceanfront drew me out, was that as I was sitting, lapped by a mild, yet bracing wind coming off the water, the warmth of the sun beating down and soothed by the anodyne of breaking and foaming waves, the craving for this extraordinary music would overtake me.

Among the most necessary items pulled from storage when we moved into the cottage had been the music collection...not everything in it, but quite a lot. Years back, a like-minded friend had burned a cd for me of both the Pet Sounds music already long in my possession as well as music from the never officially released, never completed Smile. The former, and even more so in my opinion, the latter was some of the most beautiful and accomplished music ever created. Remarkably, it was both a literate and confectionary orchestral pop of the highest order. The arrangements were complex, the sung harmonies as ethereal as they were transporting. Altogether it was exquisite and delicate.

So, when my desire for the Brian Wilson mini-symphonies blossomed in the sun I would retrieve the portable player, attach the headset to my ears and commence to absorb the sunnily complex tunes. On these occasions I occupied the beachfront, languid in the sand, basting in the sun, while I listened to Wind Chimes, Cabinessence and Surf's Up. And from Wilson it wasn't very far to the High Llamas. They were British practitioners of Wilsonesque orchestral pop, sometimes adding dollops of electronica as a bit of spicing. The Llamas were brilliant and beautiful in their own right, and as idiosyncratically their own as one could want.

As often happens after a move, and one does the obligatory rummaging through things that have been in storage, I started coming up with things I hadn't seen for awhile, but for whatever reason had lately wondered where they were, or at the very least, wondered about them in some way. One item that fit the latter category was the sheaf of old poems of mine I pulled out. I had thought about the poems at times while I popped out encyclopedia entries, curious what the old poems might sound like to me now, which led once in a while to mulling the idea of taking back up poetry writing again as Lila had suggested. I didn't believe it was likely, but thinking about it, the prospect of writing poetry did seem fresh again, especially as another avocation like the Political Encyclopedia of My Mind.

I was just finishing scratching out an entry in said Political Encyclopedia:

Waco

David Koresh, a deranged man claiming to be the Messiah barricaded himself in a compound in Waco, Texas with a hundred or so poor, dumb souls who believed he was. They holed up there with a heavy arsenal of automatic and semi-automatic weapons and explosives. So far, so good, except for the law. The Heat, anxious about the size and legality of an arsenal approximately the size of China's, paid a visit with a warrant to search. The Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus opened up on them with blazing firepower, inflicting four casualties, and many wounds. American conservatives, marking a turning point in their approach to law and order, reached the decision that firing on officers attempting to deliver a warrant was fair play, rather than condemnable, if the person being served was not in agreement with the reasons predicating issuance of this warrant: a novel view. One assumes, much too cynically I am sure, that it may have had something to do with the fact that Bill Clinton was the President of the United States at the time, and Janet Reno his Attorney General. For the Right, I suppose this meant the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even if he claims to be the Messiah, holds a building full of people hostage, including women and children, and goes mental with matches and gasoline.

After the initial skirmish the coppers pulled back beyond a safe perimeter, rolling in a convoy of heavy-metal armor that would have made Patton prouder than a priapic peacock. At this point, Koresh and his super-sized band of merry apostles threatened to hold their breath until they turned blue. This went on for weeks. They were staying put. The coppers begged, they haggled and they promised. But the Savior resisted resurrection out of the building. He alleged that if he and the others took it on the arches out of their little cathedral the X-Men would blast them to Kingdom Come. This is not to say the FBI or the ATF are ever likely to be confused with the Salvation Army; but purposely slaughtering people on CNN in front of half the world is less than subtle, even for them. But those crazy for the Lord would not come out. No olly olly ox in free would do the trick. Nope.

Once the Attorney General got word that funny sexual business might be underway inside, the jig was up. The Mighty Mouths of the Right poured gravy bowls of ridicule over the heads of the administration for its failure to put an end to the mess. As soon as the assault on the compound was underway, Koresh set the place ablaze. When everything was cooked, the Mighty Mouths of the Right poured gravy bowls of scorn on the administration for prematurely bringing an end to the mess. All of it was the administration's fault, natch. You knew the stinkpots on the Right stank; now you knew how badly. Welcome again to the Clinton Years.

But a lesson was learned, at least: no breaks in this world for Messiahs. Another one bit the dust.

As I was doing so I thought about the poems, and went to pull them out of the box that contained them. I decided to take the sheaf of them out to the beach since Lila was working indoors, and I could steal her place on the rocks for a little while. It wasn't terribly windy that day, so I assumed I could keep a handle on them, also assuming that if the wind blew them out to sea it was God's will, or at least reflected his taste in poems, and perhaps his opinion on my future writing.

I couldn't imagine why I would have placed the poems in the folder in any particular order, so I read each one as I came upon it. I remembered there were a number more in another folder. But these were the ones I thought deserved not to be put to death without the opportunity for a full appeal. You'd think I'd been dead for fifty years if you went by the jaundiced condition of the pages.

Wild Night at the Bistro

the balustrade gave way

mid-way through the

fourteenth round

and we all fell

and cavorted on the floor

like minnows flushed out of a pail

there were no splinters

but after a long night

of intermingling on

the lager-swamped

pine,

we awoke, wondering

how the termites had

hollowed us out

so expediently

It was apparent right away of course that in the intervening years I hadn't made a quantum leap in terms of the matters taking center stage in my affairs.

The Occasional Evening of the Real Thing

minutes bay like coyotes

at illusory moons

while lanterns in cafes

burn for nil-

but love, the salve for seconds,

comes millenniums

apart

to heal

and to wound

and

exaggerate to light years

Beats me, I thought. I must have had a shred of sensitivity at some point, was all I could think.

A Leer from the World, and A Sneer in the Universe

I was swearing it

was Magritte

that tits in the sky painting

you know

a sky reduced

to squares

but now electric

and storm-crazed

the old hammock

doing turns

like a jump rope

while we

grappled and swore

and sweated

like sergeants;

and the blazing

firmament lit

the pines

the branches in

low moans

reaching like

voyeurs;

but we

screwed,

for all that our

slimy and raw

and pulsating equipage was worth.

it took gall

in the middle

of everything

in front of

anyone who

would watch.

I hated her

for sure

and she made

love like

a strangler;

and we

could have

made the stars

but we would

only

despise.

That one is more like it, I thought.

Poem for Us

some right-minded godhead

invented the midnight

and the nefarious and madly

chirping night birds

who vivify with

their song

and follow the languid

indiscretions of the languid

and sorry lot of us

through

the lascivious and velveteen

mist

while the lamplight peeps out

of the White Oak

and the Honeysuckle spews sugarplums

in the stark

and glaring bouquet

of neon descending

Old Scratch invented

the sunlight and the

dull, swarming humanity

every sort of

accursed industriousness

From a land far, far way perhaps; but still kind of nice I thought. The subject matter couldn't be called a drastic departure from more contemporary preoccupations even if the light sheen of romanticism did distinguish it.

I'd glanced at enough high quality poetry reviews to know that absence of technical razzle-dazzle, and metaphysical ballast in my little poems relegated them to a ghetto of proletarian poetry. It was for the best, since I wouldn't enjoy myself in the better environment anyhow. If Elizabethan sonnets had started dropping out of me I probably would have run away in fright. It was not lost on me that if one was unlikely to understand the exegesis by others of a poem one had written, one had little business writing poems at all. To do so would only make one something of a bad poetry citizen, would it not?

a small round light

coming in the night

there is

a

man on

the tracks

underneath

a piece of

burlap

plucked out of

a passage

which he grew

profoundly to

understand

there will be

a knife

and a

napkin

and a

fork

on the cuneiform

countertop

at the

DIP N' EAT RESTAURANT

that won't

be used tonight

suspended

in between

they will

simply be

retired

like an

old ballplayer's

jersey

a wino

has stumbled

into a train

blue cruisers

converge

like a

squealing piggery

around

a corncob;

arrived to lend

one more

death

the stamp

of authenticity

remove one more

life through

burial in anonymity

draping of

convention

it does not seem

enough to deny

existence

it is necessary to

blaspheme

even the

sadness of

a merciful shroud

of drizzle

cut through it

with

infernal radios,

contemptuous flashlights,

knuckle-head jokes

lamenting stale donuts

and rooting in the

earth between the

slats

for fingers

and toes

and a

nose

or

tongue

they seek to

apprehend

it all-

sooner or

later they

will

limb by limb

or however

you can struggle for

a lifetime to

find your legs,

to stand erect

you wobble

and teeter

on legs that

seem rubbery...

like always,

you push and strain

and stagger

more often

than not

you get slammed

one night

in a falter

by a racing

locomotive

that you never saw

I detected a lack of growth in myself, and a lack of vertical mobility in life; though if one examined the record I believed it would be more than apparent this could not be helped. It's possible though, my perspective had changed a little with time.

Despite the eerie, or pitiful associations of my past and present, I had to conclude the poems for the most part were not bad. They were unassuming, had the right dash of autobiography for a proletarian writer and were free of academic embalming fluid. I put them away, thinking I would allow free reign to visions of poems to float untethered in a part of my cerebrum; and if poetry came bursting forth it could be recorded. If a poem could make it there, it could make it anywhere, I told myself.

\--------------------------------------------------

It was cloudy, so walking in the parking lot of the market didn't give me the feeling of sun-swept blessedness it sometimes did. But crossing high ground that was free of shadows under a blustering, bruised sky had an exotic edge of the continent feel that was just as good. My buddy was stationed near the door, but he was sleeping on his feet, so I didn't nod. I came back outside with a bottle of OJ. He was alert, and on duty when I reappeared and I paid him his salary. Since the parking lot was empty except for the one car, the one belonging to me, and the horizon appeared tranquil for the time being, I suggested we turn two of the cinder blocks standing against the building over and have a seat.

Neither of us had a lot to say. It seemed as though both of us were feeling fortunate to sit contentedly in the open air and meditate. He began to draw in the dirt with the mouth of an empty plastic bottle that previously had contained 40-weight. Eventually he had sketched a picture of what looked to be a dinosaur, or an armored personnel carrier, or a sprouting potato.

"A lot of hill people come in looking for blank cd's," he told me out of the blue. "I know that, you see, because sometimes I'm in the store when they ask about them."

"Hmmm."

"Billy doesn't have them."

"I don't have a cd burner. I come in for water and juice, occasionally raisins."

"I don't have one of the burners either. I come for water. I take the plastic jugs of it with me down to the beach."

"Do you sleep down there?"

"Only if it's really hot. Otherwise, you see, it's way too cold."

"Chilly wind."

"Real chilly. But on warm days I can take a dip, freshen up you see."

"The Pacific comes in handy."

"It sure does. I work my way in that direction. There's another store about a mile from here, and I work part-time there, too. Perrino's."

"Not familiar. You work there?"

"Yeah, you know."

"Oh yeah. Hill People cruise in there too?"

"More. Perrino's has a great big section of herbs and supplemental sorts of things those guys like, you see. They have enough money so, say when they're feeling down, or they've got the blues, or they're pretty tired, they can afford the stuff that puts them back in the pink, you know."

"It's my impression that as a general group they are quite concerned about their wellness, as I believe they call it."

"Their wellness?"

"Um hmmm."

"Is that a word? Wellness?"

"It's being used as one. I think that's all that counts."

"You never know what's coming next."

"Nope."

"Down at Perrino's, they also have a fantastic newsstand, this really super fine selection of magazines, you see. They give me a leftover LA Times almost every night I go there. They know I like Guitar Player. And an Utne Reader, they give me an Utne Reader."

