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I awoke this morning extremely queasy and consumed with the feeling that I am the only person alive—at least on my block. I sat at my desk, lit a cigarette, flipped through my father’s facsimile of the 1860 Leaves of Grass—“afar on arctic ice, the she-walrus lying drowsily, / while her cubs play around;”—and dumped the bit of water remaining in my thermos onto my head. That would be my bath for the day. The cigarette tastes of wet cardboard, I announced to my naked feet. I must get moving, because I have been sitting in my room chewing my lip and turning my head from side to side quite a while now.
These past few days I have been occupied with a new project: writing letters to and from imaginary persons regarding Los Angeles. Some of the correspondents sound fairly insane, their voices echoing with the sort of brighteyed lunacy that I think only Los Angeles allows, like:
To whom it may concern,
And so I spoke, presumably, of laundry, and walked on. Probably on cause of being clean I proceeded to the bar and asked for my keys, then went up to my room to boil an egg. I’m off to Moab tomorrow for the weekend to retrieve a case of vodka from Heck. You come to the party next Saturday at The Terrace in Brentwood, and bring a friend. It will be relaxing, I promise.
Signed,
F. F. Jones
I wish I could have made it to the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles during my truncated stay in town. I went to the library by Prospect Park yesterday and looked at images of the place in a volume called Book Civilization in Los Angeles. I sunk into a pleasant daze for more than an hour, and intermittently recorded this exchange between friends:
Tom,
I saw a great number of women crying today, inside the cars and delis. I notice the women are treated far more poorly here than in New York. I believe my girlfriend in Culver City is afraid of me, because that is a natural feeling towards a fellow here. This is a pretty barbaric place, seems to be dark and late even in the middle of the morning. When will you be coming out? I can set you up in the hills, perhaps; or, if you like, Topanga Canyon where it’s quiet and you could get a screenplay done in a week I bet.
Your pal,
Zev
Zev,
How nice it is nice of you to write, but I don’t think you understand anything about me anymore, not at all. You’re my friend so I imagine you can at least understand that. Here I am in a top-floor stuffy office in the garment district certainly planning my escape from this damned city (if I don’t get out soon they’ll have to give me a cane, and I’m only 32) to come out there to sit poolside and churn out scripts quick as I drink ice whiskey, ice whiskey, ice whiskey. But what with my wife out of work and the babies in need of new clothes I don’t know if I can swing the travel expense. If you could lend me cash for the bus fare I assure you I’ll pay you back. You know I’ll reimburse you fast if you just put me up in Topanga like you say and shut the doors etc.
Take care,
Tom
It seems these imaginary letters summoned an actual letter. I received this from Jerry today:
Jacob,
You really need to come back to Los Angeles. Why not? What happened to you? I found your brother listed in the phonebook and called him up. He told me you came down with a desert fever. Really? Come on. Leave New York before summer strikes in full. Did you catch that movie about the locomotive boom? Just my thing—we could make up something in that style in two days I bet you, with the help of coffee and grilled cheese. I’m not going to wait much longer for you though. I’m at the Hotel Carmel in Santa Monica. Don’t bother responding to this letter. If you’re not knocking at my door smiling by June 15, I’ll assume you’re never coming back. So come on—
Jerry
So it’s take it or leave it, a real ultimatum. I guess Jerry’s right, we could write something pretty funny about a concrete spill on the highway or some terrible door installation mishap, any old thing in the style of the locomotive movie (a basic slapstick whose structure I bet any college educated louse could mimic). Just the two of us in the lobby of the Hotel Carmel, working the thing out like naturals. Intuition!
I went to the Montreal Barber, in the downstairs arcade of the Cities Service Building in Lower Manhattan, to have a crew cut today. Afterwards, walking through the winding, narrow streets of the financial district with so little hair and a brisk wind blowing in from the Atlantic, I got quite chilly and hustled down into the Bowling Green subway station to board an uptown Lexington Avenue express. I wanted to surprise my grandfather with a lunchtime visit. Sadly, the train stalled in the tunnel between the Fulton Street and Brooklyn Bridge stations for about twenty minutes, and I experienced a deep panic. The fairly empty train quickly assumed the atmosphere of a harshly lit and absurdly spacious plastic coffin, and staring at my reflection in the doorway glass I saw my watercolor ghost. A blue light bulb in the tunnel cast a glow inside his left ear, and this served to x-ray his head and reveal a set of pink and green teeth hanging like rotten skin from brown and pimpled gums.
I came to and walked the length of the car back and forth; an old lady knitting a shirt rolled her bespectacled eyes at me, and a khaki-suited banker reading the Sun shook his head and muttered something I took to be: “Stop fucking idiot stop sit Jesus moron subway tonight Christ tomorrow right-now.” But I continued my mad walk in the hopes that my own legs would somehow propel the train, and eventually we did start to move, and I had worked up quite a sweat and my esophagus throbbed, making it hard to swallow even what little was left of my own spittle. I got out at Brooklyn Bridge and walked home, staring down at the wood slat pedestrian walkway (catching glimpses of the river flashing below) the whole way across. I’ll have to postpone the visit to my grandfather’s. Maybe my aunt can drive me over there sometime soon.
The experience on the subway really exhausted me but I didn’t feel like going to bed last night so I bought a crate of Coca-Cola from the Pineapple Street Grocery around 8 o’clock in the evening and drank six bottles through the night. It’s now 7 o’clock in the morning and I’m yet to hit the sack. Sometime in the middle of the night I became very excited and took the jar of instant coffee that my brother gave me down from the small mantel above my bed and threw it at the wall. So now there is a pile of harsh brown sand in the southwest corner of my room, in addition to the peanut shells scattered all around.
Sitting amongst this squalor, I suddenly recall a poster I saw in a hamburger café around Santa Monica Boulevard and 26th that announced “TRY OUR NEW HAMBURGER PEPPER LOAF TODAY!” Hamburger pepper loaf—it has a nice ring to it, but now when I picture the food, a soggy brick of spiced ground round cooked rare, served on a paper plate overwhelmed by the density of the leaking meal, I lose my appetite.
I think I will open an impromptu hamburger stand on our stoop. Maybe I’ll stroll over
