Angeles

The First Night of the Rest of My Life

The phone rang seven times before I picked it up. The voice on the other end was the one I expected.

"What? No answering machine?" (Obviously.)

"I threw it out. I don't want people to be able to get in touch with me."

"You answered the phone." (Baiting.)

"I can't stand the thought that people can't get in touch with me."

"You've really lost it." (Without sympathy.) "Be at the Dresden Room at midnight."

I looked at the clock. 11:11. I wanted to make a wish, but I couldn't think of anything to wish for. "Make it twelve-thirty: I want to finish this Details."

On my way out, I fetched the answering machine from the trash can. There was an earthquake, a little one. The radio man said a 4.0. I didn't think anything of it at the time.

Over the Counter Pick-Me-Up Cocktail

• One shot of espresso, grains tightly packed, prepared with a twenty-second press, and served with a lemon twist.
• Two capsules of Korean panax ginseng, 500mg each. Swallow with:
• One cup of cranberry juice cocktail. Save the last ounce or so and set it aside.
• Two hits of Primatene mist.
• Two capsules of Ripped Fuel metabolic enhancer. Swallow with:
• 2 oz. Absolut Citron, shaken with crushed ice, the juice of one lime, and the splash of cranberry juice (above). Strain and serve in a martini glass, with a lemon twist.
• One bar of Hershey's Milk Chocolate, preferably the Big Block, though never the King Size Big Block, which is just too much.
• Four cigarettes, chain-smoked. Ideally, the first should be European. The last three may be of any high tar domestic variety. Kamel Reds are an excellent example.

Try to remember where you left your car keys. Now you are ready to go out.

The Dresden Room

The usual crowd was there, and the lounge singers were crooning a song that I recognized from a Frank Stallone album. I ran into Paul by the back door. "They keep the phone in the bathroom! I just called you and left a flush at the tone—to welcome you back to the Answering Machine Age."

"The Kids", Cathy and Dunbar, were in the better-lighted half of the bar (the part I'm told is a restaurant during so-called business hours, though I can't vouch for it personally). They were in a corner booth sipping from drinks they thought made them look reminiscent of alcoholics—Amaretto sours, and a drink Cathy liked to call a "Corrupt Shirley Temple"—grenadine and ginger ale with a shot of Bourbon. "Which she says she invented herself," Paul explained, "but only because she's blacked out all of the times I used to get her drunk on them and take advantage of her."

"You have a different tactic now?," I asked.

"We're in love. I use guilt to manipulate."

Paul and I have a strange relationship. We say we're friends for lack of a better term.

There was also a vaguely European-looking man in the booth I didn't recognize. "You remember Davíd?" (with an accent—not David). I said I didn't think we'd me, and he smiled and shook my hand graciously.

Graciously. As in, not from Los Angeles.

Cathy and Dunbar were in the midst of something they'd picked up in an acting class. "Ansel Adams," she called out.

"Adam Ant," he shot back.

I ordered a Tanqueray gimlet and held my breath.

Cathy squirmed.

"What are they doing?" Davíd asked in a vaguely European-sounding accent. He was wearing an orange tie.

"Alan Alda."

I saw our waiter coming around the corner with my drink. "The Name Game. He has to find a first name beginning in "A", any last name. She takes the first initial of the last name and uses it for her next first name. But Cathy and Dunbar only pick doubles, because they're pretentious."

The waiter, prompt and cordial as ever, served off my drink, powdered sugar along the frosted glass like alpine snow. Sweetness.

"I understand all that." Davíd smiled. "I mean, why are they doing it?"

I smiled back. Orange, I'm told, is the new black.

Caution Curves

I take Mulholland home. It's not on the way, but it's closer to the stars.

Monsieur has to leave, I'd told them, because Monsieur has to get up tomorrow.

Tires squealing around the bend, g-forces pressing away from the curve and toward the tangent of the curve, shoulder leaning into the curve, as if that changes anything. As if gravity gives a damn.

Monsieur does not have to get up tomorrow, Paul heckled, because Monsieur is gainfully unemployed, and Monsieur can drink his life away, if Monsieur wishes. Does Monsieur wish?