"You've got your ocean, your steady work, and your reading material."

"And fresh air...for southern California, I mean. I get pretty much exercise on an average day."

"I bet you do."

"There are grills at the park, too. Everything's convenient."

"Yep."

"How are _you_ doin'?"

"Living on easy street. Staying with a friend."

"Excellent."

"He has a place right down on the beach."

"Ooooooohhhhhhhh. Sweet," he said, still adding Cranes, tire-jacks, or umbrellas to his pictorial in the dirt.

"Definitely. Very sweet."

"What in the hell do you think the Chinese put in that Hot and Sour soup they make?"

"Goddamned if I know, but it sure does clear your sinuses."

"It's like medicine."

"It is."

"But what in the hell is in it? There's tofu...uh, sprouts...."

"There's some of that sesame oil in there I think. Beyond that, it's a mystery."

"Nobody knows."

"Nobody knows, except the Chinese I guess."

"Nobody knows...except the Chinese."

About that time we went back for the most part to sitting quietly. By the time I left fifteen or twenty minutes later we had probably spoken no more than ten or fifteen sentences more between us.

That night, I closed all but one of the windows in the cottage after gusts blowing ashore sent a finished drawing of Lila's, and some miscellaneous pieces of paper of my own kiting around the room with tornadic flourish. We were about to sleep. Lila put her book down, and shortly thereafter I turned the television off. I'd been reading also, though watching the Animal Channel with the sound turned down at the same time, just for kicks.

"Still on The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft?" I asked, referring to the book Lila was reading then. "I love that thing."

"Nooooo."

"Feels right to be reading it now, doesn't it?"

"I can see the parallels."

Before I turned the lights out I threw an extra blanket across the bed. I flipped the switch, and climbed in. Since all but one of the windows facing the ocean had been closed, the strong, nippy breeze coming through the window left open felt exactly right. Before long, the nights would be cold enough that we would not be able to have much air at all. And eventually we would need to use the floor heaters and mini-heaters we'd had since we were in the guesthouse on the Westside. But tonight, we were scrunched up comfortably, now addicted to the sound of wind whistling through the screens and the tumbling in of waves.

"So, in the Gissing biographies you read, Gissing really lived in that place, or was that only fantasy?"

"I don't know if I'd call it fantasy, as much as fiction like his other books. I'm sure a lot of Ryecroft's opinions and observations reflected Gissing's. But I don't think the circumstances of the book...the pastoral setting, the annuity, and all of that, reflected circumstances in Gissing's actual life. It's been a long time since I read the bios, though."

"That makes it kind of sad, if that's true."

"Bittersweet, melancholy, yeah," I said, joining Lila in advancing the covers to just below our chins. "There were a lot of those elements in his life, and in the books. But I like the stories he told. Doesn't matter when they're told, if a writer's stories seem exactly right for me they seem exactly right, know what I mean? At least it's that way with the best stuff."

"Yeah. That's the attraction. But then, we're a lot alike." Before I could say anything, she added, "God help me."

I dug into her ribs with my fingers and tickled her till she screamed a little. When we were settled down, she said, "For me, Gissing's among the best. He gets these really strikingly precise observations into the most unprepossessing, but still, somehow beautiful prose. His subject matter is really his own, almost entirely unheard of in this day and time. I especially admire the ones like that, who carve their own niche, and stay with it, to some extent. Sort of the antithesis of professional or careerist."

"You messed up the covers," I said.

"You did," she said, as I was readjusting my pillow, and making a comfortable dent in it to rest my head.

Just as I was sighing with the relief of sinking into the mattress Lila said, "Would you do me a big, big favor?"

"Oh no."

"It's not so bad. Will you get me some water?"

"Fuck."

"I know, I know. Pleeeeeze?"

I got up and pulled a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. I got back into bed, holding the bottle away from her at arm's length. "Say please."

"I already did."

"Say it again."

"PLEASE."

I handed her the water. "Now drink your water and go to sleep"

#

#

#

#

#

#

#

# 

# CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Chum

We were rolling, really rolling on the 101. We were headed south, me in the front with Lila, Bob in the back with a fatty in his mouth. No fooling around with the strictly scenic PCH route for us. When the 101 branched away from the Pacific Coast Highway we branched with it. At the Hollywood Freeway and Ventura Freeway split, we barreled down the lanes heading into LA. When the time came, we dared anyone to decelerate even the slightest for the Universal exit ramp. The Dead Kennedys were blaring and we meant business.

Bob was in need of refills, both the legal kind and extra-legal. Lila and I were his transportation, as well as his escorts for the day. The two of us intended to kill most of the time we would be required to wait for him to make his acquisitions hanging about in bookstores and record shops, and also taking the opportunity to eat and drink in sophisticated urban milieus again. The most important stop we would make however was to be made on our way home. Lila had been invited, through her friend Cindy, to hang a show in a gallery...not a very big gallery...in Hollywood. She'd spoken with one of the owners there, and had told me she felt camaraderie enough with the couple's sensibility to consider putting her work up in their little nook of art. So the idea was to give the place a look, and for Lila to briefly chat the proprietors up as we were blowing town.

In the meantime we flew the friendly freeways. But nearer to downtown the winds of resistance began to slow us down. Finally we hiccupped a couple of times, and then were choked to death by the traffic noose. The air had been whooshing through the windows so hard that only the slowing of the car allowed aroma to return to us in the automobile, in this case, the unique-ish LA aroma combining fruit and grit.

The first stop, following the resurrection of our velocity was at the pharmacy around the corner from the moldy building where the lawyer working for Bob kept his office. For Lila and me, this was a simple drop-off, since Bob had a long agenda there and the pharmacy personnel would need a sizeable block of time to accommodate it. Bob shuffled in, and the two of us set off on the quest for lunch.

We meandered some, reacquainting with our metropolitan beginnings, then, after a cruise-inspired brainstorm went to take in beer and subs, and to sit at the long, long, picnic-style tables at Felipe's near Union Station. As we stood in line for the counter with the afternoon lunch crowd we remarked on how odd it seemed to be surrounded by such a glut of humanity after so much time removed, relatively speaking. We also remarked that we not did consider this removal in any way to be our misfortune.

We sat down on one of the benches, trays bearing French dips piled to the heavens with meat, deluged with au jous sitting in front of us now. Snapping a mouthful of potato chips into mulch while she pointed, Lila directed my attention toward a tall, dark-haired, tough-skinned man in a natty suit, a conspicuous business sort with an anachronism of a tidy mustache on his upper lip. "Know who that reminds me of?" Lila asked, once her mouth was clear.

"Yeah...but I can't quite place it."

"New York?"

"Uhhh...almost, but...."

"West 84th Street?"

"Right. That prick."

She laughed. "Yeah, him. I don't remember his name, do you?"

"Not in a million years. "

The gentleman to whom we alluded had been a vice president located in the Manhattan branch of a Boston-based bank. He once had sublet us a room in his brownstone near Central Park. An ass with more pomp there never was. The greatest contribution to his infamy in our eyes was his regulation of the heat. One blast to the radiator in the morning, and another in the evening was all you got. Rest of the time you were on your own.

"He was a prick," Lila confirmed.

"Insufferable, even for pricks."

"The time I was standing on the sidewalk talking to him out in front of the building and...it must have been some Freudian rebellion, because I normally would never use the word irregardless, instead of regardless, but for some reason in this conversation I did. Boy, he leapt on it like a hungry hyena. I thought he was going to spit on me from the look he gave."

"What a petty glop of dung he was."

"The best landlord was the Greek guy on Columbus Ave. "

"It was never colder than about eighty in that place, day in and day out, twenty-four hours a day for the whole winter."

"Kept his hot dog carts in the building next door. Remember how Jimmy would pull up with that flatbed truck every morning and load the carts? Then drive around the city dropping them and the hot dog vendors off?"

"Jimmy. Whoa. Jimmy would park the Greek guy's truck in Central Park at night, and rent the back out to people to sleep in. Didn't he have a little television he plugged into the cigarette lighter for the guests to watch?"

"Somebody told me he did."

"He'd be walking around eating a piece of raw meat. He said it had something to do with the alkie thing."

"Protein or vitamins that helped his depleted liver."

"And he was our building's _super_."

"You know, old man Colosanto in New Haven was pretty generous with heat."

"He was _extremely_ generous with heat."

"The place in Vermont got enough heat, but the place was drafty."

"With a forty mile an hour wind off Lake Champlain and a temperature of twenty below, that's hard to avoid, even _if_ the place had been sealed tight."

"Been a long time since we've been in snow."

"Sometimes I miss it."

"Sometimes I do too."

"One of these days, Alice."

At the halfway point through my sandwich I returned to the counter for a second round of beers. As I was parking myself on the bench again, Lila asked, "What was that Deli on Madison Avenue? I think the subs here are even better than those."

"The Carnegie Deli?"

"No. I think that's the one on Fifty-seventh. This is the one we ordered from when I was working nights."

"It was around 50th seems like."

"Right. Big pickles.

"Big Pickles was the name of the deli?"

"No, they gave you three or four of those great, big pickles."

"They did...right."

"That much I remember."

We finished up, and having a little more time before we were due back at Bob's pharmacy of choice we cruised again, zigging through sections of downtown, West Hollywood and Hollywood, rolling on something of a Donovan-led Tour of the Star-studded Sites of Donovan's Recent Detour on the Highway of Life for Lila's benefit, and riding pleasure.

"Jenna's house in Canada was pretty warm...insulated well," Lila was mentioning to me as we were passing Oscar's.

"It was cooler in our room in the basement, but never so much as to make it really uncomfortable. I don't think I even looked at the thermostat the whole time we were there...being a guest."

"I don't remember Jenna or Will complaining about their heating bills. I assume the insulation had something to do with that, how well they build houses for warmth there. They should damn well know how, if anybody in North America does."

"I liked the outlet in the wall in the driveway for hooking that engine warmer thing up."

"I remember the beautiful snowstorms."

"I remember how expensive a pack of cigarettes were. But I liked the snow and that otherworldly, North Pole, Santa's Workshop feel of the little town."

"Cornwall."

"Cornwall. Cornwall, Ontario. Beside the St. Lawrence river."

"What were cigarettes, like five or six bucks a pack? In today's dollars that would be nine or ten?"

"Beats me."

We stopped at a store on Melrose, which Lila said was one of the few places selling a special hair aid, or maybe it was a facial cream she said she liked. I waited in the car. For a couple of minutes everyone who passed was clothed in black, making it seem as if I had time-traveled to a distant, uniformed future, or to another planet, one with a strict, round-the-clock nightlife imperative.

Lila got back in, putting the bag with the lotion or crème designed for faces, or for hair, or both, for all I knew, in the seat between us. I had long suspected the products in Lila's many bottles and containers were the domestic equivalent of claim markers staking territory in the bathroom rather than actual toiletries.

"We better swing back over and pick up Bob," she said, turning the ignition.

Bob was sitting on the curb smoking a spliff when we drove up.

"Been waiting long?"

"Nah. I don't know. I don't think so."

"Let's go."

The illegal stop was the second stop of the day. We ferried Bob to de-facto Pharmacy # 2, returning to our neighborhood of old on the Westside, ending up on what looked to be the blandest street in all Westwood. There was no place to park, so we dropped him off. Lila set sail on what was to be an epic encirclement of the block. In an effort to make a large enough circle to afford us an arrival time at the destination at precisely the moment Bob reappeared Lila swung wide.

