Even in Los Angeles the seasons change. A lot of things may not, but the seasons do. Some people never change, and yours truly would be one somewhat embarrassing example of the fact they don’t. But in Los Angeles, leaves turn gold and fall to the ground even if not as voluminously as they do in other places. In the better corners of Hollywood, where I would find myself walking occasionally, mostly recreationally, and naturally, some distance from the more familiar streets of my neighborhood, yards glutted with deciduous trees would send the leaves down to cover yards, and to dapple streets, and to fluff up gutters. Looking up Vermont Ave. in parts of Los Feliz for instance, you might easily believe yourself to be staring up West Thirteenth Street, or Seventh Avenue in the West Village, that is, if you’d been flown around America blindfolded and dropped from out of the sky. A little coolness, a bit of crispness would start to creep even into the honeyed air of LA around this time of year. Change was in the air, about to blow around the corner any minute you had to expect. It wasn’t too terrible to contemplate.
One change, falling on the wrong side of autumnal change was the Pimperary’s decision to boot me off their roster of available workers. I tried to assure them they retained my loyalty, and that my loyalty was a great deal more impressive than my actual presence. But they were immune to the philosophical sophistication of as a fine a point of distinction as this. Eventually though, I was able to squeeze onto the bottom of the list at another place.
As promised, the new Pimperary had me swimming in the deep end of the work force extremely soon. At the end of another stretch of work, for another employer with the audacity to pay me what I was worth I waited on a corner in Hollywood for Andrew to arrive. It was another of our regular meet-ups, when Andrew, in this case out for his medical check-up, and I, done with a day of working for wages rendezvoused for drinks and a meal in environs of Hollywood beyond the Essex. Though I stood in a patch of grass marking the border zone separating gas station asphalt from city sidewalk my mind had set off elsewhere. The fall mystique, present for me, if for no one else instigated my reflection. I had theorized that the general lack of somber reflection among the natives of Southern California must be caused by an absence of strongly distinctive seasons…in particular, the inconsequential impact, relatively speaking of fall. It was the season of looking back, of looking inward, and of taking stock. Not however in LA. Yet my theory was an exculpation of sorts of the renowned Southern California superficiality, adjusting a notion that there was a prevalence of sunny dispositions by virtue of prevailing sunny skies, to the better one, that insubstantiality of the autumnal equinox was the climatic factor to blame.
Though not widely present in LA, in me fall tendencies had an atavistic persistence. A typical question one asked one’s self during this time of year was, “Where has so and so GONE?” The question refers to the persons one no longer sees in places where previously one had regularly seen them. For me, as I stood on a busy corner of Highland, the whereabouts of Fred the composer got me wondering. Had he finally self-delivered? Had he migrated to greener sidewalks? Had the value of one or more of his compositions received a decent measure of recognition, bringing his vocation as a composer to life…as a result, springing him from our demimonde? My hopes were for the latter, my hunch was either of the former. It hadn’t failed to occur to me that I might have visited. When there had been an immediate concern the day after he had missed suicide by cyanide only by the grace of a drunken nap, it had seemed acceptable to drop in. I’d been there at his invitation only the night before. But by and large, it was my belief you had to leave people alone. I would have elevated it to a principle, but I had no intention of slapping it with a jinx. In other words, if someone were to ask, “Have you checked on Fred lately?” and I were to answer, “I would never drop in on anyone out of the blue as a matter of principle,” Fred would drop dead.
A corner gas station on a scruffy stretch of Highland was an excellent place for making observations on the human race. The return of my focus to my surroundings caused me to notice people in passing cars often would stare with glassy-eyed curiosity. I could only speculate that such random curiosity about no more than a man standing at the edge of a filling station parking lot resulted from a deep and pathologic boredom. Some in our species have a stunted capacity for interest. A male face hanging out the window of a silver Mustang stared. I tried to send back the look asking, ”Why are people such as you so dull?” Two females in the front and back windows of an Expedition passed, dimly gaping. I muttered, though I should have yelled, “It’s a man standing on a corner, you dull, bored fucks.”
Then there was the issue of the male stare, that male-to-male challenging stare. They had envisioned me inflagrante with their wives or their girlfriends, was that it? Was it cowering they expected? In that case you felt compelled to shout, “I’m skeeered.” The goal of your return glare meant to convey how certain you were of their insecurity, and how out of touch they were with their inner pissant. But before the cheerful indifference of my normal outlook could be brought to ruin by temporary urban angst Andrew showed.
He was complaining of a raspy throat, demanding tea and honey and lemon. Sickness abounded, apparently. It was decided the ideal place for a stellar tea would be The Bourgeois Pig not too far away on Franklin. It might be reasonable to assume Andrew had an affinity for places with Pig in the name but it wasn’t true, I didn’t think. I knew for certain the Bourgeois Pig would deliver a hot pot of tea to your table.
We asked for the window, but we got the table just across from the counter, and more specifically, the server’s stand. This entitled us to a constant stream of male and female dreamboats with the actor’s gleam in their eyes, attempting to balance teapots on tiny trays as they passed. We stared. They stared. It seemed to be the theme of the day. Andrew confirmed as much, when he addressed the unsuitability of the seating with, “It’s been that kind of day.”
