Authors: Bill Barich
The message brought a curious relief. Soon the freeway alpha waves began to flow, and I was as weightless as a dolphin in saltwater until I had to leave my car.
In Beverly Hills, where I parked near Rodeo Drive, I heard a man ask for directions to the Harbor Freeway and say, “Thanks, I’ll be fine once I’m in the system.”
Rodeo Drive served up a scary panorama of cosmetically enhanced women and extraterrestrial lounge lizards whose ponytails were stuck inside their slouchy sport coats. Like Susanville, Beverly Hills had a sister city—Cannes, France. At Tribeca Restaurant, a Los Angeles gloss on New York, two female shoppers discussed cholesterol while sipping Chardonnay.
“I give Adam turkey burgers all the time,” one of them confessed to the other,
sotto voce
. “I put on the tomatoes and the lettuce, and he doesn’t know the difference!”
An extraterrestrial blew in, a regular. The bartender asked, “Beer?” Came the reply, “Nah, just a Kaliber. I’m doing the wagon thing.”
I got back on the freeway. The downside of driving and meditating was that you were exposed to four times as many cancer-causing chemicals than usual, even with your windows rolled up. You breathed carbon monoxide, of course, and benzene and toluene. You breathed xylene and ethylene dibromide and dichloride, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, perchloroethylene, a little chromium, a dollop of nickel, and a ration of lead as a garnish.
At the house in the evening, I grabbed some recent copies of the
Times
and ransacked them for the latest bloodbaths. In addition to becoming a smartass, I was also developing into a shootings buff. My incredulity was constantly being tested. Each new slaughter seemed an attempt to stretch the limits of the genre and give a new spin to the concept of violent death, investing it with fresh imaginative energy to create a sequel with legs, Shootings II, Shootings III, and Shootings IV.
A drive-by in Pacoima. Three men killed as they walked from a soccer field after a game. Ordinary.
Here was something better. An eighty-four-year-old had murdered his estranged wife in the cafeteria at Universal Studios because she refused to take him back.
And something even better. A disturbed man had emptied a shotgun on a sound stage at Lorimar Studios in Culver City, where an episode of a TV series was being filmed, because he felt that one of the stars had fucked him over in a business deal pertaining to a popcorn company. Then he had committed suicide.
Elsewhere in Los Angeles County, a drifter from Arizona, who had last worked as a janitor at a Jack-in-the-Box, shot Rebecca Schaeffer, a starlet, because he was obsessed with her. The man had mental problems. He was apprehended in Tucson, where, the
Times
noted with its infinite attention to such details, the chief of police was Linda Ronstadt’s brother.
A Jack-in-the-Box janitor-drifter with mental problems.
In the
Times
, I came upon a headline that read, “Mental Health Care: A System on the Verge of Collapse.” A citizens’ health-research group had rated L.A. County as the worst place in the United States in terms of the outpatient services that it afforded to the mentally ill. Yet more layoffs and budget cuts were looming. Social workers at a clinic in Santa Monica were reported to be demoralized in the aftermath of a recent attack during which a patient had shot a staff member.
“Poverty Gap Growing in L.A., Report Finds,” read another headline in the
Times
, but I already knew the story. Miles of money, money dropping from the clouds.
I turned on the TV. Reba McEntire said to a talk-show person, “K. T. Oslin is so unique, she’s an individual!”
Flip the channel.
Somebody was telling a talk-show person this funny story about how Ronald Reagan had once roomed with a Munchkin, Mickey Carrol, during his days as an actor. The Munchkin had testified that Dutch was clean and a good cook.
I turned off the TV, closed my eyes, and thought about what still lay ahead of me to the south—Orange County, the Colorado Desert, San Diego, and then the border.
What was it that Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, a mass murderer, had said after being sentenced to die at the close of his trial?
“Big deal, death always went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland!”
B
ARRY YOURGRAU’S HEART
had mended some. He was feeling better. His movie would soon be released, and he was performing his stories at Cafe Largo, a fashionable little venue in the Fairfax District. The performing had gone so well that he’d been asked to read something at Cafe Largo’s weekly poetry bash, where stars, starlets, ingenues,
models, and celebrities tried their hand at being Ranier Maria Rilke and Sara Teasdale.
Poetry was big with the Hollywood crowd. It came in books and had no economic value whatsoever. A poem was a free spirit, like a butterfly. If you wrote a few, you proved that you were also a free spirit and entitled to wear black clothing and hideously disfiguring eyeglasses. Poetry was above the fray.
A valet parking attendant claimed my car at Cafe Largo—the first valet ever to work a poetry reading in the history of the world. All the tables inside were occupied or marked “Reserved,” so I took a spot at the bar and listened to the murmuring about the poets who might show up to read that night, maybe Sean Penn or Ally Sheedy.
Yourgrau joined me momentarily in a state of perturbation. In front of Canter’s Deli, in a benign ambience of derma and gefilte fish, a fellow motorist had taken issue with his driving skills and had threatened to crack his skull. Only a fateful blink of a traffic light, the distance from stop to go, had saved him from a thrashing.
All in all, it had been an unusual day for Yourgrau, another step forward in the evolutionary process by which he was becoming a Californian. That afternoon, he had visited a psychic in San Fernando Valley for a consultation about his future. He had got the man’s name from the casting director on his movie.
The psychic lived in a simple tract house, but Yourgrau sensed that he wasn’t like other human beings. He had refused a handshake because he’d just washed. Who knew what manner of interference Yourgrau’s grit and germs might have had on the transmission?
Seating himself, the psychic had accepted fifty dollars and had eyeballed his visitor. He saw fame in Yourgrau’s aura. Only once before had that happened, with one other special person.
“Who?” Yourgrau inquired.
“Vanna White,” the psychic responded.
The psychic made several predictions about Yourgrau’s love life, but they were radically off-base. Still, the trip to San Fernando Valley had been an adventure, and Yourgrau was glad that he’d gone. He
wouldn’t be at a loss anymore if a cocktail-party conversation swerved toward the pananormal, he said.
For now, though, he had to choose what to read on-stage. He was torn between two pieces. The first was a wacky, audience-friendly story about a cow, while the other was a much more deeply felt story that was exquisitely turned. Yourgrau asked for my opinion. Glancing at the youngish audience, men and women in their twenties and early thirties, I counseled him to go with the second piece. Youth would respond to its subtlety and its emotion.
The poet-boss of the Cafe Largo series was our emcee. He was from New York and had the kind of radiant flush that envelops somebody who has jumped from an airplane and landed unexpectedly on his feet. He introduced the first two readers, actorish men of a sentimental bent, each capable of being moved to extremes by the drama of his own life. Then he introduced Yourgrau.
In a matter of seconds, after Yourgrau had read just a few words, I began to cringe. Disaster lay ahead. The subtlety of the story was too subtle, and the emotions were too finely put. Here was an example of real literature, and the crowd didn’t have a clue what to do with it, so they started chattering, ordering drinks, and looking at their watches.
For five slowly decomposing minutes, Yourgrau died an unnatural death on-stage before returning to the bar. “Thank you very much for your advice,” he said.
The next reader was a starlet in a mini-skirt and patterned tights. Her poems, such as they were, had to do with bad relationships. The men that she knew were fucks, bastards, and assholes, always letting her down and leaving a pair of beat-up Tony Lama cowboy boots under her bed.
The word
fuck
brought down the house. Deafening applause greeted the brand-name reference to Tony Lama.
She was followed by a man who punctuated his existential dilemma by slapping himself in the face. Poetry was being transformed in Los Angeles, turned into a Three Stooges routine.
Yourgrau suggested a late supper at a famous hamburger joint in Westwood. We had to wait in line for twenty minutes to get inside. The menu advertised “Quality Forever,” a heavy burden on the cooks. The two featured burgers were the Steakburger (“Our original, 1928”) and the Hickoryburger (“Our original, 1945”). I couldn’t tell the difference.
“Chili sauce,” Yourgrau said, pointing to some fine print. “Homemade.”
S
OMETIMES I WOULD SIT
by the swimming pool at the Gigliottis’ house and listen to the birds singing and try to believe that I had really been to the Far North, that it really existed. It seemed to belong not only to another lifetime but to another century. I saw all the felled trees of the Far North traveling south to become tract houses, and all the water of the Far North flowing through the pipes and the toilets of those houses, and wondered what the Far North was getting in exchange.
Then I remembered all the little video shelves in hardware stores and Indian gift shops, and all the Hollywood videos stacking up in them like Big Macs, and I saw the Wolfgang Puck nouveau pizzas going into the freezer case in Hoopa Valley and saw the teenage daughters of loggers in their patterned tights and their mini-skirts chasing millworkers in Tony Lama boots and writing poems about them, and I thought, Well, maybe it’s a fair deal. Or maybe not.
A
ND YET IN THE MORNING
the sun rose in triumph again, rose beautifully, achingly, reductively, still collecting its residuals. After packing my bags for my last month on the road, I assumed my accustomed position by the pool and watched Aaron and some friends playing a vigorous game of paddle tennis. They had a bristly overabundance of energy that seemed to lap and flow around them, something sharp and animal pushing against the shape that was meant to contain it.
That evening, Aaron planned to host a big barbecue. This would be a signal event, I was given to understand, because a few girls had been invited and might actually show up.
In the late afternoon, freshly showered, Aaron began his advance prep. One friend had stayed behind to help him, a plumber’s apprentice who’d suffered a hernia and was living on disability pay. He was a little older than the other boys in the posse and always had a terrible crimson sunburn, as if he could never quite remember when it was time to get off the beach. His main function, I thought, must be as the designated beer buyer, his legal I.D. in hand.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers roared from the stereo while Aaron laid out the steaks and tore some lettuce for a salad.
“I know everybody in the band,” he said with authority to his pal.
“Cool,” the plumber said. He seldom said much more than that.
Aaron had forgotten to buy some charcoal, so the boys zipped to the corner store on their skateboards, scooting along in a gnarly twilight zone between childhood and manhood. When they got back, they developed a case of the party jitters and kept checking the clock at five-minute intervals, wondering where their guests were. I could feel the helium escaping from their balloon. A half-hour went by, and then another boy finally knocked on the front door. He was the first and the last guest to arrive.
The defection of the girl guests was a major disappointment. After Aaron had the barbecue fire going and had thrown the steaks on, he phoned one of the backsliders, a friend named Thor, and vented his anger.
“What do you
mean
, man? You’re cooking dinner for your
Dad
?” he shouted into the receiver. “You’re eighteen years old, Thor! You’re supposed to be
rebelling
against him. Don’t tell me you
have
rebelled. Your rebellion got squashed, dude. You got squashed like Tiananmen Square!”
In the dusky shadows, the three boys sat at a table outside to partake of a desultory meal—another barbecue in California. They
picked at the food and made halfhearted jokes about the missing girls. What a complicated world they were inheriting. They had to survive in Los Angeles, where illusions and realities were hopelessly entangled and expectations were astounding, where even a hamburger had to be more, much more, than a simple patty of ground beef.
S
O WITH A SIGH
of relief tempered only by the melancholy understanding that I had failed to become rich, famous, or transcendentally beautiful in Los Angeles, I dodged the usual freeway spillage and made it to Long Beach, twenty-three miles away, where the motto was
Urbs Amicate
, the “Friendly City,” and the circus had just left town.
Long Beach felt like an anticlimax after L.A. It also felt like a refuge. The smell of things burning was gone from the air, and the locals would need a dictionary to find the meaning of apocalypse. They were people who could be counted on to attend the farewell tour of Gunther Gabel-Williams, the fabled trainer of big cats, whose relic circus posters were still plastered to walls and billboards.
Long Beach was the fifth-largest city in the state, with a population of about 425,000, but it was virtually untouched by sophistication. Its chief tourist attractions were the
Queen Mary
and the
Spruce Goose
, Howard Hughes’s 200-ton flying boat, which was now a Walt Disney production. Brochures reminded you that Disneyland itself was just across the Orange County line.
The 1950s were not forgotten in Long Beach. All along the ocean, I saw little beachfront motels offering weekly rates for suburbanites
on vacation. The motels frequently had a maritime motif and showed anchors and ships’ bells in neon. Aging sailors presided over them, navy pensioners with daunting brush cuts and a marked distaste for anything modern.