Sitting at a stoplight on a busy street, Lila and I became aware of yelling. I looked out my window and saw a wooly man I had never seen in my life, who seemed certain he recognized Lila and me, standing in front of a clothing store, waving his arms frantically to attract our attention. He was looking dead straight at me, and hollering, "I'm ready to go bowling, I'm ready to go bowling, I'm ready to go bowling."

Even after our circumnavigation of the world surrounding Pharmacy # 2 we still ended up having to wait for Bob. Eventually, he emerged from the front door, crossing the porch as though he were walking barefoot across a field of broken glass. At the bottom of the steps he began his search. It was difficult to tell whether he saw us or not. He crossed the yard weaving like an infantryman dodging flying lead, but a little slower.

When he got into the backseat of the car we could smell that powerful skunkweed he'd got possession of.

"Stinkpot," Lila said.

Sheepishness crossing his face, Bob said, "That's all right," meaning I think, that temporary exposure to pungent greenery was a small price to pay for storing him up with pills and weed. He also alerted us that he had picked up a little gratis powder, the "bonus" another "show of appreciation" from his generous "guy." And again, being an anti-powderite he would pass the gift along to us.

Lila wanted to take us back to West Hollywood, so she could buy a book or two at Book Soup. I liked that idea as well. Bob said it would be okay with him if we would stop at a liquor store so that he could get himself "some little donuts and a quart of beer."

As soon as I got inside, despite the excellent selection, I realized I wasn't at all in the mood to shop for books, and turned around and returned to the car to sit with Bob and share a little donut. This also saved me a sum of dollars I then would have available for music at the Virgin Megastore...which at Bob's suggestion and with Lila's and my agreement had been added to the afternoon's itinerary. Lila came out carrying a single book and slid herself back into the driver's seat. We rolled up Sunset on our sawed-off jump to the music store, rounded the corner and stopped long enough to snatch a ticket out of the gray machine, then sailed down the chute into the subterranean parking garage.

The three of us split up, going our separate ways as soon as we had passed the doors, entering the store as if we were a black-ops team on an abduction mission. After searching up and down the rows of Rock I commuted to Jazz, to find out what if anything Bob was buying. Just as I approached him, the building began to move, bumping and grinding a couple of times and coming to a halt. On the second of the bumps and grinds, the lights went out. Bob and I stood looking into the darkness awaiting what was next. A few seconds later, the lights returned.

"Little temblor," I said. Bob brought up the subject of how we might conduct ourselves should the lights go out again, next time for a longer duration in the event of larger shakes.

"I'm thinking we could get some of these into our pants, and get the out the door before the lights come back on," he strategized.

"One more good shake and looting could officially commence," I said. "As an act of insurrection against the high CD-pricing bastards in the music business. This may be the only good opportunity to loot we'll ever get."

"Yeah...that's...the thing I thought."

But nothing happened. Terra firma. Another perfectly good, possible Act of God shot to hell.

In the end I bought one, Lila bought two, and Bob purchased three for himself. Then we embarked on the start and stop extended trek from West Hollywood through Hollywood into the Cahuenga Pass.

Once we passed the Ford Theater at warp speed, and pounded down the hill to Barham, the gallery was practically in spitting distance. We crossed the Hollywood Freeway via the Barham bridge, and nudged our way into a parking space in the tiny lot of the cookie-cutter strip mall sculpted from American cheese which by dint of its wedging into a Hollywood Hill, acquired a rustic look.

Zooma Gallery (not to be confused apparently with Zuma as in Zuma Beach) was painted in candy cane colors and stripes across the window glass, the interior of the gallery blocked by purple curtains. I remembered Lila had asked me to look at the gallery's web site and to tell her what I thought, and I'd forgotten to do it. Bob wanted to tag along, his eyes as big and round as china plates.

Inside, Lila went to the back to scare the owners up, and Bob and I drifted toward a wall of hanging art. The exhibit consisted both of smudged pencil drawings, and watercolor pastels, all of which looked to be depicting crime scenes. Personally, I thought they were very good. Bob told me he liked them, too.

"Lila's paintings aren't like these," Bob said to me after we'd looked them over.

"Hers aren't as violent. Not as many of hers are figurative," I answered.

"Oh," he said, meaning whatever I wanted it to mean I think.

Lila waved us over to meet the owners. The husband and wife both sported long, gray ponytails, and wire-rimmed glasses. Bob looked at them long and hard and fondly, as if discovering a related species. They were unpretentious, and had a darker sense of humor than might have been expected from their looks. Finally Lila excused herself and them, as she and the proprietors retired to their office in order to talk shop. Bob and I were abandoned to our own proclivities, and we sauntered toward the art again, this time to a patch of wall near the entrance to the hallway, where the restrooms, and further down, the office and storage and work areas in the back were, the only works in the gallery not done by the featured artist, whose work Bob and I had seen before. They were paintings of a sort that might be described as the highest order of finger painting. The canvases were loaded up with images of the worm-like, and the tubular, all of them squirmingly colorful.

Bob asked, as we stood shoulder by shoulder looking at the pictures, "What do these say about life?" leaning forward and squinting his eyes as if to examine the paintings for clues.

"That it's futile to try and understand."

"You see...symbolism, in all those knots and curlicues and...those rainbow pasta pipe things?"

"I see the same things you see...one man's symbol is another man's..."

"So what's the meaning?" he interrupted.

"That thinking is for pleasure...or it's good as an exercise, but not for solving anything impractical or of a metaphysical nature."

"Metaphysical...shit."

"I know."

"Man, those colors...those lines kind of jiggling," tilting his head to get a better look at one, "they give me a funny feeling."

"The funnier the better."

"Art..."

"Exactly."

"You know...this is nice. I like these. It's a way to...spend time. I love, you know, to be distracted for a really...a really long, LONG time...like, when I listen to 'Filles De Kilimanjaro with a good bowl."

"Exactly."

When Lila still hadn't come out from the back after ten or fifteen minutes had passed I decided to capitulate to the quickly gathering storm of ideas for encyclopedia entries, and retrieve the pen and the notebook from the glove compartment, and kill the next leg of the wait jotting entries out. I sat on a bench on the gallery floor across from a painting titled, "Death Takes a Chevrolet." Bob was crouched on the floor staring up at one of the finger paintings. I began to write. The door opened, and a man in a Levi jacket, jeans, sneakers, with skin that was vibrating tan, came inside with a female escort, a woman in a business suit. I heard the man say to the woman, "You're going to be surprised."

After writing twelve or thirteen minutes I had written:

Vince Foster

On July 20, 1993, a man named Vince Foster, Deputy White House Counsel for the Clinton Administration finished his lunch, drove across the Potomac to Fort Marcy Park, and used a pistol to scatter his gray matter across those of God's natural wonders in his closest proximity. He had been, as they say, down. Naturally, the conservative brain trust in America concluded he must have been the victim of murder!

He in fact, had been ax-murdered in editorials by the Wall Street Journal; and after his factual death butchered for scraps by the same gang only to needle the Clintons. As a childhood friend of President Clinton and a fellow lawyer in the firm that had employed Hillary Clinton in Arkansas he'd landed in Washington with a bull's eye on his back. After a few months lawyering, and most notably for the Anti-Clinton Apoplectics, lawyering involving a dispute over the firing of a group of putative deadbeats in the White House Travel Office, the Brahmins of the Loopy Right at the Wall Street Journal had featured him in another of their school plays: Clinton Conspiracy Theory #99, in other words. After clinical depression, this was Reason Number Two that Vince was down. Once he showed up dead in the park, there could be no doubt: Foster had been capped because he was going to sing like a canary about a heinous Clinton plot, or a fiendish deed; Vince and Hillary were fuck-buddies, and he had to go; Vince had known where the bodies of the multitudes swimming with the fishes for double-crossing the Clintons were sweetly resting in peace; and the blues would cause him to squeal, should he stay among the living.

A ripped note was found in Vince's briefcase in the aftermath. In it he had written that while neither he nor anyone else in the White House ever violated a single law, "the public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff. I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington...here, ruining people is considered sport." One clear lesson of the Foster suicide was: the truth hurts, even if it isn't the truth.

Also found among the departed Vince's papers were notes that included a list of psychiatrists, and an "argument with himself," as those who had read one of the notes described it, strong evidence for all but those breathing political laughing gas that the man was severely depressed right before his death. Of course, along with the sci-fi plotting, and the unending zeal of the unsuccessful effort to blot the Clinton presidency out of their brittle psyches, the Right-wing necrophiliacs kept humping Foster's corpse for years. Whether knowledge of facts ever shall supplant so much mendacious fiction in the minds of however many Americans greeted the Foster fictions with a degree of credulity, one can never know. But what a world.

When Lila still hadn't returned, I put the point of the pen back onto the paper and continued to write. Ten minutes later I had written:

The 1994 Republican Takeover of the House and Senate

Rather than fully support, successfully amend, and at election time bravely defend the plan for universal health insurance proposed by the Clinton administration in 1993, congressional Democrats took off running from the issue faster than Road Runner on the lam from Wile E. Coyote. After voting for Clinton's enormously successful Budget Plan of 1993, with its tax increase on the fattest two percent of cats in these United States, which would spur a roaring economy, result in a balanced budget and eventually a budget surplus, predictably timorous congressional Democrats descended into wet noodledom, and got their gonads handed to them on a platter in 1994.

They were ultimately outsmarted and outmaneuvered by Republican Minority Whip Gingrich the Newt, which tells you something about the prowess and the constitution of congressional Democrats of that time. In all fairness to them, however, the Republicans had enough Newt-inspired, laundered, but still soiled Republican political action committee ducats to slime Democrats in five countries the size of the United States. Furthermore the insurance companies, after their tight escape from the jaws of human decency plowed enough insurance money into the election to choke a chubby actuary. One of Newt's brain-storm-trooping tactics was to attach nefarious buzzwords to fine, upstanding words, such as: liberal and Democratic. For example, "The Democratic health plan is another collectivist, tax-hiking, mother and father raping proposal to place god-fearing Mid-western housewives into sadomasochistic reorientation camps."

Two more factors. No minor matter when it came to the targeted pigeons (voters) apparently, was that every channel on the radio dial was for the first election territory under the occupation of broadcasters to the right of Rommel, proclaiming that not only was the Democratic Party intent on the brutal demise of all that was good and holy, but that God himself, should the Democrats retain control of congress, would be fitted with cement shoes and thrown summarily into the Hudson River. Naturally old staples like the mendacity of the poor, and their appetite for stealing your kiddies' lunch money before your youngsters can fill their bellies was on the Hit Parade. And the Republicans came up with a number they liked to call: The Contract for America. It was offered with the sincerity of a car salesman ten minutes before closing on Christmas Eve. One of its strongly trumpeted promises was to limit the number of terms members of Congress could serve... a bluff they had used to bait hapless, defensive Democrats for countless years. Naturally, such limits, once Republicans were comfy in their majority went the way of Amelia Earhart. But too many voters were buying.

The people are terribly stupid.

The couple who had come into the gallery were standing smack in front of "Death Takes a Chevrolet," which meant their backsides now were smack in front of me. And still no Lila? Well, Onward Christian Soldiers.

The 1996 Republican Shutdown of the Federal Government

The republican leaders of congress made the tactical decision at the approach of the expiration of the federal government's budget late in 1995, to refuse passage of the temporary spending measure that would have funded the government until the finer points of a budget could be compromised. Rather than take a step back from their original budget proposals, intended to starve the starving class a little more, they dared William Jefferson Clinton to risk a shutdown of the federal government, by putting his veto on their Draconian paperwork. He called their bluff. Thrice.

