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 m
an’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 poli
tics. 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 yo
u. 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.”
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