Foot hovering over the brakes nervously. Foolish foot. Mind persuading foot that brakes aren't real, brakes don't actually exist, brakes are propaganda put forth by Mercedes and Volvo to ensure our continual investment in research and development for new, always-improving ABS systems, which also don't exist, but somehow mysteriously raise the price of all cars on the market. Foot not following mind's sloppy argument, but continuing to hover in inert confusion.

Mon dieu forgets, I said, slipping out of the booth, that Monsieur is on creative leave. Said with enough emphasis to get the attention of the table.

Pardon. Monsieur on leave of his creativity? Paul's goodbye. Good riddance to Monsieur.

The entire valley of Los Angeles opening up beneath me, beautiful view, clear night sky, (Is that a shooting star?), and free fall, one, two, three, four seconds before my cradle, my crèche, my fair-weather, fuel-injected friend, skipping on rock, rolling on gravel, meeting a tree and making a bad first impression, glass is everywhere, steel is everywhere, sky is everywhere, and yes, I'm sure, yes. It was a shooting star.

Dreams

A dream I remember: I am driving through the town where I live. I am listening to the radio, driving without thinking. I make a left turn and nearly drive the car off the road—because in front of me, rising up out of my neighborhood, is a volcano that has never been there before. It takes up my entire field of vision, a wall of glacier and granite with its own pull of gravity. I am terrified, because it is spewing steam and smoke and ash, but more because it exists, and somehow I never knew.

Another: I am in the sky, flying high above Los Angeles. Somehow I can see the tectonic plates of California and the eastern Pacific moving as if they have been filmed in stop-action animation, sliding across the Earth's mantle like butter in a pan. Where the two plates meet, off the coast, there is an amazing fire, impossibly hot and under water, nearly nuclear, and I can see its glow through the ocean and through the miles of sky. The plate that California rests on is being pushed into this fire, and cremated into mustard-colored ash. There is an unseen force pushing—easily—the United States into the fire.

Visiting Hours

My first guest at the hospital was Davíd. He brought irises. He wore a black suit with an orange shirt beneath. "These are for you," he said, handing them to me. I tried to take them but got tangled in my IV.

I sat up. "How long have you been here?"

"How long have you been here?" He smiled again. He was always smiling. Actually, I had no idea how long but was afraid to ask, so I looked down at the flowers, already wilting in spite of the sub-zero air conditioning.

"It's the IV gives you the chill. What's flowing into your bloodstream. The room is about seventy-eight degrees."

"Are you a doctor? I can't feel my body."

"It doesn't matter." And then I must have fallen asleep, because when Davíd spoke, he was on the other side of the room.

"I have a message from God."

From the hall, I heard the clatter of aluminum, maybe falling bedpans. Then a vague electronic beeping, and, farther away, the cry of someone very old: "Help me. Help me please. I think I'm rotting from the inside."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"You're going to be okay. But God wants something from you. God is ready to destroy Los Angeles. He wants to do it soon."

I could feel my body for the first time. The feeling came as a pain from underneath my ribs.

"God wants you to write a screenplay to record it all. If you set down all the things worth remembering, He may spare the world."

Then Davíd was gone. Visiting hours were over.

Demerol

Generic name: Meperidine hydrochloride

Type of drug: Narcotic analgesic

Clinical pharmacology: Meperidine hydrochloride is a narcotic analgesic with multiple actions qualitatively similar to those of morphine. The most prominent of these involve the central nervous system and organs composed of smooth muscle. The principle actions of therapeutic value are analgesia and sedation.

Warnings: Side effects cannot be anticipated. Most frequent are dizziness, light-headedness, euphoria, dysphoria, transient hallucinations, visual disturbances, and disorientations.

Caution: The side effects of the narcotic drugs are exaggerated when the patient has a head injury, brain tumor, or other head problem. Narcotics also hide the symptoms of head injury. Meperidine should not be mixed with alcohol or other depressants. It should be taken with food to reduce stomach upset.

Flowers

"My stomach is killing me."