In what turned out to be something of a Waterloo for Gingrich the Newt, whose theory had been that the Republican threats, and follow-throughs to shutter the government, would bring confetti raining down upon their heads by a grateful population, ended up a goat. A very large percentage of the population told pollsters they viewed Republicans in congress as petty, not to mention penurious. Congress passed, and Clinton signed, a budget highly favorable to the Oval Office. Newt and Company's numbers tumbled over the cliff, as did the candidacies of Dole for President, and Republicans running for congress in the following November. Clinton was King.

The people are brilliantly intuitive.

I had paid no attention to the couple in the gallery during the writing. When I stopped, I overheard the woman telling the man as they approached the door, "...home to start dinner. David is always home since he was laid off."

"I have tickets to the Lakers' game," he told her proudly.

I was taking stock of my momentum for another go, when I heard noise coming from the back of the gallery. Multiple voices could be heard clanging around in the hallway, then one goodbye reciprocated with two more. The footsteps heard approaching were Lila's, and she stopped first, when she came to Bob, who was sitting on the floor across from the colored worms and wiggles.

"How do you like it?" she asked, referring to the art in front of him. When no answer was forthcoming she said to him, "Hey Bob?" When no answer came forth on the follow-up she stepped in front of him, reaching down and nudging him on the shoulder. "Wake up, buddy-Ro." His slumber must have been profound, for it appeared to take him a couple of minutes to shake himself back to the minimal level of alertness. As Bob was rousing himself, and I was planting the pen inside the notebook and closing it up, Lila joined me.

"Alright. We can be on our way," she said.

"How'd it go?"

"Went great. They're going to hang me."

\--------------------------------------------------------

Back on the waterfront it felt like home. There was a sense of relief, so our acclimation must have been complete. Still, it was important to get out of the house occasionally. If you didn't see some people every so often, you couldn't truly appreciate the daily joy of being completely removed from human beings.

It wasn't especially cool that evening, but the gusts of wind got so strong our perennial airborne personal possessions problem, reached a level that was not acceptable. We closed the windows, and turned the television on while we prepared dinner. Since we'd gotten home the windows had gone black with the passing of twilight. One effect of this was to turn the windows into panels, featuring in the reflection on the glass the story of Lila and me in the corner "kitchen" of our room beside the windows preparing dinner. Another effect was that the lamps inside that were scattering splashes of gold everywhere in the room behind us, also were causing warm, yellow lamplight to flicker in the window glass at the same time as the movie of our, "Dinner Prepared."

This was a collaborative operation to produce sandwiches of Lila's invention that we had been eating for years, and homemade salsa. Chopping, slicing, and slathering (this sandwich required mustard and mayonnaise working in harmony) were involved, and the two of us were working together, side by side. I was closer to the television, hence could hear more clearly. The local news was reporting a story about another bunch of ill-mannered cops in Southern California, and I passed along the salient details to Lila.

"The cops are on tape flogging a guy with flashlights down in Inglewood...I think he stole a...bakery truck? A cop is saying that they were concerned he might be about to brandish..."

"A crueler?"

"A weapon. I guess an old crueler would be a weapon. Now...alright, the Chief is saying not to jump to any inclusions till all of the facts are in."

She laughed.

"I love the smell of whitewash in the morning, " I told her, causing her to look at me askance. I apologized for being in such a good mood.

I stopped talking, and listened while I did my work. Lila alternated between humming and softly singing snatches of the Pogues' "Fairy Tale of New York." At one point, reacting to something I heard, I simply said "Disney" out loud, and shook my head without utterance of a further comment. The failure by Lila to ask for explanation indicated none was required.

The sandwiches were nearly ready for assemblage, strips of mozzarella, and bits and pieces of Spanish olives, green peppers and tomatoes in heaps all across the counter. As Lila dumped cilantro, tomato, onion, and jalapeno into the super-chopper to manufacture salsa, I spoke up to convey more news of interest.

"You should hear this...the City Council...the City Council is talking about banning smoking at beaches..."

Lila stopped her work with the super-chopper as if she were frozen in the frame of a film.

"Yep...banned at all the public beaches in the city."

"What? Pathetic. Jesus. Is this a public or a private beach?" she asked, nodding at the window and our little slice of seaside.

"Beats the hell out of me...the penalty would be a fine..."

"Yeah, that's a law I'm planning to obey."

"Somebody would have to report it...I wouldn't expect anybody to just show up."

"If they do, and they intend to fuck with me about smoking in the great outdoors, they better bring a motherfucking army."

"So, you're like a gangsta painter now?"

"Damn straight," she chuckled. "But is this a public beach or not?"

"How the hell would I know? So far, I haven't had to chase anybody off. A guy walked through once, and a lady jogged by another time, but I didn't threaten to make a citizen's arrest on either occasion."

After a run of commercials ended, and about the time Lila was putting the sandwiches on the plates, and throwing some chips on, I said, "Rambo," which signaled the weather was next. While we carried our plates to the bed, and propped ourselves against the pillows to eat, Rambo was saying, "...we looked into our records...our intrepid Channel Seven researchers went to work..."

There he was, our most excellent buddy Rambo standing smack in front of the big, blue map of the United States. He almost seemed like a member of the family now.

"...and what they discovered," Rambo said as we continued to watch, "is that in September of 1939, a hurricane actually came ashore in Los Angeles, the only tropical cyclone to have come ashore in Southern California. More accurately, it came ashore in Long Beach, with tropical storm strength winds of 50 mph. That year, there were also two other storms: one that moved northeastward, and came ashore in Baha; the other moving northwestward across Mexico and then languishing in the Pacific _off the shore_ of Baha. But in 1939, the remnants from both those storms combined with the storm that came ashore in Long Beach, to create tropical storm conditions along the Southern California coast. Right now, in addition to the storm that's sitting off the coast, there are the remnants of Hurricane Darlene, which came out of the Gulf of Mexico and crossed the deserts and mountains of Arizona into California; and a storm coming down out of the Pacific northwest, bringing that additional moisture into the mix. That's the rub. As of now, it's difficult to predict how far south the storm will push, and whether the upper level winds will nudge the hurricane inland into Southern California; or stay too far north to have much effect on our area of the state at all. Either way, it is expected to feed some amount of moisture into Southern California. So you folks here in the Southland there are a variety of scenarios possible as you can see. Whether it's going to be something historical, nobody can say as yet. But either way, you're going to need those umbrellas for a while, that we can say for sure."`

"Whaddaya know?" Lila said as we looked at one another.

"Umm...damn," I said back.

"Kind of exciting or kind of scary," she said, as Rambo launched into his delivery of the immediate forecast.

"If something blows in, we're going to see it up close and personal, that's for sure."

"Might be exciting."

"Might be."

"Then again, it could be the end of life as we know it at the beach."

"Perfect timing again for us."

"But a hurricane here? El Nino, yeah, but a hurricane?"

"You heard what the man said...it'd be a fluke, but it has happened before...more or less."

"Sounded to me like before it was kind of a little one that came ashore. Then it was reinforced by those other storms until it was hurricane- _like_ here, with all of the storms combined. What was it? Nineteen-thirty Nine?"

"Yeah, Nineteen-thirty-Nine. There is going to be the Mother of all Storm Watches if this thing actually starts to happen."

Lila wrapped herself in her computer for most of the evening. She asked me the meaning of a couple of words along the way so at least part of the time she was writing mail. My most productive endeavor during the course of the evening turned out to be forming perspiration on the ridges of my upper lip, made possible by the sticky, and as of that evening, tightly fitting humidity. Though it wasn't warm inside by any means, the moisture was both dulling, as well as enervating. I decided to utilize the bounty of Mother Nature I was leasing practically free of charge, and try to refresh myself in body and mind, by stretching my legs and breathing the air outside the cottage. As I was putting my shoes on the news came on again. Naturally, the lead story had become the imminence of the various storms and the possibility of shore leave for a hurricane.

It had begun to drizzle. The drizzle tickled the face, and the air was indeed a rejuvenator. I walked down the street a little ways, turned and walked back, then stood for a while looking out at the ocean. The surf was at least slightly more riled than it usually was. There wasn't much of a steady wind, only an occasional, but forceful gust. In the drizzle and fog I could see lights from exactly none of the ships at sea.

I walked back toward the cottage, and past it a little ways, finally stopping at the edge of the street to stand and stare inland. Muddy as the view was with the shroud of drizzle and mist, I still could see lights twinkling across the massive rise of mountains and hills in front of me. Every time I stared aloft at night I was possessed by a kind of wonderment, perhaps a bit of envy that all those houses were snuggled so comfy into their niches there. You couldn't help but be curious what the Hill People were doing right that moment to pass the time. From where I was, they did indeed appear to be sitting on top of the world.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

By morning, the drizzle had changed to sprinkles. The first look out of the window before making coffee revealed an ocean that surely enough was choppier than it had been on the day before. Lila turned the television on, and I went outside to fetch the paper while the coffee brewed. As bona fide members of the leisure class, the LA Times now was delivered to our doorstep. This day it came provided with a plastic package that protected it from the rain. I expected the plastic, and the spritz I took on my face when I retrieved it would become standard fare for a while to come.

I methodically disassembled the paper on top of the bed as Lila sampled the spectrum of channels. She stopped momentarily on the show, "The View," where the female Gang of Five appeared to be gang-neutering Sylvester Stallone with love.

"Local news," I admonished Lila. She scanned the local channels, finding that none of them were running a newscast at that precise moment. An examination of the Guide Channel revealed the local news would hit the air on Channel Seven in twenty minutes. The wait seemed to drive Lila to more manic channel-flipping behavior than normal, and the speed of her dance across the tube-light fantastic of the cable dial brought my head up from the day's Sports.

At MSNBC, the first juncture where we rested, an official of the Indian government was discussing the export of raw opium products from legal poppy growers in three designated provinces in India, for the making of morphine, codeine and other products, as well as the efforts by the Indian government to stop poachers from encroaching in those fields, or taking them over in order to divert poppies to be used for making heroin. The official was asked by the interviewer about the "seepage, or rather flooding" of legal opiates into the illegal market, and the futility of terminating distribution of the illegal forms. Though the official was speaking English I translated his answer as approximately, "In order to succor your misery or to ease your pain, it is important to contract the proper affliction. Narcotizing in the service of increasing the tax base is no vice. Narcotizing without kicking in to the kitty is no virtue."

Moving along to Headline News we discovered a gentleman wearing sunglasses, and a canary sports jacket sitting on a sofa in his living room. While he talked, one could read the crawl at the bottom of the screen relaying to the audience that the man, of the Christian Science faith, remained blind, rather than undergo surgery needed to restore his sight. Having landed at Court TV we lingered long enough to ascertain that the "legal expert" speaking, was describing the salient events of the day in the litigation of a lawsuit brought about, when a woman riding a ride at Magic Mountain sustained catastrophic damage to her brain, though the ride itself did not malfunction.

When we came to a stop on the Animal Planet, I felt a little more at home. A behavioral psychologist and a veterinarian were making a highly persuasive case for animals being more trustworthy and reliable than human beings. Very quickly I was nodding with approval. I was taken aback only when a literary allusion was made, to a quote from Milan Kundera of all things: "True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists in its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals."

After Lila successfully flipped us over to CNN she got up to refill her cup, providing the opportunity for remaining in a single cable niche beyond a minute or two. There, I listened to a man of nineteen describe his excitement at the response to the Initial Public Offering of his company, an online cappuccino delivery service. Awaiting his answer to consecutively posed questions regarding his plans for the future, and his net worth, the nipples of the questioner appeared to harden. One might have regarded her as a surrogate for the audience itself, a Nips Populi, if you will.

