The Pig was the one thing that could get Andrew out of the Essex, and off the block. He would go on pilgrimages there, one man’s Mecca, one man’s shrine being another’s mere rib joint on N. La Brea. Sometimes I’d go there with him, when the mood and the money were in alignment. This time I was working pimperarily in the vicinity, and Andrew had plans to feed. Given our fortuitous conjunction of circumstances, we planned to meet up after I got off work. We’d put the fork in the pork and ride the bus home together when the job was done.
Shambling lethargically up the sidewalk in the aftermath, lard in our feet, we nearly collided with a former co-worker of mine as he was leaving a building. He was one of those persons without a name, whose identity was a set of initials instead. I knew him as T.B. at Pyramid, another of the ink-stained sketchers of political history. His moniker in fact did cause him to encounter performances of coughing fits, and to be summoned or greeted by loud wheezing.
As we stood on the sidewalk, still within olfactory range of cooking meat, he told us he didn’t plan to work at Pyramid very much longer. The catalyst for this ongoing change of life had been his acceptance, now his attendance of classes at USC in the creative writing program, “winning” an assistantship, he said. I told him it sounded “really good,” though by and large I had no idea what an assistantship was. I believed paper grading might have been involved, but wasn’t sure. He went on to put some gilding on his lily, telling Andrew and me how he had impressed a local publisher with a collection of his stories. The stories were “hip stories” he said, “that debunk the pretenses of health food fanatics, hippies, psychology, survivalists and the like.”
In a low voice funneled directly into my ear Andrew observed, “Bold targeting,” as TB looked around with hope to see if anyone else had been in earshot of his bona fides.
“I was just on my way to meet a friend of mine. You should join us?” he said, clearly inviting the both of us. “He’s kind of a new friend. I met him in the writing program. I think you guys would hit it off.”
The look Andrew and I exchanged reflected mutual dread of what we had in store, either bearing the onus of doing the thing or of having to politely blow this man off.
“If you don’t have anything else to do,” he added, “I’ll buy you guys some drinks.”
The new look on Andrew’s face imploring me to answer in the affirmative told me TB had made the sale.
In the car I told TB I was a General Office Specialist now, a career choice that provided me with the time I required for dispersing my memory cells in the California breeze. ”If you can’t remember it, it doesn’t count,” I said. TB may have understood.
He asked Andrew, “How do you get by?”
“You get me by,” Andrew replied.
“I do? How do I do that?”
“Your tax dollars finance my disability checks. And thanks, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” TB said, leery of saying more.
TB wheeled his automobile right, off Temple, and onto Spring, telling us, “The café where we’re meeting is down on First. The guy we’re hooking up with, Stanley, works near there at City Hall.”
Even before we parked, we became aware of the swarm of sirens. ”Fire somewhere,” TB remarked about the persistency and the density of the swarm. When we got out of the car we could smell smoke, and by the time we were closing in on the café on First we could see ugly, brown smoke billowing up to our east. TB started glancing around at the tables clustered on the sidewalk the second we reached the café. He went to greet his friend, as Andrew and I stood staring at an enormous conflagration in the intersection of Main and First. The entire intersection appeared ablaze, prodigious smoke swallowing earth and sky, while south of First, even the buildings on either side of Main looked as though they may have been on fire as well.
“Over here,” TB summoned, from a table a few feet away.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like that,” I said, nodding at the holocaust in front of my eyes.
“It’s awesome,” TB answered. “Hey, Donovan, this is my buddy Stanley, Stanley, meet Donovan, a former Pyramider.”
“Nice to meet you.” Stanley said. “So you’re one of us.”
“Us?” I asked, puzzled.
“A literary man.”
“Yeah…well, as Muddy Waters would say, ‘I’m a man.’ The other part of what you alleged is unsubstantiated.”
“See, he was fun to work with,” TB told him.
“Fuck,” Andrew gasped, still staring into the street.
“A gasoline truck crashed into a city bus,” Stanley told us matter-of-factly.
“I was going to ask if anybody was hurt,” TB said, “but….” He realized Andrew and I were not listening, transfixed by the presence of such a number of ambulances, fire trucks, Jaws of Life, and cop cars, which produced a strobing and swiveling of colored lights practically dumbfounding.
The waiter there to take our orders said, “I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be open. This is looking pretty serious.”
“All right,” said TB, “bring us,” indicating Stanley as well as himself, “two pitchers of Samuel Adams.”
Not one to dismiss a good idea just because another person had it first, I ordered a couple of Stoli rocks. Just as I finished a woman in her early thirties perhaps, reading at the nearest table, sniffed at Stanley, “Literary man?” tilting her head back and laughing from deep down.
“Who asked you?” Stanley sniffed back.
“Who told you you were literary?” she laughed.
“For one, the faculty who admitted me to the USC MFA program in creative writing.”
“If you had any sense you’d skip all that and commit a felony. If you want to be a writer stop looking for shortcuts. Do what’s required. Do as I’m telling you, and you’ll have a book contract in the six figure neighborhood so fast it’ll make your wallet spin, I guarantee it. Literary man,” she added, laughing some more.
TB looked over his Fumanchu at her, and said, “You won’t be laughing after I squirt my GHB into your Shirley Temple, baby.”
“Now you have potential,” she said. “It’s crude, but it’s potential.”
Just then, what sounded like a single boom of thunder caused us to jump or to bristle to attention. The boom was followed by a series of snaps, crackles and pops.
“Transformers blowing,” Andrew said.
In the wake of the boom it felt as though we were sitting in a peculiarly unnatural vacuum. It was a sensation you felt on your skin, a sensation that electricity or concussion had blasted every single molecule out of the immediate area. In the silence of the vacuum, two men who were sitting a couple of tables over could be heard loud and clear. One was saying to the other, “I heard him say that a right-wing maniac had threatened to drive a tanker into a bus.”
“I specifically heard the waiter telling a customer, a left-wing maniac…I heard him say anarchist, too.”
“I heard from the cashier, who heard it from the cook, who’s watching MSNBC in the kitchen,” the other one said.
“Fuck MSNBC. The waiter got if off a local radio station.”
A very loud and pronounced swoosh rolled across the tables and chairs. Those of us positioned to see, saw a radiant fireball rise from the furnace of smoke and flame at the intersecting streets, then seemingly break apart into two separate balls of fire going in opposite directions.
“Oh, so there’s some elevated stature the cook has, but the waiter doesn’t?” one of the men at the other table said, breaking the silence again.
Amid a renewed caterwauling of sirens, Stanley said, “What a racket.”
The waiter had returned to our table, saying, “Can you imagine, all those poor people riding the bus?”
None of us responded. The waiter then added, “The café is closing. I think the entire area is being eva
cuated. If you stay, the manager told me to tell you, the café has no responsibility.”
TB said, “I’ve got it,” and gave his credit card to the waiter along with the check. This was followed by a chorus of “thanks” from the other three of us at the table.
It appeared the clientele was reduced now to our table of four, the woman at the adjacent table, and the two men. Since my chair was facing toward the intersection I could witness the remarkable number of ambulances lining up on First alone. The sanitary white of stretchers nearly obscured the pavement, as if a school of fish lying belly-up had been dumped from one of the police and media whirly-birds circling above. The steel bottoms of the many gurneys were burnished maroon with reflected smoke and fire. Andrew looked up from doodling on his sketchpad and exclaimed, “Look at those stacks of empty body bags.”
“I hope they don’t need those,” I sputtered out.
The woman at the adjacent table piped up again, this time speaking directly to Andrew as if she had just then noticed him sitting there. She asked, “Are you a literary man, too?”
“Are you speakin’ to li’l ole me?” he replied.
“Yeah.”
“No m’am,” he told her, grinning, “I’m not.”
“What do you do?”
“Christ, people keep asking me that lately. You know, I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said, ‘It’s not what you do, it’s what you do for fun.’ I thought that was pretty good.”
She smiled and said, “Yeah, it is.”
“He’s an unexpectedly talented political cartoonist,“ I told her.
“You’re right,” she said, “that’s unexpected.”
“I never have a cartoon in print, so your low expectations are warranted,” he said matter of factly. Rather than answer, she got up from her chair, putting her book on the table but taking her drink with her, and walked around and stood behind him. Taking hold of the back of a chair at an empty table next to her, she said, “Mind if I squeeze in?” Andrew and I opened up the space between us, and she pushed her chair in and sat down. “I’m Kelly,” she said.
All around the rest of the table we said our names and hellos.
“How come they’re never in print?”
“I don’t ask anybody to print them. Not for a long time, I haven’t. It could change.”
“What would change it?”
“Oh, the right character and the right concept for an ongoing strip, that would change it. I’m just having fun with it for the time being. It amuses my regular crowd of lowbrow friends and acquaintances.”
“That would be me,” I said. “One of the crowd, anyhow.”
“Obviously,” she said. “Can I see?” she asked Andrew, pointing down at his pad.
Andrew began to flip the pages, pulled some loose ones out, shuffled them around, and handed three of them to Kelly. “Here are a few panels,” he said as he handed them to her. “I’d consider these finished products.”
Kelly started to look them over, and shortly thereafter began to chuckle. TB and Stanley observed with obvious interest, watching without comment, though. Kelly went from chuckling to laughing. “Funny. Smart stuff. They’re like some hideous hybrid of Doonesbury and R. Crumb. You're kinda talented.”