"How's your head?"

"Still can't feel it."

The room filled with flowers I didn't know the names of, and Cathy's eyes rimmed with mascara. She looked like a raccoon—or a speed freak. "Well, we were worried about you."

I read the cards:

If you die, can I have your stuff? Hugs and kisses, Dunbar.

"They said you broke your head. I pictured spilled brains everywhere, Blood on the Highway, all that. It was scary."

What do you expect? Your whole life is a car accident. Paul.

"Look, I got you this." Cathy held up a plastic crow. "When you pull the string, it's supposed to squawk and say 'The end is nigh.' But it's broken."

"What's that one? Is that one a pot plant?"

"It's basil. It's from Pepper. She said you'd take actual flowers as too much commitment. She's probably right.'"

I changed the subject: "How's the car? Am I being charged with anything? "

"You haven't heard? The accident was listed as 'No Fault.' You were thrown off the mountain by an earthquake.

(Suddenly remembering, sitting up, looking around the room.) "Where are the irises?"

"What irises?"

"From David."

"From who?"

My head hurt, and my ribs, and my leg. The smell of flowers everywhere, it made me feel I must be dying. I closed my eyes. I saw orange.

"I'm going to let you sleep," Cathy whispered, kissing me on the cheek.

Release Date

Paul picked me up from the hospital and drove me home. The cars all seemed faster than usual, and the highway seemed strewn with a disproportionate number of roadkills, or what looked like roadkills: looking more closely, I could see they were old car parts, big bits of carpet, trash bags. Nothing organic at all.

At home, the afternoon sun was just starting to come through the kitchen window. The plants were dead. Dominos Pizza had left three ads on my door. The room smelled like dirty laundry. There were ants in the pantry.

"Sweet, or dry?" Paul asked.

"Dry."

"Shaken or stirred?"

"Shaken."

"Olive or onion?"

He couldn't find a clean glass, so he poured into a coffee mug. "Welcome home."

Message from Pepper

"Ben, you little shit. I am so pissed at you. How could you? I go away for a few days, I'm practically relaxing, and you almost get yourself killed. You're so selfish. You probably got absent-minded while you were driving and started looking at the stars. Prick.

"I miss you. Be careful. I'll be back Tuesday."

Lost

At some point I might need to talk about myself, tell you who I am and why I'm writing all of this down. For now, a few facts:

I live in a small deco apartment that is ugly in that it looks like a bathtub, and beautiful in that it is four blocks from the ocean.

I spend a lot of time by the ocean. Some days the beach is crowded and I squeeze in to claim an unobtrusive spot of sand, to watch people fly their kites, spin their cartwheels, laugh at each other's jokes, and walk hand-in-hand along that always-moving line where the water meets the shore. Some days I let this remind me of a condom commercial, but most of the time, I manage not to think anything at all.

Los Angeles is the wrong place to be lost: the light is too good, the roads too well-marked, the distances too insignificant, the people too apathetic.

Behind me a wall of mountains strewn with debris, flotsam left from a hard rain, the last stop on the long march from the Continental Divide: at the foot of the ocean, it's all uphill from here. In front of me, waves roll in from the Channel Islands, from the Marianas, from Japan.

I am on a beach, pinned between mudslide and tidal wave.

I bury myself in the sand, to hide from the sun. I think I can make out an island, through the haze, but I'm not sure.

Skipper

I went to visit my friend Skipper (because we all need a friend who is crazier than we are). Skipper has what might be the only basement apartment in Santa Monica. The light comes in from a lone window, tiny, facing east, where he's set up a telescope.

"Look at that." He had the telescope trained on a bulldozer resting in a vacant lot. "New strip mall. Just what this town needs. Why'd you shave your head?"

"I was in an accident. Got some stitches."

He didn't seem impressed."Strip malls spreading like cancer. I don't need another grocery store. You know how many places I can go right now and buy fresh arugula?"

"You eat arugula?"

"Seven. Seven different markets, all within walking distance."

"I find it bitter, as greens go."

"Soon to be eight." He wheeled the telescope around for punctuation.