Lila returned, and after the ensuing flip, we remained with BET long enough to get the gist of a screed by a representative of an inner city community group, about the selling of very expensive sneakers bearing the names of, or promoted by, or worn by star players, in particular, the way fighting over the shoes and the stealing of them contributed to "the epidemic of youth violence." He said he loved the stars, hated the shoes.

Even though Lila picked up her speed again, we spent enough quality time at our next stop to get to know a couple in identical flannel shirts strolling the grounds of a frame house, and pointing out, "OUR deck," "OUR garden," and "OUR gazebo," while also promising to instruct members of the audience in a series of programs in weeks to come how to make, "YOUR gazebo" resemble "OUR gazebo."

"It's time," I said to Lila, meaning time for the news to begin to air on Channel Seven.

"I'm on it," she said. Once a man dressed in the costume of the Terminator screaming at the top of his lungs about delivery of new Toyotas was finished, there appeared, as we were told, a "live shot" of the Santa Monica Pier in the falling rain. A view of the Santa Monica Pier was a staple of the weather segment. There seemed to be a tacit contract with the viewer, that should a storm arrive someday, it would cause the Ferris wheel seen in all those shots to be blown away from its moorings, to go whizzing across Ocean Front, and over PCH, leave Palisades Park with a swath of destruction, and go bounding into the Third Street Promenade for a final rolling and tumbling strike of magnificent devastation. Stay tuned to Channel Seven.

The first words to be sounded were, "It doesn't look all that bad now, but in southern California, get ready for Giorgio." The anchors quickly passed the audience, like a searing potato, over to the weather guy. He stood in front of the Big Map, a large, ominous swirly planted off the coast, and monumental L's stationed to the north and east.

"Giorgio, formerly a hurricane, downgraded to a tropical storm as it made its way across the southern part of Mexico, upgraded back to hurricane status south of Baha, until, after moving north, and losing intensity, it was downgraded to a tropical storm again, and finally to a plain old storm as it stationed itself off the coast of southern California, has now been upgraded to tropical storm status once again, its winds clocking at about fifty-two miles per hour"

"At the same time, we see here," he said as he pointed, "this storm is sitting about smack dab over Riverside, producing two to three inches of rain already in the Inland Empire, depending on the exact location. This storm also is feeding additional moisture into Giorgio."

"As THIS storm," pointing again, this time higher on the map, "coming down from the north, slides southeastward, down through California, bringing its counter-clockwise upper level winds, rather than butting against Giorgio off the coast, it's expected to have the effect of holding Giorgio in place, where it is now, allowing the tropical storm to intensify and finally, as this storm," doing more pointing, "eventually pulls completely off to the east, nudging Giorgio very near the coast, with about a fifty-fifty chance it will make landfall on the coast of southern California."

"Holy fuck," Lila responded.

My response was the more prosaic, "Fuck."

"This means," our forecast provider continued, "a strong possibility of hurricane force winds in the coastal regions, and throughout the Los Angeles basin. Folks along the coast can expect storm tides and coastal flooding...we may see swells as large as twenty or thirty feet. Right now, we're expecting Giorgio to reach the status of a Level One hurricane, the smallest on the scale...but that's plenty strong enough, folks...with winds at 74 miles per hour or stronger. It isn't inconceivable that Giorgio could become a Category Two storm, if its wind speeds manage to reach as high as ninety-six miles per hour or stronger, though that isn't considered a high probability at the current time."

"By tomorrow, we should see a conspicuous increase in wind velocity all up and down the coast, and rain moderate to intermittently heavy. Right now, it looks as though the storm will get its closest to the shore, or make landfall if that turns out to be the case sometime late in the day Thursday, or Thursday night. It's impossible to pinpoint with a great deal of accuracy, but landfall should occur somewhere in the large area between Laguna and Zuma Beach...right now, the highest probability is in the area of Pacific Palisades."

"What do you think we should do? Lila asked.

"Buy vodka."

"Seriously. And food?"

"Why not."

\----------------------------------------------------------------

By nightfall, rain was drumming hard on the cottage roof. When the wind revved up, the gusts would turn it sideways, causing it to strafe unnervingly hard across the window glass on the oceanfront. Lila responded by turning her back to the windows, and drawing, while turning her head at times to look at "Annie Hall" on television rather than merely hear it. I sat beside her choosing to confront the escalating weather conditions by listening under headphones to a consecutive number of extraordinary albums by XTC. A better diversion from, or accompaniment to a hurricane, I couldn't imagine.

There had been mention on the six o'clock news shows of local authorities considering a call for involuntary evacuations along the coast, but none had been made as yet. The mayor, and the head of the local emergency planning bureaucracy assured us it was, "very unlikely." While "caution" was "being advised, residents are going to feel the need to protect their property during the storm as best they can, and we think it is important for them to be able to do that; unless we feel it is absolutely critical, so dangerous really, that evacuations cannot be avoided."

Reporters popped up all over the place, in all manner of protective weather gear, in order to depict precisely what the conditions were in any given area, by standing in them while in front of the camera. We were apprised of the existence of, and the whereabouts of shelters to accommodate those who had evacuated voluntarily, or were just unbearably nervous, with a tour of some of the places of sanctuary, most with concrete floors, brick walls, and cloth cots, that made the hospitality of a hurricane look relatively inviting. Whether the shelters offered cable or satellite never was addressed.

The storm, though intensifying was still a long way from reaching hurricane status as of that evening, and was not realistically projected to reach more than the minimal Category One severity, we were assured by our confidante, Rambo, which he, like everyone else took pains to emphasize, had the potential to "rock a lot of people's worlds in southern California."

When "Annie Hall" was over, Lila put her drawing away and moved to the computer, covering her ears with headphones as I had done. Always the contrarian, I removed mine. In fact, the impulse driving my immediate movements was to create a poem. Out with the CD player, in with the legal pad. Either I was moved by the idea of the coming hurricane as an irresistible subject for poetic expression, or the looming tempest was acting as my muse. I pushed a chair as close to a window as possible, planning on resting the legal pad on my lap, and thinking I would crack a window so slightly as to prevent a jet of air from blasting in and tossing the room, while allowing me to absorb the sounds of wind and rain and surf in their agitation, and to inhale the smells of nature borne by the turbulent air. What happened though was that water blowing in ended up making large splotches of water on my legal paper, then pools of it, that eventually ran in little rivulets down the paper and into my lap. It blew into my eyes, so I couldn't see, the wind finally flapping the pages of the pad like a dealer shuffling a deck in Vegas.

I shut the window, stripped the wet pages off of the pad and junked them, then sat back, and began to will myself into contemplativeness. Light from the television, and the reflection of various colored objects inside the cottage showed up in the window, distorted by the rain actively streaking the glass, bringing to mind the opening scene of "Taxi Driver." I pursued a suitable snatch of imagery that could be located somewhere in that original source, but after a while, the expected imagery still eluded capture, and I desisted. After a few more minutes I squeezed out a line that had to do with the wrath of god in Manhattan Beach, and shaggy blonde men hanging ten on crosses. Then I scratched it out.

Shortly thereafter an image of a pier spinning in the eye of a hurricane like a clock in an Orson Welles film started to jell, and from that I got the fuel for a string of lines. I had six of them, and was about to add a seventh before calling it a stanza, when Lila took her head phones off to tell me if I wanted another crack at the news, it was about eleven.

Nothing was new about the logistics of the storm, or what was expected of it, but we now were heavy into local tales of preparations. The local news squads had fanned themselves across the southland, seemingly staking out every Ralph's, Home Depot and Radio Shack under the Pacific sky. There was little that differed with the routine preparations for earthquakes regularly suggested, and depicted by these same channels, videotaped documentation of people with an unusual zeal to make the purchase of batteries, water, flashlights, and masking tape. The only difference here was that people dwelling near the water were in the market for sandbags, as well as the other items. As for us, we were not currently planning sandbagging missions on our little beach. In fact, where bags of sand came from, neither Lila nor I was really sure.

The two of us subscribed to the theory that since we had seen such reports of storm preparations in various parts of the country for many years, channels across the nation simply all reverted to identical pieces of file tape, whatever the "crisis," whether the threat at hand was earthquakes, El Ninos, even Eastern snowstorms, all the reports virtually interchangeable: citizens standing in line holding all the toilet paper two human arms can cradle, while bread and milk go flying off the shelves around them. It made you wonder if shoppers were equally frantic in their loading up on Grand Mariner and packages of Trojans. If they were...and I suspected they were, you never saw it.

When the report was over, I turned the sound down, and returned to my chair by the window and my legal pad. Not long after, Lila took off her headphones, turned the computer off, and rolled into bed with her book. I made another effort to nuzzle up to nature's fury, as well as its beauty for the purpose of my art, cracking the window again as minimally as I could. I would put my face close to the screen, I thought, and breathe the air in, and then close it, before l situated the legal pad on my lap again. But a sustained wind, by all accounts tropical force in velocity, forced water, sand, insects and microscopic plant life into my face and eyes with the power of a fire hose, and I shut the window.

\------------------------------------------------

When we took our first look out our windows the following morning, we were a bit surprised. Not only was our little cottage not engulfed by thunderbolts and swarms of cyclones, but in fact, you got the feeling the sun was not too far from sneaking out from under its cover. It was difficult to tell, just by looking out of the window, whether any rain was coming down, even though if you squinted you could observe drizzle. But once we had insinuated ourselves back into the loop with our various teams of meteorologists and weather-savvy anchors and intrepid storm reporters, we learned that indeed, the break in the weather was no more than an aberration, "caused by the current positioning of weather systems," and not only would not last, but was only prelude to the march ashore of Giorgio, and the correctly predicted hellish convergence of storms above our heads.

In the meantime, the relatively placid conditions beckoned us outside for an interlude of sorely missed strolling, and to do reconnaissance on the current beach conditions. I had been planning to check in with Bob at some point in the day anyhow, come hell or high tides. Lila too thought it a good idea to check in on Bob, and discuss our plan, if you could call planning to wait out a storm a plan, for the hurricane.

I was dressed already, so I went on out ahead of Lila, who was lying on the floor when I left, looking underneath the bed for a missing sneaker. It was very windy outdoors, with palm fronds, tin cans, and seaweed hop scotching over the sand and across the road. But the drizzle had stopped, and I stayed dry.

The beach itself was blighted with exotic crud, and more than usual of the regular crud. It was tempting to regard the ocean as Santa Claus, and to ask the tides to wash me in a new set of radials for the car. Instead, I surveyed the landscape, and the oceanscape, until I was satisfied that, except for the deposits from the stronger than usual tides, all I would see were the things I normally did. I decided to start officially strolling, during the course of which I would investigate what was, or was not happening on other parts of the beach, taking advantage of the chance to exercise before being confined for another possibly longer stretch.

I had only walked a little ways before I was able to sight, if blurrily, human beings on the beach far in the distance. Then I nearly stumbled over one right in front of me...not literally...but I was surprised, after crossing the beach in front of Bob's, to see a man resting in the sand against the sea wall behind what I presumed to be his own house. Above the seawall, stacks of sandbags raised the barrier another couple of yards. The man, middle aged, dressed in khaki shorts and a red tank top was drinking lustily from a bottle of water. He put the bottle down as I walked in his direction.

"Whaddya think?" he asked when I got close.

"About what...the sandbags? Looks like you've stacked them well."

"It's worth a try," he said.

"According to the news, a lot of people feel the same way."

"I've seen you out and around a few times. You're a neighbor aren't you?"

