Table of Contents
FOR MY GRANDPARENTS
The cloudy afternoon is as pleasant
as silence. Who would think
one would ever have enough of sunshine?
A good epitaph, I suppose, would be
He liked the sunshine; better still, He liked to walk. And yet the dead, if it could speak, might say, I had grown tired of walking, yes, even of the sunshine.
CHARLES REZNIKOFF
“Autobiography: Hollywood”
1
I JUST LANDED IN LOS ANGELES. My older brother has been here two years, in the valley neighborhood of Encino. He makes his living as an importer of flowers, and resides comfortably alone in a one-story cube-shaped house. According to letters and phone conversations he feels “really wonderful.”
I come as a writer, hoping to make a fortune in the movies. Hollywood is hiring these days. That’s what Jerry told me. He’s on his way here right now, some miles behind me (afraid of flying, he chose to take the train). “Come on,” he persuaded me over beers three weeks ago, “we’ll move out there and work together making easy money setting down screenplays both dumb and brilliant.”
When I checked into my apartment building in Santa Monica the fellow at the desk handed me a postcard from Jerry.
Jacob—I’m laid over in a small Arizona town right now, thinking, over a glass of seltzer, why don’t you like my novel? My opinion is that you’re jealous of me. But I am also jealous of you and that complicates the matter. —Jerry
The letter startled me and sent a wave of nausea from my knees to my throat. I entered my room and set my white cap down on the wooden ironing board and stepped onto the little terrace for a cigarette, wondering, was I to consider this a threat from Jerry? And if so, how serious a threat? We met each other through our employ as assistants at a big Manhattan publishing firm. We both hated the day-in-day-out repetitive nonsense of the work, and our friendship, if you could call it that, consisted of complaining about the job in a coffee shop as we ate our egg salad and vinegar sandwiches and pulled viciously at glasses of coke during lunch hour.
I stubbed my cigarette out in an empty almond can, hurried down the dark stairwell of the apartment building and found a corner pay phone to call my brother and let him know that I’d arrived in Los Angeles.
To say the least, I am very excited to be in Los Angeles. Walking down Wilshire Boulevard towards the ocean, the bright sun calming my brain and setting all my spirits at ease, plus the light breeze blowing up my pants-legs; slipping inside the shady newspaper stores, the subdued but also jitterbug delicatessens; even passing the bums smirking into garbage cans and up at the gargantuan traffic lights—all of these things, though I can’t say why, make me feel at home. I’ve never left the East before, and instead of any homesickness, I’ve several times gone so far as to speak aloud to myself today, and to the pigeons as well, “God almighty, this is the place.”
Underneath my intense excitement, I feel an insane sadness, and this too, I love. Somehow, the sadness is filling me with joy. The utter loneliness of the blocks, the long—the endless!—blocks of houses extending north and south, and not a human being on either side except for a tiny faraway mother pushing a baby carriage up her front lawn, the sun hazily illuminating the infinity of the city. Drunk with health, I had to stop once and lean against some shuttered bank to stare across the street at an ancient green clock on the cornice of a building.
I felt real promise in the air this afternoon, and a rush at having disappeared from New York City and its gray, cold, close subway cars, its musty, dim, and crowded living rooms, and its harsh, moronic, tension-filled officebuilding routines of contracts, memorandums, errands, and telegrams.
I came upon a plaza of benches in front of an insurance firm headquarters and was struck with the impression that I’d landed in San Antonio, and scribbled some lousy jokes and bits of dialogue in my pad.
A bunch of palm trees were drooping over my head, filling me with a new desire—like for a new pair of shoes or a chocolate milkshake. I don’t think I want to write scripts with Jerry; I would be better off writing, I think, a simple 200-page novel in my apartment. Listening to the buses swish by, rising early, the pages will definitely pour out of me with great ease.
The trick, of course, is to return to Los Angeles. Five days after my arrival I came down with a terrible fever, and my brother put me on the afternoon train to New York. “Los Angeles is no place for a young man with a fever,” he said to me as he pushed me into my sleeper car. “Now, rest up—here, I’ll close the curtains for you. Mother will meet you at Penn Station.”
In my delirium I supposed my tongue was either missing or up in flames and I made no response to my brother, who appeared to be wearing an apron. Out of a front pouch he pulled a pack of cigarettes and a small jar of instant coffee granules. “For when you’re feeling better, buddy boy,” he said, patting me on my damp head. The last thing I remember of the Golden State is peeking at my brother through the curtains as he dissolved into a shimmering orange grove. I slept deep for three days, until the transfer in Chicago. Now I’m back in Brooklyn Heights, living with my mother and aunt, trying to figure my next move.
When my father killed himself five years ago, my aunt moved in. She helps my mother with the housework and generally tries to cheer her up with fashion magazines, card games, and conversation. Plus she keeps her away from the vodka. She allows her one vice: cigarettes. They smoke together on the stoop. They are sitting down there right now, and their chatter and smoke carries up to my room through the open window. I smoke too, and blow my smoke into their smoke.
I’ve been riding the buses around quite a lot, and going to movies, and eating hot dogs. I keep a