"Romaine, red leaf, I find them more palatable. I'd go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and eat iceberg lettuce before I'd eat arugula. Eating arugula is like eating a salad made of parsley."

"Not by Flood, not by Fire, but by Strip Mall. End of the fucking world." Then: "Have you noticed all of the birds are dying?"

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cathy put on her best pout: "What are ya thinkin' when you look at me like that?" She batted her eyelashes. Dunbar pushed up his glasses: "I don't remember thinkin' anything, Maggie."

Off in the distance, I watched the strange sight of a DJ setting up speakers on the beach, running from one speaker , back to his mixing board fifty feet away, and then to the other speaker. He seemed to be having cable troubles.

Cathy plopped down in the sand: "Livin' alone with someone you love can be loneliah than livin' entirely alone."

Dunbar leaned in: "Would you like to live alone, Maggie?"

Cathy looked up. "You cut off my line. No, it's okay. But you cut off my line."

Dunbar frowned. "Where? What line? Maybe we should cut it."

A small crowd was starting to gather around the DJ. They didn't seem particularly young or old, skinny or fat: I couldn't tell what the event was. I stretched out my legs in the sand and tried to read a magazine but the wind kept folding the pages into chaotic origami.

Cathy moved in on Dunbar. "You're the only drinkin' man ah know that nevah seems t' put fat on." She patted his bony belly. "Well, soonah or latah, it's bound to soften you up."

I saw something had washed up on the beach not far from us: a dead seagull. No, not quite. The wing of a dead seagull. The flies were already on it. With all their motion, the wing was practically alive again.

Cathy continued to berate Dunbar in a bad southern accent: "Ya always had that detached quality of playin' a game without much concern ovah whethah ya won or lost, and now ya've just quit playin'. Ya have that rare sort of charm that usually only happens in the very old or hopelessly sick people, the charm of the defeated. Ya look so cool, so cool, so enviably cool."

The DJ finally got his speakers working. "Check, one two. Okay, everyone. Happy New Year!" It was Rosh Hashanah. We'd meant to leave as the crowd came in, but they started singing songs in a language we didn't understand, and we decided to stay.

The Click

In the second act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick explains to Big Daddy, "I have to hear that little click in my head that makes me peaceful. Usually I hear it sooner than this, sometimes as early as noon, but today it's dilatory. I just haven't got the right level of alcohol in my bloodstream yet."

Sometimes, if you're quiet enough, you can sneak up on the click. The right combination of sun and sand, cuddling you as the waves "Shhh," over and over. Sometimes, too, under night stars, when there's no noise but gentle waves, the click comes. That one moment of peaceful nothing: no wind.

And just as suddenly, it's gone.

On nights like these, I look up with vague memories of the constellations I was taught in junior high school. I look up and wonder about questions I've never been able to articulate, and wonder if I'll see the answer in the sky. But all I ever see is sky.

Pepper

Pepper argues when I tell her I'm amazed people ever manage to leave Los Angeles. Her flight arrived that morning; I picked her up at Burbank, the drive-thru airport.

"It's like gravity must be stronger here, making it harder for people to leave. Like there's a black hole in the middle of the city. Probably the Cathedral..."

Pepper was trying to find something on the radio. "Ask me about my trip."

"Or maybe in the Hollywood Bowl! It's the only explanation for the constant traffic on Highland."

She raised a red eyebrow like a Shakespearean actor. "You don't think it has to do with the freeway, and the cars coming out of the theatre?"

"At one in the afternoon? At four in the morning?"

"You're the only one I know who's been in a traffic jam outside the Hollywood Bowl at four in the morning."

I changed tactics. "Maybe magnetic fields. Does iron usually collect around a fault line?"

"My trip was amazing, thanks for asking. The leaves were changing out there! When's the last time you saw real fall? I brought you some. They're in my bag."

"You brought me some leaves? Thanks."

"And I watched the eclipse from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. Where were you? You did watch the eclipse, right?" Those same expressive, acrobatic eyebrows furrowed. "Jesus, you've sold you soul or something."