"I live in that cottage," I said pointing, "next over from the house next to yours...Bob...my friend Bob is the owner of it."

"Ahhh," he said. "Bob's an unusual guy."

"You aren't the first to say that, believe it or not."

"I believe it," he said, chuckling.

"You think the sandbagging will make a difference?"

"Most of the time they wash out. Still, it's one of the few precautions you're able to take, and it could be the difference between preserving your property, and not preserving it. Have you finished at your place?"

"You could say that. I prayed nothing will happen, and I'm leaving it at that."

"Not worth the trouble?" he asked, skeptically, giving a look I had seen before.

"I just hate wasted effort so much, especially when the effort is manual."

"I dunno," he said, shaking his head and standing up.

Changing the direction of the conversation I inquired, "What do you think?" nodding toward the bank of brooding clouds glowering back from the sea.

"I think it's pretty unavoidable now. Question is, whether what's coming is only some extra wind and water, or something worse. It looks to be worse than your basic El Nino, and not as bad as a serious hurricane. It's worthy of concern...there may be a little more fear than is justified for the time being."

"Some of that may be vocabulary. The word hurricane puts a little extra fear of God into the huddled masses."

"Possibly. Speaking of words, I recall the longhaired man...what's the name of your friend who lives between us?"

"Bob."

"Yes, Bob...Bob told me, if I remember correctly, that you're a writer of some kind."

"It's true my last significant employment was a job entailing a certain amount of writing. Beyond that, I'm reluctant to lay claim to, 'writer,' and reluctant to be counted among, 'writers'. That designation lost its cachet for me a long time ago...in other words, before so many of them were prominent citizens of their communities...the good old days, when they were mostly fuck-ups."

"I see," he said uncertainly. Then he pointed out, "Isn't that your wife or girlfriend down there on the beach?"

"That's Lila," I said. "I guess I better find out what she's up to," anxious to separate myself from this soured, and souring chat.

"I guess we'll see what we're in for," he said.

"Could be the right-wing plan for taking a swat at the Evil Empire...Hollywood," I said.

"Or...really, really bad luck for us, if it comes to the worst," he answered.

"In any case, good luck to you," I said before I walked down the beach to join Lila, who had even less interest in neighborhood bonding than I, if such a thing were possible.

"Good luck to you."

He didn't mean anything really with this mention of luck, of course. But for some reason the subject of luck remained with me, not as something in the foreground, but buried, and set to manifest itself at a later time, like an explosive with its fuse attached to a timer.

When I caught up with Lila she asked what I had been talking about with our neighbor on the beach, and I told her.

"He may be right," she said, referring to the sandbags.

"He may, but we don't own the cottage, and we could get everything that's in there out, and into the car in thirty minutes."

"I think it would take longer than that."

We debated this, and the potential consequences of our negligence in regards to sandbags and to other matters, as we set off walking in the opposite direction from which I'd started out. The tide was coming in, and it appeared dry sand soon was to be at a premium. The walkway, and the oil platform upon which human presence was perpetually undetectable were swaying dramatically among a prevalence of whitecaps, so close together they resembled a flotilla of water lilies bobbing in the sea.

"You think a storm like this could cause enough damage to put the oil at risk of spilling into the ocean? That would ruin our beach here, too."

"Those pipes should be resistant to storms. But if I go for a walk after the storm is over, and I come back looking like I joined a minstrel show, that will prove I was completely wrong."

She shook her head. "Well I hope you're right."

It started to drizzle again, and we decided to turn around, preferring to get to Bob's before it started to rain harder. Bob had gradually transformed the interior of his beach house to resemble his other house on the Westside, and if there was the occasional visitor, which I doubted there was, the visitor, unlike regular guests such as Lila and I might regard the place as a model home for display of the Big Bang aesthetic of interior decoration. The familiar disorder associated with cigarettes, weed, music appreciation and food consumption was revealed in the scatter of miscellanea. Bob answered the door with a can opener in his hand, though alas, no ready can was in plain sight when we all arrived in the kitchen. Bob declared his appetite had passed; and that remembering what he had almost eaten would be of historical value only.

He ambled into the living room, so we followed along. Bob's living room had an ocean view, and that was where he normally sat, with headphones and his principal bong. He used the bedroom only for sleeping and watching television, and the kitchen as a combination office-workshop-food preparation center. He asked if we wanted to sit out on the porch-patio and talk, since unlike our little cottage, his house had a roofed patio, and an entrance on the ocean side.

"It's a little inclement for that, don't you think?" Lila answered for us.

"I don't know about that. But maybe we should stay inside because of the wind and rain," he said.

Venturing no reply, we simply sat down on the sofa. He sat down with us, removing the headphones from the seat of his favorite armchair, or the chair commonly referred to by insiders as, "the chair."

"So, we've been wondering, Bob, what you think about this storm that's coming?" Lila queried him, adding, "You think everything's going to be okay here...and next door, I mean?"

"I've been seeing all this stuff on tv. It's going to get here next Thursday, right?"

"No, tomorrow, Bob." Lila informed him.

"Yeah...tomorrow's Thursday."

"Bob...right, tomorrow is when it gets here," giving me a "help me, here" look I pretended not to see.

"Doesn't another one get here next week...next Thursday?"

"Nothing gets here next week, nothing I'm aware of at the moment," Lila said.

"So when does it get here?"

Nodding toward the sea, Lila said, "I think this is it...the beginning. Tomorrow is when it's supposed to really hit."

"There's more than one."

"Right. Three," Lila, said, "one storm off the coast, and two more feeding it...the one that could become a hurricane...last time I heard it could, anyhow."

"I know...I've followed it. We've never had an actual hurricane that got this close. I saw all about that. It's unusual for us...on the west coast. They say dangerous, maybe...damage-wise...property-wise, if it gets that big...which I doubt it will."

"But nothing catastrophic. It could cause trouble, especially right along the ocean...like we are."

"That's why I was thinking we should have a party."

Lila and I looked at one another.

"Because...you know...because it's not supposed to be, catastrophic."

I decided I would be the one to take a swing at this pitch. "Who are we inviting, Bob?"

"Nobody. The three of us. You guys will come over here... we'll party...get high, listen to music, and hang out. It'd be a hurricane party."

"I gotcha."

"I know about them," he said, "...they have hurricane parties on the east coast during a hurricane."

"I've never heard of them...not that it's such a bad idea," Lila concluded.

"No," I said, speaking to Lila, "They do have those along the eastern seaboard. They're a custom, you might say, in the Atlantic states, down in Florida, on the Gulf, in Louisiana and Texas."

"Huh."

"People hole up together with a stockpile of their favorite intoxicants, and stick out the brunt of the hurricane getting pissed and raising hell."

"Yeah," Bob said. "Right."

"It's fine with me then," Lila said, "A hurricane party tomorrow at Bob's. What time, Mr. Host?"

Bob failed to answer.

"How about we come over some time during the day tomorrow," I told Bob, "about the time the Big H. is really revving up, but before so much hell breaks loose it's impossible to make the walk."

"If it does rev up," Lila added.

"Good point. If it does."

"Anytime," Bob said, looking over at his headphones as if he was ready to turn his attention back to where it had been before we showed up.

Before we left, we let Bob know we were making one last run to the market to get supplies, and asked if there was anything that we could get him.

"Since there's a party...I'd have to say...yes."

Lila and I drove to the usual spot a little ways up the road, pulling into the lot that was now mud. There were a couple of people in line in front of me, which was slightly unusual, but no frantic mob was descending on the store right before the moment of truth. I asked Greg, the clerk that day, if he had seen my friend normally stationed at the front of the store asking for change. He answered that he hadn't seen him, "since the day before yesterday," and speculated, "he must have headed for the hills."

\---------------------------------------------------------------

The sound was eerie. It was still dark, but I was awake and listening, before I opened my eyes, and sat up in the bed. It was a whistling sound, a shrill whistling, though voluble. At first, as I sat there, I believed it might be the plumbing or the refrigerator. When I finally looked, peering into the dark through the glass toward the oilrig and the walkway that connected to it, I could see power lines billowing out, sharply arced between poles. Rather than whipping around in the wind, the lines were bulging only in one direction. It wasn't that the wind necessarily was all that strong, but that it was steady, and continued to blow at the same velocity without the slightest change. I didn't recall having seen or heard anything remotely like it.

But more than anything what was so conspicuous about it all was the eeriness. Lila and I had never actually gotten into the bed, but had fallen asleep on top it of while watching the late weather, and whatever else we watched on television after that, before falling asleep in front of the screen. One of us must have rolled over on the remote in our sleep, because I awoke not only to the scarifying howl of the wind, but to the scarifying words of a televangelist plotting by the looks of his props, his conquest of numerous nations of Earth, or a severe bitch-slapping of them by the Almighty. There were two wall-sized maps of the world placed side by side, as well as charts and graphs depicting endeavors I could not decipher. I wasn't sure what he was talking about, but I didn't like the sound of it, didn't like the sound of it at all. Eerie.

The first thing Lila said when she awoke was, "What is that?" I didn't know whether she meant the pomaded man on television or the creepy wind. Before I could ask her, she got out of bed and went to the window to look for herself.

"That's weird," she said, describing it concisely.

"Very."

"That high-pitched sound the wind is making...it's really strong...they're no gusts, just a constant blowing. What time is it anyhow?" asking as she returned to bed.

"A little after five."

"What's that?" she asked, when she got her first gander of Dr. Divinity, or whoever it was.

"You don't know from weird, sister."

She watched for around a minute and a half, then said, "Yeah, too spooky for this situation. Change it. Aren't you going to get the weather? Or the news?" adding this last before I had a chance to do it, failing as she saw it to flip with the alacrity expected of me.

The Weather Channel was concentrated on the East coast, apprising us of the current temperature in Central Park. In all fairness, at one time in my life this would have been information not at all insignificant to me. But I skipped around the local channels till I landed on the latest installment of Storm Watch, which I had dreamed during the night would undergo the deserved upgrade, to Big Storm Watch.

"The storm is moving toward the coast very slowly, at less than five miles per hour," we were told. "The National Hurricane Center reported in its most recent bulletin that Giorgio, which remains a strong tropical storm and not quite a hurricane, is beginning to veer northwestwardly. It now is forecasting that the storm will brush the coast of southern California before eventually turning out to sea. The bad news for us is that the storm's slow movement will keep it churning just off shore for the better part of today and tonight, meaning the storm's circulating winds will bring what are called feeder bands, squall lines basically, into the Los Angeles area over the next twelve hours, and possibly beyond. Warnings and explanations followed.

"Storm surges may be anywhere from four to eight feet. Remember now, a storm surge is simply water that is pushed toward the shore by the force of the winds swirling around the storm. This advancing surge combines with the normal tides to create the hurricane storm tide, which in certain circumstances can increase water levels 15 feet or more. In addition, wind waves are superimposed on the storm tide. This rise in water level can cause severe flooding in coastal areas, particularly when the storm tide coincides with the normal high tides. Unfortunately for those who have homes or business along the coast, the currents created by the tide combine with the action of the waves to severely erode beaches, and coastal highways.

"We can expect six to eight inches of rain along the coast, four to six throughout the basin and foothills before this mess is gone. We've had reports of wind gusts as high as eighty-seven miles per hour in Santa Monica, and seventy- five at Long Beach. Out in Burbank, gusts of sixty miles per hour have been recorded. Sustained winds range from forty-five to fifty-five in the coastal regions, and anywhere from thirty to forty in the valleys. All those speeds are expected to increase as the day wears on, and the storm edges closer to shore."