Andrew launched into a raft of complaints about the insensitivity of the medical profession and dehumanization of the office visit. I countered with my tale of woeful mistreatment of the stationary pedestrian, the presumed loiterer, simply trying to wait for a friend without the inherent, if unintended hostility of inane stares.
“They don’t even look you in the eye. It’s just poke, prod, jab and prick,” he said. “You’re not much more than a spigot of testable fluids.”
“Not a pretty picture.”
“They have that way of making you feel like a chicken hung from its feet on a conveyor belt waiting to be plucked.”
“Yep. Ugh.”
“Everybody’s just got to make you out a fucking freak. Makes them feel that much grander about themselves I guess. Look, I know I’m The Medical Miracle, shot to hell but functional, functional in appearance at least. So fuck me. FUCK me.”
“I felt like a specimen myself out there on the corner waiting. Got examined by every rubbernecking brainiac who can ride in a car. Undressing me with their eyes, but only in the medical way, of course. And fortunately under the circumstances.”
“Thing is, earlier in the day I was looking out the window of the bus contemplating how much I love this place, dig this city…how cool the world can actually be. Life is such an odd mix, ain’t it? I mean, of good and bad? It’s awful, it’s beautiful…feels like hell, feels wonderful?”
“It’s exactly like that. It feels good. It hurts. It’s gorgeous. It’s ugly. Can never tamp it down. Roll with it, I guess that’s what you do. And then you get to my stage and the seasickness sets in.”
“Right. I have a touch of that.”
“Can’t be cured. Medicine helps, as you know already.”
“Yes, despite the best efforts of prevailing moral and governmental humbugs, there’s still mercy in the form of pills, weed, booze and various white powders for the lowly and the lowly at heart. Halle-fucking-leullah,” he yelped, getting us a lot of at
tention.
“After a pause, I said, “There is also becoming an apparition…like me. I walk through reality the way spooks and goblins walk through walls.”
“I think I’m missing something.”
“It’s another method, in this case, a complementary method of insensate living. You can look at it also as merciful equanimity.”
“Hmmm. I’d still benefit from a little more articulation of your thoughts there, friend.”
“I don’t exist.”
“You look like you do.”
“I consider this a good-looking corpse, and nothing else. Memories, my natural traits, what interests me, things billowing up in my imagination, my lies, my sensitivities even have been so scrambled with the passage of time my entire insides have frozen up. It’s similar to a computer’s memory getting overloaded, then the desktop freezes. There’s nothing here. This person’s vamoosed. Casper the Ghost. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t the case. But then others, I’m extremely grateful. Either way I see no likelihood of going forward or back. For good or ill I think it’s a permanent fact of life. There’s no rebooting. My personality has become intangible.
The tea arrived, and each of us took a few sips from our cups. Then Andrew announced, “I have to crap.”
“You’re good to go as far I’m concerned.”
“I ought to be better after I get back.”
“I tell you what. While you’re gone, I’ll write up a little encyclopedia entry to give you a boost. You like those.”
“Couldn’t hurt.”
I pulled out the pen pilfered from the day’s employer, and flipped the paper placemat over. I wrote at breakneck pace until I saw Andrew coming out of the bathroom quicker than I’d expected.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Lighter.”
“So, better?”
“Lighter.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So listen to this:
The 1992 Election
Breaking the twelve-year Republican stranglehold on the American presidency, Bill Clinton chased Republican snakes out of the White House in 1992. Poppy Bush did everything short of exhuming the body of Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin in his effort to tar Clinton as the coming of Red America. No one bought it, other than the inbred mutants who had believed it from the start. Little Loopy Ross Perot and his Insane Clown Reform Party proved themselves immensely amusing. Pat Buchanan and his Border Patrolling Pitchfork Army simply for their antagonizing of Bush of Kennebunkport were doubly amusing. Poppy’s, “I won a war, let them eat cake,” approach to a decomposing economy landed him in the dustbin of one-termers.
Clinton’s Balanced Budget Act of 1993 passed by Congress by a single vote, none of them Republican was denounced by the Reactionary Brethren as the sure precipitator of The Great Depression II, which was to commence in as little as three, but not much more than six months into the future, according to them. Eight years of unprecedented prosperity followed, demonstrating that Republican political voices were as good as gold and as right as rain at identifying what would happen in the future by predicting its exact opposite.
Anti-Clinton hysteria soon swallowed the right side of the road in its entirety. The circus was in town to stay, but Billy beat the Bad Boys like a drum twice (three times if you count impeachment) and there was, and never will be, a goddamn thing anybody can do about it (though for more intransigent segments of the backward set, weeping through eternity seems to be the substitute of choice).
Democrats who could accept a centrist president, lived happily ever after, or for two consecutive terms; and Republicans had an eight-year nervous breakdown. Still, they, like everyone else enjoyed themselves immensely, if perversely, and there’s no denying it…especially by them.”