"I've seen them before."

"It was the last one of the millennium. Maybe the last one ever. Isn't the world supposed to end soon?" She gave up on the radio, turned it off, rolled down the window and sat back..

Average speed on the freeway was eighty-two miles per hour.

Jellybeans

Pepper at my apartment made a Mickey Mouse mosaic out of jellybeans. Since neither of us like licorice, she used the speckled cappuccino flavor for Mickey's head, instead of black. "Look," she said. "He's graying."

"About time. What is he, seventy?"

She started combing the fuzz on my head with her fingers, I'm sure leaving sticky bits of colorful corn syrup. "You're not even half that old. But look at these: growing back gray." She tried to pluck one.

"Ouch."

"Ben?," she asked. "How come we're not in love?"

"I don't know. We never wanted that."

"Mmm." She pulled my head back against her belly, still running her hands through what little hair I had. She grabbed a handful, gently. Then she let go.

Theme and Variation

The lovers I have had, their faces arrayed before me in snapshots that seem unfairly to cheat time (because these are neither the women as they are now, nor as I knew them, but in a way, as they truly were at that time; they are snapshots, then, of women I never really knew), come in all figures and shapes and sizes. Even photos of a single woman make her a chameleon. I rearrange the order of the faces and find that everything falls apart; the only thing about them that is, in fact, solid is their chronology: FACT: This comes first; FACT: This follows; FACT: Third in succession.

My memory of each is determined by the memory to precede it. They are not people; they are events for contextualization; they are control, then experiment, then hypothesis, then control, then experiment, then hypothesis. And my memory of the whole of them is determined wholly by my latest theory.

[Time is confused for lovers because for them it stands still, while the world goes on. In my mind I have locked them so that I may freely compare and contrast. Are they still growing? Of course. But my system does not allow that, which is why I prefer snapshots. Moreover, my history with my lovers is not determined by me, but by them. They dictate to me whether it was "true love" by their current interpretation of the whole affair. E.g., my first love was true enough at the time; now it is a fact that it was not true love, because she has decided it was innocent and naive. As I was there, I have no choice but to agree. So, though I would like to keep my old lovers, I will not, because it is more important to me to have control over my own history.]

The sum of all of this is that my second experience in love is held in direct contrast to my first and is not an unprecedented experience unto itself. The third is compared to the average of the first two, and so on, so that I have distilled the THEME, "Love," and have a number of examples, VARIATIONS. It is now impossible for me to have an experience of love, only an event that will fall closer to or farther from a feeling that I think I once felt, but which continues to be re-written.

The Screenplay That Can Save the World

Why, given a mandate from God through an archangel named Davíd, has our hero Ben Hugo not given a single thought to writing a screenplay? To be fair, screen writing is harder than is commonly believed: there are pitch meetings, treatments, rewrite after rewrite after rewrite. There are lawyers, agents, managers, unions. There is a tremendous amount of work between the typing of the first slugline and the completion of a final draft.

But none of this has occurred to our hero Ben Hugo. Here is why:

Ben Hugo doesn't believe in very much. If a man named Davíd, whom no one else remembered, came to you and claimed that God wanted a screenplay, what would you do?

Ben went to the Smog Cutter.

The Smog Cutter

Karaoke night at the Smog Cutter (isn't it always?), and a woman with big hair was belting out a heartfelt if atonal rendition of "California Dreamin'."

Pepper tugged on my arm. "I love this song. Let's dance."

"You want to dance to karaoke? I can't: if I dance before I'm ready, my arms and legs get all out of control. People could get hurt."

"One dance, that's all I'm asking."

"Pep, it's for your own protection."

Paul suddenly appeared and clinked my martini glass. "He just doesn't want to spill his drink."

"Poor Ben. If only he had a hobby, he wouldn't need to drink so much." And she disappeared to the dance floor.

The bar was crowded with people wearing flannel, latter-day hipster lumberjacks. The song changed to something by the Kinks, and the waitress took orders for another round.

"Are you and Pepper okay?," Paul asked.

"Sure. Why?"