“Aw, shucks.”
After she handed the pages back, TB asked, “Mind if I look at those?”
“Go ahead,” Andrew said. He shifted the pages across the table.
My attention was drawn to telephone poles now on fire on Main north of the intersection. At the same time, south of First, flames clearly could be seen shooting up from the corner buildings on either side of Main. In the block of buildings in which the building housing the café was a part, smoke and flame were billowing from the roof of the corner building and the building beside it, it seemed to me. There was a new burst of police radios, sirens, and people shouting…a few of them screaming. Despite it, the two men at the nearby table continued to talk.
“Cooks are elitist…back in the kitchen,” one of them was saying. “Waiters are mingling with the masses. They have a much better feel for what people do and think. They have their fingers closer to the pulse.”
“No,” the man across from him said, “It’s the opposite, actually. Cooks are performing labor, actual labor. A kitchen is full of workers working. Waiters are mostly public relations, customer service people…white collar, really, except for carrying a few things, and never anything that’s heavy.”
About this time two vans raced up, swerved to a stop at the curb directly in front of where we were sitting. Men, and a couple of women hopped out, a few of the bunch pulling cords and equipment, sound booms and cameras among it, from the back of the van. Then they all tore up the street in the direction of First and Main.
TB and Stanley both were howling as they read the comics. Stanley began to cough, a cough that erupted quickly into a full-blown coughing jag. “Must be all this burnt stuff in the air,” he said when the coughing stopped.
“It does seem smokier,” TB acknowledged.
When the pages were handed back across the table, Stanley attempted awkwardly to rehabilitate himself with Kelly. He did this by emphasizing his attachment to TB, who earlier she appeared to indulge more. “We’re in the same writing class,” he told her, tilting his head at TB.
“Bully for you,” she said.
“I guess he gets the leg up because he has an assistantship,” Stanley said, as if talking only to himself but loudly enough for all to hear.
“You don’t have an assistantship?” Kelly was on it. “Don’t you want to work for a university when you grow up, too? Don’t you want a university sinecure when you become a great, big writer?” She commenced laughing like the devil.
Turning so that he flashed her the turquoise stud in his left lobe, TB jumped in and said, “Leave my man alone. He writes on the wild side, same as I do, kitten.”
“I thought you two were so proud of your little writing club?”
“There’s no club. Where’d you get that?”
“How do you expect to write without being associated with a network, an organization of writers?”
“I already write. Huh?”
“No, I don’t have any job with the school,” Stanley answered, showing the frustration of his wait to do so.
“How,” asked Kelly, “can you support yourself without a paid teaching position at an institution of higher learning? How can you expect to make the protagonists in your fiction college professors, if you don’t do at least a bit of college teaching?”
“Queen of the Contrarians, isn’t she Stan?” TB said.
“I believe she is,” Stanley answered, bucking up.
“She makes perfectly good sense to me,” Andrew told them.
“I’ll make a protagonist a college professor if I damn well feel like it,” Stanley said.
“Then you better stay in school,” Andrew answered.
“I may not even finish getting the degree,” Stanley snapped back. “I may just learn as much as I need and move on.”
“To succeed as a writer you’ll be needing your school connections in order to attend writing conferences, mingle with agents, editors and reviewers. Don’t you network? Aren’t you interested in career planning? Didn’t you plan ahead for these things when you began your education, with an eye toward a career as a professional writer of fiction?” After saying this Andrew looked out of breath.
“Bite yourself,” TB said.
Like a sooty Phoenix moving laterally out of an inferno of smoke, a looter came dashing, running for broke down the street with an armful of new and gleaming aluminum tennis rackets. As he passed us, he conceded, “I’ve got too many,” and let two of them slip away into the street.
“I don’t play,” I informed my tablemates.
“I used to,” TB said, then got up and retrieved the rackets. He twirled on
e in his palm looking it over back in his chair.
At the nearby table one of the men was saying, “He’s pissed at me because I pointed out in print how inaccurate his analysis of Orwell is.”
Said the other, “His analysis is as credible as yours, particularly given his background.”
“Please.”
“He’s going to be more important than Murray Kempton, eventually.”
“He’s got people believing that, but anyone who’s well-read, and well-informed, and any judge of style, sees how pedestrian his stuff really is.”
“When’s the last time you talked to him in person?”
“Ages.”
“You’ve been talking to everybody about this spat for months. You get something about it into every piece. You even managed to get it into the one about the repercussions of welfare reform in Oakland…even the one about what’s her name, the dissident in Myanmar.”
The other smiled.
There was commotion, when a member of the news squad who had driven up earlier returned in a panic and began frantically and loudly rummaging in the back of one of the vans. He jumped out of the back holding something sleek and black, either a large plug or a little microphone. Noticing us, he stopped long enough to ask, “What are you still doing here?”
