The meeting had been called in order to deliberate matters of the most critical import for the future. If not Life and Death, at least the concerns to be addressed fit the Life and Hoping to Sustain Something More Intimate and Rewarding than the Vacillation Between Simple Clinical Existence and Proactive Hedonism, category. The meeting was in a place one could enter in the midst of any full-blown out-of-body experience of inebriation, and still be brought back jarringly to lucidity and Earth by the penetrating strength and brightness of its fluorescent lights. I was convinced it had been designed by the preeminent architect of prisoner of war camps, if such a person existed, given its capacity to take one from happy warrior of pleasure, to involuntary submissive whipped back to the remorselessness of reality in clear-eyed focus. We had come to Bob’s Big Boy, the one located in Burbank, the first of its kind in the beef-eating world.
For Lila and me, this was another visit with the purpose of re-solidifying our spiritual, intellectual, and physical bonds: an edge to the physical perhaps, if candor is required. In other words, we would hang out together for a couple of weeks, my longest Valley sojourn yet. Once again, it was a getaway for me as much as a conference on Lila’s and my continuing joint endeavor, and the specifics of our endeavor in weeks to come. I decided at some point along the way to refer to Cynthia’s house, where again I was shacking up with Lila for the duration, as “the country house.”
Though this time ‘round the car was in running condition I had volunteered to take the train in order to meet up with Lila as soon she was back from work. Before the conference commenced, I stopped off in The Now Voyager, a septic tank of a bar for pre-deliberation cocktails. I walked out of the place and up the sidewalk to Bob’s, a cheerful whistle one of the fruits of my stopping by. The metamorphosis one underwent from guzzler in a dark, dank bar, to eye-popped discusser of practicalities and life-planner in Bob’s was stark. Drunks walked in, but retina-shocked straight arrows stumbled out.
Lila had told me in our most recent regular telephone conversation that she had amassed nearly $1,200 for our nest egg, The New Habitat Fund. I reported to her in that same conversation that I had stashed something in the vicinity of ninety-four to ninety-six dollars for the fund, depending on the accuracy of my counting of ones, in which I had somewhat shaky confidence. “Two months,” she said, “and we’ll have enough. A month,” she added, “if you would speed up your generation of income or improve your saving ability to that of an average sub-normal.” I was also to confer with persons presenting an employment opportunity, who happened as well to be, as far as they had been described, political confederates. Turning my visit into a working vacation, so to speak, could be a key Lila believed to the advancement of the timetable for realizing our humble, new dream of acquiring our very own corner in a multiple-family dwelling.
As I sat there on the first evening, it quickly became apparent to me that while sitting in a booth in Bob’s I might well be sitting on the Next Big Thing in Los Angeles nightlife. It turned out to be a visionary moment. After a few more visits it would become evident the place was always crammed with patrons. When the bars closed it began to overflow, drinking night owls the natural trauma victims of the Big-Boy whammy on a personal buzz.
Lila and I were pawing one another a little under the table, while discussing prospective LA communities in which to land, a range of reasonable rents, and expectations for our future income when the two people we were awaiting joined us. Both of them appeared to be in their late twenties, one a longhaired male in a brown tee shirt, the other a longhaired female in a blue one. Following the introductions the two wanted to pitch in on the topic under consideration before they arrived. One of them lived in Silver Lake, which he proudly boosted as “A cool neighborhood with a good scene.”
“You’ve put your finger on the reason I don’t want to live in Silver Lake: scene. I’ve paid my debt to scenes,” I said.
“Yeah? There’s a lot, you know going on, is what I mean. Good bars and stores, and restaurants, and other things. The people are cool.”
“Cool, in the real estate sense usually means expensive and dopey, with a heavy lemming population,” I explained.
”It’s pretty in Silver Lake,” Lila said, “those pretty hills, good clubs for music,” hoping to sand down a little of the pointed edge of what had gone before. The female told us she lived on Franklin Street in Hollywood, her exact location another fashionably overpriced boho district, no doubt housing a number of soon-to-be artistic superstars of the new millennium. I didn’t say anything but I grunted in the negative, and they were able to decipher.
The fellow asked, “What’s your goal?”