"Dunno. Cathy asked me, earlier." We both watched quietly while the bartender poured out our next round.

"Pepper Corazón!" the karaoke man read from his list. She squeezed her way through the crowd toward the mike and drilled her eyes on me I. The music came up — the Go-Go's "Vacation." I smiled and lifted my drink to toast her; she didn't smile back.

Can't seem to get my mind off of you
Back here at home there's nothin' to do
Ooo, ooo.
Now that I'm away
I wish I'd stayed
Tomorrow's a day of mine that you won't be in

"God." Paul leaned in to me with gin breath. "She looks even better than Belinda Carlyle."

Vacation, all I ever wanted
Vacation, had to get away
Vacation, meant to be spent alone

Suddenly I felt sick.

Purging

My body heaves with a mix of vomiting and sobs, near a urinal that is ponderously high.

"What's the matter?," asks Davíd.

"I don't know."

He holds me, while I shake, against his silk shirt. "Do you love her?"

"I don't know. I'm so lonely."

Davíd nods and points two fingers at my chest. "Look here."

A hole has opened in my chest, a black cavity the size of my fist. "Where your heart used to be," he says. "Look at it. Look inside." He takes my hand and forces it toward the hole.

I shake my head. "I don't want to." I try to see, but the angle is wrong, and it's too dark inside. "What's in there?"

"Nothing. That's why you're sick."

Davíd's eyes are pure black, indiscernible. He takes the flower from his lapel and places it inside my chest. Covering the hole with his hand, he leans over and kisses his own knuckles. "Now maybe you will feel better."

He leaves through a side door, out into the alley. I'm no longer shaking. But when I get back to the bar, Pepper is gone.

The Man with the Flower in His Chest

A man has a flower planted inside his chest in the men's room of a small Silverlake bar. What does this mean? How can this ambiguous gesture give him the strength he seems to require? Can he draw strength from a metaphor?

One thing is certain: if a man has a flower planted inside his chest, it is a challenge to him—can he let the flower grow?

Coverage

Title: Angeles
Author: Ben Hugo
Type of Material: Vague
Location: Los Angeles
Circa: Present day
Genre: Apocalyptic black comedy (?)

SYNOPSIS: The story of yet another marginalized would-be-writer, Ben Hugo, drifting through life and using his own boredom as his only self-motivator. He has a menial job writing coverage at a small production company but tells his so-called friends that he works in "development," and covers his malaise with a veneer of high-proof alcohol.

The story's real adventure is happening in Ben's mind: he begins to envision his aimless wanderings as a spiritual quest set at the end of time. He becomes certain that epiphanies wait at every corner; he meets angels for coffee; he has been chosen by God to chronicle the apocalypse. But he's out of step: he misses his meetings with the angel by the minutes it takes him to find a legal parking place.

COMMENTS: This story lacks plot, it lacks drive, it lacks legitimate love interest. It has little arc and no climax. It thinks it's wittier than it ever is, and its main character fails to be sympathetic or engaging. The whole thing is a wet blanket: don't get wrapped up in it.

RECOMMENDATION: Pass.

Black Iris

Greeted at my home by a mail slot filled with overdue bills (I half-expected a phone bill saying, If you die, can I have your stuff?), I found a postcard written in an architect's handwriting—clear, strong, unfamiliar:

The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence, and it repenteth me that I have made men. And behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Make thee a script for film. Plots and subplots shalt though make in the script, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it: the length of the script shall be one hundred and twenty pages in a twelve-point font. In breadth, it shall obey verisimilitude of space and time, and shall not tax the limits of plausibility. With lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

And behold I, even I, do bring all fire and water to do my bidding, do call all locusts and birds and things living to do my bidding, to destroy all flesh. But with thee will I establish my Covenant: thou art my Instrument of Remembering.

And on the other side of the card, a Georgia O'Keeffe flower: Black Iris, 1926. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Oh shit," I said aloud. "God's an Aristotelian."

But it was settled. I was going to have to write a screenplay. I grabbed my Syd Field book from the shelf and got started.

 

[end of part one]