At our table, we looked at one another, and then TB answered, “Talking and having drinks.”
“Don’t you know the cops and fire officials have evacuated everybody but news crews and emergency personnel for blocks and blocks and blocks in every direction from this mess?”
“I think we heard that,” Stanley said, looking over at the two men at the nearby table who had seemed to be following developments earlier.
“How come not you?” he asked, looking confusedly at the whole group.
“I guess they can’t see us,” Kelly told him. “Must be your news vans blocking us from view. Look at how you parked.”
He shook his head and said, “Flames are moving down this block of buildings. It’s going to ignite this one before long,” nodding at the structure behind the tables and chairs on the sidewalk where we sat, before he took off in a sprint.
“I would have explained Cognitive Dissonance Theory to him, since it might have helped...explain this,” Kelly said, waving her hand in the air to designate the sidewalk café, and those of us sitting in it, “but I was out of bourbon.” She wrapped her hand around her empty glass for emphasis.
“What the fuck is Cognitive Dissonance Theory?” Stanley asked with a scowl.
“How do you expect to engage in critical writing or reviewing, especially commentary on the culture in essay form if you are unaware of Cognitive Dissonance Theory?”
“What is it you do,” TB sneered, “ that gives you so much expertise on everything, Little Miss Snot?”
“Unlike some people, I don’t blab in cafes about what I do.”
There was a loud creak, then a piercing snap, and finally a heavy crash somewhere close by.
“You know, I’m out of liquid refreshment too,” Andrew said, looking at Kelly.
“I can fix that.” She got up and walked over to where she had been sitting prior to joining us, stooped down and opened her purse, and pulled out a fifth of bourbon.
“Why do we chicks always have to bail you lunkhead Y-chromosome types out of every jam?”
I noticed that smoke seemed to have thickened on the section of First Street in front of where we were since my last glance. Kelly, standing in front of her chair poured bourbon into every held out glass.
“Here’s to TB Doyle,” Stanley announced, raising his glass over the center of the table.
“Who’s TB Doyle?” Kelly asked.
“The man standing next to me,” Stanley said, with a rejuvenated spine.
“To the next James Gould Cozzens,” Kelly proclaimed. “In the land of eunuchs, the one-nut author is king.”
“Jesus you’re a pill,” TB said. “I don’t even want to fuck you now.”
Kelly placed her hand over her mouth in mock astonishment, then removed it to give her chortling free reign.
“Behave now, class,” Andrew admonished. Then raising his own glass he declared, “In the land of hyperbole, everybody is full of shit.”
“Here, here,” I said.
The sound of a siren was gradually becoming louder and shriller, until finally it felt as though the sound was going to deafen us all, when a fire engine lumbered around the vans in the street in front of us and rolled to a stop twenty yards beyond. Additional yelling, radio communication and general cacophony followed.
One of the two men at the nearby table could be heard again, saying in a louder voice than ever, “Those people never should have expected to be tolerated in Washington. So you’re elected and you end up moving here? That doesn’t mean people who live here…I mean, D.C…I keep forgetting where I am at the moment…have to like you, or want you here, as opposed to the bunch of toothpicks who sent you here to begin with…or there…whatever.”
Since he was standing too, I nudged Andrew, getting him to take a look across the street at the grounds of City Hall. Flames were crawling up the trunks and down the branches of trees.
One of the two men at the nearby table could be overheard saying, “Well I live in Los Angeles now, and god help me, I love it.”
I chimed in, “Me too. God help me,” meaning the former at least.
“What’s with the salon-istas over there?” Kelly said.
I shrugged to indicate an inability to answer. Smoke was actually beginning to find its way over the tables and chairs onto the sidewalk now, moving along in what looked like medium-sized brown puffs.
“He’s a crypto-syndicalist,” one of the men at the two men’s table shouted.
“What,” Andrew asked Kelly, “is a syndicalist?”
A telephone wire running along beside the grounds of the municipal buildings on First, suddenly popped, broke in half, and then the two halves fell to the street sputtering. All through the air on the grounds themselves, sparks were fluttering like blinking fireflies on a humid Georgia night in June. A gang of the media came charging down the street, yanked the doors of a van open, and dove in. Then the van made a U-turn in the street and floored it going west down First.
Now the smoke truly was rolling in. I saw one little trickle of flame, discreetly creeping along the eave of the building adjacent to the building housing our café. Stanley looked at his watch and said not quite clandestinely to TB, “Charlie Rose starts in twenty minutes. Do you think we have enough time to get all the way back to Downey?”
“All right. It’s time for me to be going,” TB stood up and announced.
CHAPTER TEN
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG BURGER