“A one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood with depressed homicide statistics,” I said. “Some trees would be nice.”
Lila dispersed the toxicity again, telling them, “Quiet. Affordable. Necessities nearby. That’s about it.” Matching the amalgamation of particulars in our stated criteria with an actual place in the city, due either to their lack of knowledge of places, or their lack of interest in that set of particulars, exceeded their advisory capacity, and the subject dropped.
Our tablemates and my prospective employers were working on behalf of a petition drive to bring a proposition before the voters of California. The two of them actually worked for a private business, a professional signature gathering company, which in any given campaign, in any state or locality paid the signature gatherer a dollar per valid signature, which was in fact, the pay scale for this petition drive. As they explained it, the proposition, Prop. 909, would generate a law requiring that ten percent of the wood in each and every surfboard manufactured in the state of California must be wood from a California lumberyard. The law would be the same whether the surfboard was principally made of wood, such as balsa or spruce, or made from foam, in which case a piece of wood was situated between two pieces of foam that were clamped together. The purpose of this was to sustain the level of wages for unionized workers in lumberyards that competed with lumberyards in other states. My first impression was that it was a decent cause, while for Lila the cause was completely irrelevant; the compelling factor being that it was a way for me to generate income hanging around at strip malls during the time she worked, enabling me of course to lob some extra coinage into the kitty.
As we drank Bob’s beer, ate his nachos and chatted, Big Boys continued streaming out of the back on trays, Big Boy Deluxes with cheese and fries, carried by waitresses who didn’t look like they were on the acting track, or behave like it either, tender mercies both.
“I have a feeling this place has the potential to become a scene itself,” I said, veering off the subject, or backtracking perhaps. “There are probably a ton of people here all hours of the day as it is. I’m keeping an eye out for signs of chic for the next two weeks. I’ll have to split this scene back to my own neighborhood after that,” I told him, and winked.
“Interesting experiment, if you look at it like that,” the male said, “waiting for Bob’s to turn into something other than what it is already. You know, it’s really popular now. I understand you’re talking about a different thing.”
“Good,” I said.
My new comrade-employers were aware I was currently a temporary General Office Specialist, though they hadn’t heard about my position with the Encyclopedia of American Political History. When told, they didn’t seem very impressed, conspicuously unimpressed in fact. I could sense they regarded the composing of such encapsulated presentations as easy as pie. It was only sitting, looking at words and writing them down. I wanted to say, “I can feel your scorn.” Of course, anybody could do those things: reading, writing and sitting. It looked easy. Actually, it wasn’t hard. There was a question however, of whether it would be easy for them. I was about to demonstrate the craft when Lila put a stop to it in the name of diplomacy and prospective income.
When Li
la and I were alone with one another in the booth again, full of the warmth of contentedness and beer, we decided to extend our stay out on the town together, and to order another round at Bob’s. The hum from the multitude of voices was like a bee in your ear, and the white intensity of the lighting affected your eyes like exposure to heavy concentrations of chlorine. Yet these elements aside, the place at this time of night was a multi-ethnic, cross-cultural, class-straddling tribute to late-in-the-night die-hardedness. Our Bob’s was at the same time festive, unselfconscious, predatory, loaded, giddy, sex-crazed and wholesomely congenial in the way its characteristics were embodied by its patrons, all thrown together in a pot or a boiling deep-fry. With our two little friends gone their own way, my name signed on the dotted line committing me to the job of signing other names to other dotted lines, Lila and I teased, provoked, and tickled each other, and occasionally ranted, all as we had done in the days of yore.
We stepped outside to have a smoke, seating ourselves on the base of Bob the statue. The air was mild, the street was still busy, probably no more than a third of the cars that passed patrol cars, as patrons continued to flow in and out the doors. Just before we sucked up our final dizzy doses of tar and nicotine and pressed the stubs into the bucket of pebbles, a group of five or six men and women in interchangeable sandals, tie-dyed tubes, and tanks and tees, passed in front of us and went inside.
As soon as we got back into our booth I asked Lila for pen and paper, both of which she reliably shoveled out of her purse. Straightaway I began to write. This was fine with Lila, for she had no problem sitting and taking in the surroundings, not having to talk. When I was finished, I silently read over what I had written: