building on Times Square tomorrow, for no particular reason. I will have to ride the subway—something I dread.
I took the subway to Grand Central Station, and before walking west to the Paramount building, I sat on a bench in the main waiting hall and drank a cup of watery lunch stand coffee. I stared at a telephone booth and considered calling my brother. I also thought about calling the apartment building in Santa Monica to ask the fellow at the desk if he happened to find a pen somewhere in my room. It seems that I lost my pen in Los Angeles. Or maybe it fell out of my pocket on the train to New York. I don’t know. I liked that pen, a fine Parker Jotter that my father brought back for me from England. He spent three months there about two years before he shot himself, on business—something to do with closing a linen deal with one of the major British retailers, Marks & Spencer I think. Well, I didn’t make any phone calls, and then I looked down at my left tennis shoe and noticed a small tear at the point where the rubber toe meets the canvas, felt depressed, and walked to the Paramount building, where I stopped and looked up at the glittering script on the facade for a few seconds, and then proceeded to the subway and rode back to Brooklyn. I’m going to listen to baseball on the radio now, and try to fall asleep.
I had a dream last night that all different sizes of airplanes were buzzing around in the sky above the harbor. Most of the airplanes were simple silver, but one of them—a huge red and blue jetliner—carried a bunch of bullhorn wielding film directors on the wings. It seems they were directing a complicated scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. All of the cables on the bridge had been removed. I couldn’t understand why there were multiple directors working on the one movie. Maybe some kind of competition was going on. Suddenly, I found myself seated in the cockpit of a rattling bomber, and the pilot told me that at the call of “Action!” I must jump out. He said it would be fine, that I would land in the water. Church bells up the street awoke me, and I went into the kitchen and sat at the table and drank a glass of iced tea.
My mother thinks I should call the publishing firm and ask for my position back. I told her that I’ll be returning to Los Angeles the second week of June (in fact I haven’t made any real arrangements) so there’s really no point. She frowned, and my aunt, glaring at me, took her by the hand and said, “Let him go if he wants to, and besides his brother is there to look after him.”
Then my mother, whimpering, asked me, “Jacob, why don’t you just live with your brother if you really must go back to Los Angeles?”
I told her that if Jerry and I are to collaborate on scripts, we must be in the same neighborhood, and that the valley land is no place for screenwriters. Then my back started to hurt and I felt like screaming so I left the apartment and walked along Columbia Heights, by the water. Across the way, Manhattan was all lit up like a warehouse full of croaking soda vending machines, and the sight did nothing to assuage my impulse to scream—but still I didn’t.
I am trying to determine where my laziness comes from. I’ve concluded that the source must be my grandfather, my mother’s father, a gambling bum who lives in his deceased mother’s apartment on Park Avenue.
I got out of bed this morning at 11:30. From 8:30 on I awoke every half-hour and told myself to get up, but then quickly answered myself with: “No, dreaming is good for writers—it’s the same as writing, really,” and rolled over. An idiotic idea, I recognized when I finally got up and had nothing to show for it, feeling gross and worthless.
But I’ve got to maintain a sense of dignity. So around 1 o’clock this afternoon I took a walk through my neighborhood and down to the piers, bringing along my little pad to take down some story notes. I wish I had an actress friend for whom I could write a script; that would give my project some push. The men up in Paramount would take a look straightaway if they knew the script was attached to one of the rising stars.
Then I recalled how I felt that day sitting under the palm trees in Santa Monica, filled with desire and cool confidence, and I got Chet Baker’s rendition of “Look for the Silver Lining” in my head, and closed my eyes and tried to get to Los Angeles that way. But the moaning foghorns in the harbor prevented any prolonged reverie. I opened my eyes and saw the Staten Island Ferry crashing into the Manhattan slip, and I felt my body shift and knock in sympathy with the event. It’s that game New York plays with natives, the city tells you that every idea you’ve got related to leaving is just a big trap you’ve set up for yourself, that there’s nowhere else to go, and while you may be driven out in disgrace you can’t just willfully depart.
I went to the bank today to check my balances and withdraw some petty cash. When my father died he left me a fair amount of money, just like he did for my mother and my brother, enough to give my own wife and children—should they ever exist—a fine lift. I didn’t think I would touch the money for a long time; after all I’d been working enough to meet all of my modest expenses. Until I quit my job, that is, and went to Los Angeles at Jerry’s urging. And now I’m not working on anything. All I am is a professional dodger, and until I’m back in Los Angeles I don’t see myself making any kind of progress. Once there I’ll start investing in myself, as the saying goes. Here in New York I’m of a mind to go over to my grandfather’s and watch cartoons projected onto his dining room wall (and maybe the ceiling too) and take his pistol out of the bathroom cupboard and shoot at the pigeons congregating in the airshaft.
I went to a 3 o’clock showing of Brass Rain today. The movie opens with a close-up of a brown derby wrapped in blue cellophane, floating in a lagoon. Zooming out, we see the image is inside of a tabloid show on a television mounted high in the ceiling corner at a farmers’ market dining patio. A young man wearing a white flannel suit sits on a metal chair, eating what looks like a fantastic whole-wheat and sugar dusted doughnut. He looks up at the television, and squinting at the derby, removes a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and scrawls some illegible words on a piece of stationary from the Malibu California Surf Hotel. He waves his hand at a flea, a snare drum cracks, and the title sequence begins, a phantasmagoria of orange-saturated smashed soda bottles, burnt automobiles, and deserted barbershops.
When I got home I took a nap and dreamt that I was sitting by the movie’s lagoon, photographing couples as they rowed around in circles eating tremendous hamburgers with blankets of American cheese drooping out from the bun. Then I was wandering around some French Quarter of Los Angeles, all of the bakers dumping flour off their balconies, and ended up behind the steaming Korean fast food stalls of Wilshire Boulevard. I hurried up when I realized I was on my way to my night job as a tile-scrubber at the Aztec Hotel.
Strolling around Coney Island today, I dropped a coin into a scale to learn my weight: 195 pounds. I looked at my reflection in the protective glass surrounding the bumper car court and was overcome with shame. I am a scruffy faced and plump good-for-nothing. But no! Lo! I’m just an Elvis Presley stunt-double in need of a shower, and I bought a cup of beer, sat down on a bench and watched the women wearing lightweight cardigan sweaters pass by, their breasts pointing out like great torpedoes of life. And I felt a little better, and I walked to the train station and riding home daydreamed about palm trees as I stared at the Statue of Liberty in the distance, from my outlook a mere teal phantom shrouded in smoke. I intend to buy a set of dumb-bells
