The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (10 page)

He bit a hunk off the Slim Jim, chewed it once, and swallowed.

—Soledad.

—Say what?

—Her name is Soledad. And here's a tip, it means
solitude
in Spanish. As in,
Leave me the fuck alone.

I held my arm out the window and felt the sun burning it red.

—She didn't pick her own name.

—Drop me over here.

Po Sin looked around.

—We're only in Santa Monica. How the hell you gonna get home from here?

—I'll get a ride.

—A ride.
Chev gonna drive out here to pick you up?

—I'll get a ride. Pull over, pull over here, man.

He pulled the van to the curb on Ocean, just past the pier.

—Tell you one thing, you get stuck out here, I won't be coming to get you.

I opened the door and started to get out and he grabbed the tail of my old Mobil gas station shirt.

—Web.

I looked at him.

—You get stuck out here, you're gonna be riding the bus.

I tugged free.

—I can get a ride.

He held up his hands.

—As you wish.

I climbed out and pushed the door closed.

—That's the idea.

He pushed a button on his armrest and the passenger window slid down.

—Listen, there's no job tomorrow. You want to make some more cash, you can help clean the shop.

I shrugged.

—Sure. Sure. Sounds good.

—OK.

The window rolled back up and he drove off toward the 10 West.

I stood there for a minute and looked at the causeway to the pier and thought about walking out past the bars and the fried-food stands and the Ferris wheel all the way to the end so I could stand there and stare at the water. But instead I turned around and trotted across the street and walked into the late-afternoon darkness inside Chez Jay.

Dark, the only light coming in through the open upper half of the split front door and three portholes cut behind the bar. Fishing nets, life preservers and a ship's anchor on the walls, a tattered American flag hung in a single billow over the bar. I took a seat on the corner. The bartender looked down from the TV where he was watching a rerun of
Charlie's Angels.

He came over.

—I was always a Kate Jackson man. You?

I glanced at the TV.

—Never watched it.

He stops in his tracks.

—Naw?

—Didn't have a TV growing up.

—No kidding. One of those.

—Yeah. One of those. No early childhood brain cancer to retard my emotional development.

—That's not funny.

—Not supposed to be.

He looked back up at the TV.

—Well I like the show.

—Yeah, I rest my case.

—Huh?

—Can I have a beer, please?

—What kind?

—Whatever.

He took a mug from behind the bar and drew a Heineken and set it in front of me.

—Four.

—I got that.

I looked at the old man tucked into the angle where the bar met the wall. Hunched over an open book, a stack of several more books at his elbow, thick plastic-rimmed glasses on the end of his swollen nose, a sweating glass of beer in front of him paired with a half-full shot glass.

He nudged a few dollars out of the pile of bills next to his drinks.

—That bother you, that no-TV thing?

I lifted my glass and took a sip.

—No. Not really. I read a lot.

The bartender took the money and went back down the bar.

—Well I like TV.

The old man gestured at his back.

—And here he is, tending bar.

I shrugged.

—It's a job.

The old man scraped his fingernails over his whiskers.

—It's a shitty job.

The bartender turned up the volume on the TV.

The old man dog-eared the corner of the page he was reading and closed the book.

—You still read a lot?

—Yeah.

He started going through the stack. He found what he was looking for and pulled it from the pile and offered it to me.

—Ever read this one?

I took the book and looked at the cover.

A Fan's Notes.

—Yeah, I read it.

He took the book back.

—That's a good book.

I took a sip of beer.

—It's good, I like it, but it's not that great.

He put the book on top of the stack.

—Did I say it was great? I said it was good. Try listening.

—Whatever.

He pulled at the collar of his red flannel shirt, the skin beneath beach-bum rough and brick red.

—A great book is a rare thing. What have you read lately that's great?

—Nothing.

—See what I mean.

He held up the book he was reading when I came in.

—Anna Karenina.
A great book. Indisputably.

—Indisputably great trashy fiction.

He set the book down.

