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 d
istrict.
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 pu
ffy 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