Though the briefing had been thorough, I was by now adrenalized, and could not help myself from seeking additional information back at the Weather Channel. The focus there by then had turned to the Pacific Coast, as it most assuredly should have. While no specific information about our conditions was forthcoming, a little more was added to our general education.

"Storm surges are of limited magnitude on the Pacific Coast because of the great ocean depths close to shore. Numerous hurricanes form off the west coast of Mexico, but these tend to move seaward. Only rarely does one of these hurricanes reach the extreme southern California coast, and those that do are weak compared to hurricanes on the eastern seaboard. Their intensity is limited by the cold temperature of the underlying water surface and other factors." Then, "On up the coast in the Bay Area..." was the signal for me to flip again.

CNN was currently hoping to engage an audience with a health segment clarifying the legitimate and illegitimate claims of the healthful benefits of drinking green tea. Three of the local channels had switched to a colorful apartment fire burning out of control in Hawthorne, and two others, not to be outdone, had the cameras in their circling news choppers trained on the scene of a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck splayed across a lane of the Antelope Freeway.

"What's on Fox?" Lila asked, referring to the news channel whose name we dared not speak and which we never watched, as the pitch of their programming was somewhere to the right of Australopithecus.

"What's on Fox? Suppurating pustules would be my guess."

Snorting, she conceded, "My impatience is out of hand."

Finally, Channel Eleven gave us Rambo, standing outside, and occasionally latching desperately onto a post in a wind threatening to blow him off the deserted seaside patio at Gladstone's restaurant in Pacific Palisades. It was the first of a string of on-site "reports" from various windblown and drenched locations.

"It's seriously windy out here," Rambo offered, illuminating the situation.

Lila rolled her eyes, sighed, and said, "I've had enough. I know I'm not getting back to sleep, that's for sure. I don't feel like sitting here charting every inch of Giorgio's progress on the friggin' Weather Channel, or every hiccup outside on the friggin' local channels. I might as well just get up and make the coffee," she declared, getting up to do exactly that.

"Geez, what a grouch," I said.

"No, I'm just planning to use the window for my weather updates, and read some stuff online."

I followed her off the bed, opening the door to pull the paper in, taking a morning shower in the process of closing it, since it remained pinned against the side of the cottage by the gale force winds. Chilled and wet already, I decided to take a _hot_ shower.

When I got out, the gray light insinuating itself at the horizon earlier, now had permeated the western sky. I looked out the window, seeing ocean swells as large as I had ever seen them, a thin yellow line of dry sand between the ocean, and the steps up the small bank to our sliver of yard. Lila was at the computer. I returned to the bed, turned the sound down on the television and read the Times. During this period we were aware of small thuds on the roof at intervals, banging sounds from somewhere and fairly strong rattling of the window glass. Giant raindrops pelted the windows off and on. There was a noise outside that sounded like a metal chain repeatedly whacking a metal sign.

Later in the morning, sometime before noon, I put the book I had begun to read down, and turned the sound on the television up again. There was no real deviation from what we'd first heard. The storm was moving slowly, but steadily, neither loosing nor gaining intensity. Outside, there was a steady rain at times, which became hard rain; then, after a while, tapered off to soft rain, before starting up the cycle again. The wind had gone from making a whistling sound, to making a howling sound, and then to some combination of howling and a deep, demonic brand of whooshing.

About one in the afternoon, with conditions noticeably worsening, we decided that embarking sooner rather than later on a derangement of the senses was the prudent course. Leaving for Bob's carrying grocery bags of vodka, and cheese and bread, and Band Aids, we said goodbye to our cottage, hoped that it survived, and we did too, then headed face first into the brutal power of motherfucking Nature.

The rain had tapered off, but what was falling fell almost horizontally, as it was being pushed by the vicious gale; and the sand being whipped up peppered us like tiny pieces of buckshot, with no minor sting. Recalling how eloquently Rambo had elucidated a similar situation earlier, I reported to Lila as we struggled, "It's seriously windy out here."

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Even if I hadn't been loaded, even if the weather hadn't been slightly poor, I don't believe anyone would have found me complaining about having to slurp vodka out of Bob's rusty, tin measuring cup. That's the kind of trouper I was. Lila was proceeding with relative moderation. I, on the other hand, had smoked such a quantity of Bob's Chronic, that by the middle of the afternoon I long since had reverted to my traditional way of talking to myself when critically zonked, in other words, addressing myself as Ollie of Laurel and Hardy. There was no change whatsoever in Bob, nothing to distinguish his activity then and there, from any other time and place.

Bob's old-school music was rattling the house worse than the wind. He was practically deaf, and Lila and I liked it loud to begin with, so the decibels had their way with the joint. Lila had discovered in the Bob archives one of those paddles with a ball that's attached by an elastic string; and she slapped the ball on the paddle very precisely to the beat of a tune from Shuggie Otis's, "Inspiration Information."

By four in the afternoon, I had smoked so much stinkweed I was hungry enough to eat my way through the center of the Earth to China. Chef's duties were out of the question for me since I literally could not have found my way into the kitchen. The others were hungry too, so they did KP while I listened to an Arthur Lee and Love album Bob put on. As my right leg, crossed over my left one, jimmied up and down like a metronome in the throes of Tourettes, keeping time to the music, Bob could be heard in the kitchen amid the clang of the pots and silverware, in a true demonstration of the stoner-savant in action, croaking the lyrics to, "My Little Red Book: "I just got out my little red book/ The minute that you said goodbye. I thumbed right through my little red book/ I wasn't gonna sit and cry."

When this gonzo prepared repast came out of the kitchen, there were three big plates of baked beans Lila had cooked in the microwave. Bob, following right behind her brought a stack of wieners he had fried crispy black in a skillet, stabbing them with a fork, and dropping them onto the plates of beans. We ate it with such happy violence, the sound of Emily Post rolling over in her tomb drowned the noise of the storm.

After the meal, sated but not sobered, we sprawled all over the furniture, Bob in "the chair" of course, all of us yowling along with Sugarcane Harris, and after that the Zombies. It was somewhere around this time the remark about luck the neighbor had made on the beach the day before started working at me. I didn't know why. For some reason, I started to think...about luck. There was something especially deflating about reflecting on the subject of luck. I'd had to endure some of the bad stuff, I thought, in a few important areas. On the other hand, all in all, I'd had an enormous preponderance of the good stuff, extremely good, in a few significant areas, too. For some inexplicable reason evaluating which kind of luck, that in my case had been the preponderant kind, analyzing its lasting effects, and putting all of it into perspective occurred to me as a thing I ought to do. So, in that state of profound dissoluteness I tried to do as much, while the storm flailed beyond the window, and music and sing-alongs held sway indoors. Yet even while zapped it was a miserable experience. And one could hardly ponder one's luck in the past, and not wonder about one's luck in the future. Worst of all even luck itself seemed entirely irrelevant to my future. And by extension, logical or drunken, the human inclination to look ahead, the very notion of looking forward began to strike me as no longer of relevance to me either. Not only looking forward, but even reflection on the very concept of looking forward could result in little but a heavy dose of blahs for me. I wasn't tormented by this absence, even though I regretted it; or at the least, felt like I should regret it. The result of this brief endeavor was that I recoiled backward, toward oblivion, this episode of meditation no matter its brevity, causing me to rededicate myself to the proposition that sensory abuse truly was a gift from God, sent from him to ease our pain...and much, much more. I said goodbye to the measuring cup and began to consume my vodka directly from the bottle.

"Glutton," Lila accused me accordingly.

"What's your point?"

Bob brought over his water pipe copious with ganja, and stood holding it for me while I sucked a stratospheric high from deep within. After that, he deejayed us into Ornette Coleman's, "Change of the Century," Charlie Haden rolling out a bass so supple and so fine it would be standard only on Olympus.

On the outside the wrath of hell itself was breaking loose. Rain swept over the house, one ululating squall followed immediately by another, a curtain of water blown by an enormous fan it seemed. We noticed the following, though barely: bangs, thuds, cracks, creaks, snaps, buzzes, crashes, clangs, and pops, in no particular order. We watched as shingles, shutters, pieces of wood, strips of plastic, beach umbrellas, chunks of insulation, leaves, branches, shrubs, windshield wipers, newspapers, bicycle seats, shirts, some sort of restraints, and what looked suspiciously like a colostomy bag went flying by. I thought I saw a poodle, though more likely it was just a mop.

Bob, who had allowed the remote control for his cd player to tumble down into the nether regions of, "the chair," accidentally put Ornette on pause, sitting or pressing his buttocks on the button, and pausing the album a song away from its end. In the meantime, the lights blinked, blinked again, and then again, distracting Bob from the interlude of stilled music. As a means of filling the void, I began to sing, lilting into the theme from the movie, MASH, which had popped into my head from who knew where. I sang: "The game of life is hard to play/I'm gonna lose it anyway/The losing card I'll someday lay/So this is all I have to say...that suicide is painless/It brings on many changes/And I can take or leave it if I please." This caused Bob, once he had noticed to make the observation that there were some very good theme songs for movies and television shows in the 1970s.

"Theme from Green Acres really can't be beat," Lila said.

"I think he means not just campy or funny, but actually pretty good," I qualified.

"Oh really," she said, albeit, with vaudevillian exaggeration.

"Barney Miller and Taxi were pretty good," Bob said.

"Remember the movie 'Blow-up'?" I asked. "It has the scene with the version of the Yardbirds when Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck played guitar in the band at the same time. Not a theme song, though...not the Seventies either...well...hmm."

"I remember that," Bob said. "Not the movie," he corrected, speaking slowly, "I mean the scene."

"The best one, and it was plain good, was "Secret Agent Man," he then asserted.

"You may be right," I agreed.

"I've got to find my Johnny Rivers," he clamored abruptly, "'Secret Agent Man' is on, 'The Greatest Hits."

As he began to search, Bob came 'round to awareness of the cessation of music, and pulled the remote out of the seat and restored Coleman. About that time the lights began to flicker, and the music sloooooowed down for a moment, though Southern California Edison never let us down.

"Time to reload," I said, having in mind a refurbishing of my measuring cup. But a split-second after I'd decided to stand, I felt as though someone had put a slug right between my eyes. I eased back down in my seat. There I found a return to gliding...the euphoria of free flight.

In the meantime, miraculously, Bob had searched down the Holy Grail of TV themes, located as he'd said, among, "Johnny Rivers: Greatest Hits." I heard a few glorious seconds of "Seventh Son," before Bob moved the show along, flipping the remote and launching the strains of, "Secret Agent Man."

"The Golden Age of TV," I proclaimed, "wasn't it?"

"Movies too," Lila said.

"The Golden Age of Promiscuity, they say.

"How would you know?" she demanded to learn.

"I hear things."

Bob was digging the song, and digging it some more: "...They've given you a number/And taken a-WAY your name..."

"Remember when," Lila asked, "the Flintstones was meant for kids?" This was definitive enough that we all pondered it in silence for a while, each to himself, or herself, and each in his or her own way. This allowed us not only to see the water swooshing up and over the patio, but also to hear the sound of the hissing foam. Bob leapt up, and without saying a word, took off out the door, splashing his way into the tide.

"Fuck," Lila yelled.

"What'd he do?"

"That stupid fucking thing of his that sat on the porch...the water washed it away."

"What thing?"

"That statue thing...the statue of Richard Petty...he got at 7-11."

"Hmm."

"Jesus...he's chasing after it in the water...Jesus."

I wobbled up, then stabilized myself by leaning against the wall, and grasping the windowsill. Bob continued to wade, going farther out. The water was up to about his chest, when he stopped, and started clutching at himself in a very unusual way. Then slowly he seemed to be kneeling down, the water appearing to swirl around his chin.

"Shit," Lila yelled, and flung open the door herself.

"What?" I shouted back.

"Something's wrong," she said, and plunged into the water too. I followed her in. She heard my splashing and stopped in her tracks and turned around.

"Stop. Stay here."

"Why?"

"You'll drown. You stay right there."

She started off again, turned abruptly once more, and yelled, "You're fucked...way too fucked. Go back...do you hear me?"

I turned around and walked back to the patio to watch from there.

It was difficult to stand, because of the strength of the wind and the diminishment of my equilibrium. So much water was in my face, and despite my arm remaining in a continuous wiping motion in order to improve my sight, the best I could accomplish was a blurred view. Lila had made it as far out into the ocean as Bob. She seemed to be bending down reaching into the water. Then I saw Bob. The two of them were together in the water. A wave crested, and battered down hard on both of them...then they were gone...disappeared. I stood with my back braced against the wall of the house and watched. All of the sudden, there they were swimming or floating, though they had drifted farther out into the ocean and were moving away. The current was pulling them north, in the direction of the oilrig.

They continued going, farther, then farther away. Finally, I couldn't see them at all. I told myself that perhaps they were actually swimming, rather than being pulled away, conscious or unconscious by the current. How far up the beach could the ocean take them I wondered? If they got out of the water, say a half a mile up the coast, how long would it take them to walk back? By now, I could hardly stand, braced against the wall or not. I inched nearer the door, struggled with it in the wind, and finally got inside. Once there, I leaned for a moment, my back against the door, staring. Dazed, fried and stupefied, I asked myself, "I wonder if they'll be coming back?" One thing I knew for sure was swimming was my own head. I teetered, and then fell in the direction of the floor, face-first.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was where the stream of images accelerated, and indeed lifted off. The first thing that struck me was the presence of hippies. Not Time Machine hippies, but new ones, in hippie-looking garb. Now THIS is an amusement park I said to myself. Disneyland, only with freaks...the good kind of freaks, too. We rode the Roller Coaster that crossed the ocean. We rode the Rocket Ship that glided above the mountains. We rode the motorcycles; then we rode the pick-up truck that had the canvas stretched across the back to keep you dry. Every word that came out of our mouths showed up on the sides of buildings or flashing neon signs. We cackled. We howled. I pointed us in the right direction.

Then I wanted out. Or I wanted in. I wasn't sure. I charged at the door at full speed, and banged hard against it with my shoulder. I broke out glass. I splintered wood. I crawled, I slithered. And then...I followed the tunnel into the Great Light. I came face to face with my Creator.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I recognized wakefulness when it arrived. Still, pudgy clouds bumped against one another inside my head. And they remained there for a little while. When they began to scatter, then I remembered. I remembered the hurricane. I remembered Bob's.

And I opened my eyes. The surroundings, what I saw at first of them, looked peculiar. On the other hand they looked familiar. It wasn't Bob's. Exactly where it was I didn't know. But it wasn't Bob's.

I raised myself, and using my hands, scooted myself along the floor, and propped myself against the wall. So I had taken a trip, after all?

Then I commenced piecing it all together. I was able to peel apart, though the parts were sticky, fragments of what had actually happened, from their representation in this drugged and drunken fever dream. I remembered confusion, the Pacific Coast Highway, wandering along beside it. I recalled riding in the back of a truck with others. I remembered telling someone where I was headed. I had a recollection of hitting things, of hurting myself and of things that cracked or broke. I could see cuts on myself. I could see bruises. But I didn't remember with clarity my actions inflicting damage; nor could I remember to what I must have done it.

Then it dawned on me. Then I knew... _exactly_ where I was. It didn't look the same, empty of furniture or furnishings, which had been replaced by yard supplies and garden tools. It was the guesthouse, Bob's guesthouse...behind his house on the Westside. Rushing into my head after that as I sat there, were pictures of Bob and Lila bobbing up and down in water, and floating away. I felt a welling up inside, though it wasn't remorse. It was testiness. It was confusion at what had happened to Bob and to Lila. I caught myself...what MIGHT have happened to Bob and to Lila. I didn't really know. Not yet.

But then, what first had been testiness and what had been confusion, turned to pure anger. Shaking my head, moving my eyes around the premises, looking at seed and fertilizer, at hoes and dirty gloves, my eyes lighted upon, and then fixed on the gallons of gasoline that rested beside the mower. I stood. When I was upright, I could see that indeed, I had smashed out the window glass, obliterated molding, and crawled my way inside the place. I turned, walked over, lifted up two cans of gasoline and carried them to the door, where I set them down. I kicked the door wide open with my foot and picked up the cans of gasoline, and carried them to the yard. When I closed the door, I saw the evidence of my futile use of my body as a battering ram.

The main house, Bob's, looked deserted. Nobody was in sight. There were no lights...no sounds...no cars...no one home. Then it occurred to me they had scampered inland to escape the storm.

In the yard I checked to make certain my cigarette lighter still was in my pocket. It was. I tested it with a flick. All systems were go, so I picked the gasoline up, and began to walk, in the direction of the adjacent house, the neighbor's house, the rat-finking homunculus Scheer's house.

I crept, once I reached the grass in the side yard. I stopped, thinking I would look first around in back for places to begin to pour accelerant. No...I had to check, do my best to determine if Scheer was home, or if anyone else was in the house by attempting to peer inside the front windows. My bet was that the weasel, and his weaselettes, had scampered as well, scared out of their wits by Giorgio.

I tip toed around the corner, and stopped, and put the gas down behind the shrub that was blocking the way. Then, I proceeded to do reconnaissance. The process wasn't a long one. A tree, a very large one, fifteen feet perhaps from the front of the house, had snapped in two, a third of the way up. The top of the tree lay inside the house, having sheared the roof, flattening half the house at least to the height of a manhole cover. I stood, took it all in, then turned around and walked away.

I opened the door of the guesthouse, and went inside again. I sat down on the floor and slumped against the wall like I had before. My mind felt as though it temporarily had been voided...and then, a need to return to the beach as quickly as possible filled it up.

Still, there was confusion. I felt the need to return, to know; and at the same time, to stay away...to protect myself from knowing. I was unable to make clear in my own mind, whether I believed I was returning to discover what had really happened, to verify what I assumed; or to face, what perhaps I knew already. My temporary conclusion was that I must be experiencing a condition very akin to shock, and that uncertainty, and possibility were nature's way of looking out for me a little bit; and I took heart, so to speak, that nature believed there remained feelings in me I needed protection from.

On this note of mental tranquility I ventured behind a bush in the yard, the girth of which allowed me to relieve myself in utter privacy. I returned to my spot inside, but no sooner had I sat, than I became aware, not so much of hunger, but of the crater in my stomach yearning to be filled, and how thirsty I was. It was time to go.

As soon as I started out, walking in the street since there were no sidewalks, I could see how forceful the storm had been, seeing leaves, fronds, branches, and in some cases limbs, that were on the ground. But nothing I saw indicated the storm approached anything like severity, Scheer's house being the only example of serious damage I had seen. It was a little worse than what one might witness after a rather powerful buffeting by Santa Anas.

I completed the few long blocks of walking it took to get to Little Santa Monica, made my way over to Santa Monica, and then waited for an opportunity to scoot across the lanes. A couple of blocks west, I came to the corner market I had visited on many occasions before, though never on foot. I stopped beside a car in the lot in the ownership of a driver with strong convictions about regular trips to the car wash, and used the window glass to spruce myself into a marginally more presentable presence.

Inside I bought a sandwich, a giant bottle of water, a pen and a spiral notebook. I was left with sixty dollars or so (my life savings, which I responsibly kept in my wallet). My plan was to go to the payphone out in the parking lot and call a cab. The cab would take me to the Greyhound station, from which a bus would take me to Carpinteria. From there I would take a taxi back to the beach.

I sat on a bus bench to eat my sandwich before I called the cab. Preoccupied though I was with other matters, even perhaps in the back of my mind anticipating that toiling on my little political encyclopedia project might be the best medicine for me in the days ahead, if not a faux career path excellently suited to me, ideas for entries penetrated those preoccupations, and I compulsively opened the notebook and began to write. The initial entry was:

## The Domino Theory

Among the preposterous hogwash used to justify the immoral war in Vietnam, was something called the Domino Theory, a delectable load of equine manure postulating that should one nation in Southeast Asia fall to the communist menace (dressed as nationalist defenders of their nation, natch) all of them would fall, one after another, like...yes, you guessed it. In the end, other than Cambodia, which Dracula and Henry the H. Bomb offered up for butchery for the sake of convenience, the fall of South Vietnam left nothing in its wake but a long line of standing dominoes.

_In the same vein of grandiose, and splendiferous manipulation of the naturalized and native lambs of the land, there was the famous, and infamous "Light at the end of the tunnel," pronouncement, circa 1967, by that grizzled and grizzly hack with the many shiny accessories on his duds, General William C. Westomoreland...meant to predict that victory over the peasant population of Vietnam was only a hop, a skip, and a jump away, guerillas in bamboo haberdashery no match for our strategy. Apropos, the military brass in 'Nam had been famous for their press conferences each and every afternoon, eventually labeled by the long suffering victims, those attending reporters, as: The Five O' Clock Follies, because of the quotient of bull cookies served up in their buffet._ _The program routinely began, with the emcee addressing the audience with the introduction: "for your dancing and dining pleasure, the Pentagon brings you: Los Fabulosos Flying Monkeys...."_

I could tell I was flagging here, sensed I was about to drift, therefore I stopped. I nibbled on the sandwich some, and chugged water almost until I lost consciousness from the want of air. I got up, called the taxi in the booth at the corner of the lot, and sat back down. But it wasn't long before I took the notebook up again and began to write, bending to the fate that surely would render no other skills available to me; at least not any sufficient enough to be exploited by me without considerable embarrassment and humiliation:

## The Kirkpatrick Doctrine

Jeanne Kirkpatrick, beloved doyenne of whack-a-doodle right-wing foreign policy, and a one-time Ambassador to the United Nations under Ronald Ray Guns, swore on everything that is holy, while crossing her heart and spewing brain matter out of her nostrils, as demonstration of superior intellect, that never, absolutely never, could a communist authoritarian nation peacefully be transformed into a democratic one. She turned out to be exactly right, except for all of the nations of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. Of course, to challenge the doctrine when it was being passed around in political circles like a super race of crablice was to invite deportation to Siberia, and a lifetime loss of respect by those whose respect would mark one's legacy among the sane, to a degree more stigmatizing than death by drowning in a pool of Tidy Bowl. Of course, these garden variety scams and snookers, and repeated assaults on one's miraculously returning virginity...

Once again, I felt myself about to wander. Indeed, my concentration was being lost to preoccupations I wrongly had believed to be unlikely to wake for a reliable length of time. It came to me like a bolt that a dram of vodka truly would hit the spot, the water refreshing, but greatly less satisfying as succor for my particular kind of thirst. I was comforted by the realization that upon the return to the house at the beach...no matter who was there, or who was not, vodka would readily be at hand.

Sitting, and staring toward the sun, until my retinas were burned with little images of blackened tennis balls, the pondering that had been my distraction, led me to say to myself, "I can foresee no circumstances under which I would return to my job at Pyramid." Just as this was said in my head, the cab pulled up in front of me at the curb. Reaching for the door, I said out loud, this time, "Hey. I've got your Encyclopedia of American Political History right here."