—Are you trying to upset me?

—No. I just think it's a great piece of popular melodrama, but not a great piece of art.

He turned on his stool, faced me.

—Who the hell? Where do you get off? This is one of the.

He backhanded the air.

—Why do I bother? You might as well have spent your childhood watching TV. Should have just wheeled one into your bedroom and plugged it into your eyes and let it brainwash you like the rest of society. You could be a bartender instead of a teacher. You could have a nice comfortable job pouring drinks and mopping vomit and watching TV. Wasted time. Wasted effort.

He picked up his shot glass and drained it.

—Wasted life.

I stared at the beer in my glass.

He knocked the base of the shot glass on the bar and the bartender came down with a bottle of Bushmills in his hand.

He topped off the old man's shot glass.

—L.L., how ’bout you take it easy on my customers. You buy the guy a drink, doesn't mean you have the right to browbeat him.

I raised a hand.

—It's cool, he's my dad.

L.L. wrote a novel.

It's on that shelf with the Nelson Algren and Bukowski and Kerouac at your local independent bookstore. If you have one of those. If not, you can find it on the Internet. But it will probably be the printing they did for the movie.

He wrote his novel before he met my mom. Really, he met my mom because he wrote the novel. It was a cult thing. Dozens of printings over the
years, each of them a run of a couple thousand, well regarded enough to get him several guest lecture gigs in the late sixties as a not quite elder statesman of the counterculture. If not for that, he'd never have been at UC Berkeley in ’68. Never gone to the Fillmore with some of his grad students to see a happening, and loudly denigrate it as bullshit, sounding off at the back of the hall, a bottle of mescal in one hand and a huge joint in the other, surrounded by the more reactionary wing of the peace and freedom movement. If not for that, he'd never been challenged by an attractive young undergrad from SF State, who proposed to show him how rock music, acid and free love could change the world. Never would have eye-droppered a dose of U.S. government pure LSD and ended up fucking the undergrad's brains out in Golden Gate Park at dawn, receiving along the way what he once described to me as,
The most sublime head known to man or Jesus. I saw the universe entire in that blow job, Web, the whole damn shooting match.
Never would have taken the undergrad to wife that week. Never would have brought her back to Los Angeles with him. And certainly never would have gotten stone fucked up with her twelve years later, on one of the rare occasions they had sex anymore, and forgotten to make sure she had in her diaphragm and impregnated her with a child she would refuse to abort, all of it ending with me as his son. Or that's how he tells the story.

The old man rubbed a hand over his round belly.

—Would you have preferred that? If I'd just plopped you in front of the boob tube for your education? It could have prepared you for a menial life, it would have been no trouble at all. It would have been much easier than teaching you how to read when you were two. It would have been much easier than showing you the constellations or taking you to the Getty to see Rembrandts or the Hollywood Bowl to see Bernstein. It would have been much easier than giving you an education that you were able to use, something to share with your students. There's no nobler profession, no better use of a life than to teach, but I could have saved us both the trouble and given you a TV and that would have made you happy, it seems.

I looked at the old man.

—I'm not teaching anymore.

He blinked.

—Oh, and what kind of job have you turned your energies to?

—I'm. Cleaning stuff.

He picked at the tuft of gray hair sprouting from his right ear.

—A janitor.

—No.

—You're cleaning for a living?

—Well, for the last couple days.

—Then you are, my son, either a janitor or a housekeeper. Are you a housekeeper?

—No.

He swiveled on his stool and signaled the bartender.

—Do you have, by any chance, an application? My son, I think, might be looking to improve his employment situation.

The bartender blinked.

—We're not hiring.

My dad shrugged.

—Alas. Another beer then. He can use it to drown his useless dreams and sorrows.

I drained my glass and set it down.

—Thanks, Dad. But I think you're mistaking me for you.

He grinned, showing me the gap where his two upper front teeth used to be before he lost them in an Ensenada bar fight.

—Ah, now there's the little son of a bitch I raised.

Lincoln Lake Crows loves teachers and teaching. In theory. Which is to say he loves the idea of teachers and of teaching.

The Noblest Profession, Web. No greater calling than the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next. A thankless task it is, to the outsider. The teacher, the true teacher, knows that the rewards of his calling are not properly measured in silver. They are measured in the achievements of the teacher's students. Respect, yes. Admiration, yes. A word of thanks, yes. All these are well deserved and appreciated. But the true and absolute payment comes in seeing a student learn and apply that learning. No matter how modest their accomplishments may be, that is the reward. That is coin of the realm for a true teacher.

And he should know. Old L.L. put his years in as a high school teacher. Toiling in the mines of public education for well over a decade.

He'd still be there now.

Except that he wrote a novel. And he lived in Los Angeles. And someone he knew knew someone who knew someone who passed the novel around to someone. And that someone turned out to be Dennis Hopper. And he showed it to Bob Rafelson. And
Bob
, as he was known around our house, took out an option.

And L.L.'s opinions about remuneration changed very rapidly thereafter.

At least that's how my mom tells the story.

—And what brings the fruit of my loins to the western precipice of this, our waning civilization?

I forked up the last of the sand dabs he'd ordered for me and wiped my mouth.

—Nothing.

I put the fork down and pushed the plate away. Dad hadn't bothered to eat, food inhibiting, as it does, the absorption of alcohol.

He flicked his eyes across a page of the book he had reopened while I ate.

—Nothing.
Certainly. Why should a janitor be anything but aimless? The freedoms of the laboring class. Why fill the off hours with knowledge and investigation, with self-improvement? To what end, after all?
Nothing.
Indeed.

I leaned over on my stool and took a toothpick from the dispenser on the shelf next to the menus. The waiters were coming on for dinner service, I watched one use an ice cream scoop on a tub of refrigerated butter, plopping the perfect little balls into white dishes. Another slid trays of dinner salads into the stand-fridge. The manager chalked specials on a board. A couple regulars came in and the bartender started making their drinks without being asked.

I looked at L.L. reading
Anna Karenina.
I thought about Anna throwing herself under her train. I thought about the shower of blood and brain on the bedroom wall of the house in Malibu. I thought about the putrid stain the pack rat left on the floor in Koreatown.

I picked my teeth.

—Guess I was just thinking about you, L.L. Thought I'd come by and see how you're doing.

He glanced at me, eyes peering just over the top of his glasses. He signaled the bartender and looked back down at his book.

—A banner day. Another beer is surely in order.

L.L. wrote the screenplay, and it was a hit.

It was read by everyone in Hollywood. Dad became the hottest writer in town. Coppola tapped him to adapt
Travels with Charley.
Redford wanted to know if he'd brush up a remake of
The Heart of the Matter.
Michael Cimino was looking to do the life of Jim Thomson. Robert Evans thought he'd snagged the Holy Grail, the rights to
The Catcher in the Rye.
Did L.L. want first crack? Anything and everything with a whiff of the literary, L.L. Crows was at the top of the list to write, adapt, brush up, or take a pass at.

And he took every job. And he wrote some of the most consistently excellent and praised screenplays Hollywood has ever seen. And not a fucking one was ever produced. Nothing that he got screen credit for, anyway. But in the ’70s, and through most of the ’80s, his red pencil marks had decorated, and vastly improved, he'd be sure to inform you, the pages of a small forest's worth of scripts. Some good, some pure ass. Several Oscar nominees, and a few winners. Not that he gave a fuck one way or another. Because they weren't his stories. He was just the hired gun, getting richer than any human could pray to a fat and greedy Jesus to get.

His story, his admired and lauded screenplay of his one and only novel, walked up and down the runway and had its skirt lifted by every A-list studio/actor/director/producer in town with a yen to take on the what had become
the greatest movie never made
, and while it had more than a few dollar bills stuffed in its panties, no big spender ever stepped up to throw down for a trip to the champagne lounge.