The Los Angeles Diaries

by James Brown

  I’m not trying to be brave. Or stupid. I’m as scared as the rest. It’s just that I don’t know what else to do, what to think or where to run, and despite my mixed feelings about Hollywood I’ve been waiting a long time for this meeting, if not this particular one on this particular day, then certainly careerwise. Like an earthquake, I expect it to pass soon, and I don’t want to appear panicked.

  Another window blows out. Again it’s on some other floor.

  I continue to wait. Two or three minutes pass, and finally the door to the executive’s office opens slowly, tentatively, and he peers out at me, a young man with curly red hair. He looks about ten years my junior. I stand up and hold out my hand. He doesn’t take it.

  “Hello,” I say. “I’m Jim Brown.”

  “Who?”

  “Jim Brown. We’re supposed to have a meeting today.”

  “There’s a sniper out there,” he says. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  I think about that for a second but decide not to answer. The question that most concerns me is whether or not he’s had a chance to look over my ideas and I’m afraid to ask for fear of sounding too anxious, as if it’s a matter of life and death.

  Ordinarily when I drive into Los Angeles I try to anticipate the unexpected, insofar as that’s possible, and compensate for it in advance. Coming, I allow myself that extra time to change a flat tire, say, or if I make the wrong turn and get lost. Going home, if I can’t get back on the freeway by two in the afternoon, I’ll wait the traffic out until around eight that evening. I’ll have a few drinks at a dark quiet bar, maybe some dinner at a fast-food place before I hit the road. But today, both coming and going, my plans backfire.

  By the time I leave the Black Tower, the area has already been cordoned off with yellow tape. Studio security and LAPD are everywhere, and as I move through the crowds, on my way to the parking lot, I overhear a man talking.

  “It’s a tram driver who lost his job,” he says. “But they got him already. He was across the street in the park with a highpowered rifle just randomly shooting out windows. Top to bottom. I hope they lock his ass up and throw away the key.”

  Soon I’m back in my car on the San Bernardino Freeway, heading home. There shouldn’t be much traffic now, it’s just half-past twelve, but you can’t predict when there will be a wreck. Ahead the exhaust from hundreds of cars wavers in the air, liquidlike, and no one is going anywhere. I roll down my window. I light a cigarette and think about the tram driver. He could be a screenwriter. Or better yet an actor. I would bet on it, and his desperation to make it has probably been building for years. Maybe his wife or girlfriend recently left him. Maybe he’s drinking too much and can’t stop. Each day his disillusionment grows, each day he finds less reason to care. Eventually his frustration turns to anger, the anger to rage, and when he loses his job, a shitty job he never even liked, something inside finally snaps. I can understand that. I can even sympathize.

  Slowly the traffic lurches forward. The flashing red and blue lights of the highway patrol come into view, and I see it now—the cause for this delay. It’s just a fender bender but still everyone has to stop and stare. We’re all looking for blood. We’re all expecting the worst. Mangled frames of cars. Shattered glass. Anything short of someone being carried away on a stretcher is a disappointment.

  Summer 1962

  MY PAPA’S WALTZ

  We have an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and when my father gets drunk he puts on Patsy Cline’s song “Crazy” and asks me to dance. He has this sloppy smile on his face. I’m six, maybe seven years old at the time. He is in his midfifties and his drunken sentimentality annoys me. His palms feel rough and hard when he slips them into mine and tries to lift me from my chair at the kitchen table. But I hold tight to the edge, the chipped green Formica, or one of the slick chrome legs. “Up, up,” he says. “Let go. Dance.” His breath smells of whiskey, his collar of sawdust and sweat. My father is a building contractor, a good one, a real finish man who charges people according to what he thinks they can afford, and they often take advantage of him.

  A few years back I wrote a novel that uses this memory as its heart. I’ve mined the territory before, if not this particular moment then something like it, and I’ve done it so often that I find myself confusing what actually happened with how I imagine it. In trying to sort between autobiography and fiction, or invention, and then trying to put the pieces together so that they make some kind of sense, I’ve come to think that the truth as it occurs isn’t of much use to me other than, say, as a catalyst for a story. While I’m figuring this out, I lose a couple of years writing a bad novel. I don’t get through it and that’s a good thing, because if I hadn’t given up I would have lost more time. And I worry about time.

  The problem, at least one of them, was that I was being dishonest with myself in the worst, most shameful way. I was writing about people and events and places that I didn’t fully understand, and I wasn’t good enough at it for it not to show. So I start another book, one that makes me see past what I think actually occurred, to what hasn’t but should have according to that thing I imagine called plot. And the writer’s obsession, as I also come to understand, suggests something other than limitation or theme, that as storytellers we basically spend our lives telling the same story over and over, only we do it from different angles.

  The trick is disguising it, so it doesn’t seem the same.

  The trick is how well you can keep doing it, not once or twice, but hundreds of times, page after page, with one real detail after another. The hardest part is to make it appear seamless and vivid in the end as if it all came naturally.

  Like magic.

  Like you don’t have to think. Like it really couldn’t have happened any other way.

  I was in college when I encountered “My Papa’s Waltz,” Theodore Roethke’s short dark poem about dancing with his drunken father. I don’t know for a fact if Roethke ever danced with his father and I don’t believe that it matters. Of course, when I’m six or seven years old, I’d never heard of the poet, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had. Reading is for sissies, especially poems, and like my old man I consider myself a tough guy. Pound for pound I can kick any kid’s ass in the neighborhood, and where we live on the poor side of San Jose I have some serious competition. My mother is in prison at the time, and my father, my brother and sister and I share a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchenette and a hot plate, a window overlooking the warehouse next door and a sofa bed in the living room. You have to push it back into place in the morning, so you can get to the bathroom.

  William Street Park is only a few blocks away, and I spend plenty of hot summer days playing around the creek that passes through it. It was a rough place then and it’s no better now, with all the dope and every other kid carrying a piece. The generation has changed. The clothes are different. But the pose is the same. Black kids still hang out on the benches and behind the bathrooms, glossy eyed, getting wasted, and the pachucos or cholos, what they call homies now, are on the other side of the park at the mouth of the old drain storm tunnel that runs under the street. My father buys the old reel-to-reel recorder here, off some older guy who needs a few quick bucks.

  I like the tunnel. On the hottest days, when everybody is dragging, I stop about halfway through the tunnel and suck the cool air deep into my lungs. I like to press my cheek against the cool steel and feel the vibrations of the cars and the trucks rumbling past on the street above. I think about my mother. I think about when she’s coming home. My old man doesn’t like to talk about it and I’m left to wonder, to make up stories. To imagine. I plan the Great Escape in that tunnel and play it over and over in my head.

  I need rope.

  I need a gun.

  I need a guard’s uniform and a pair of walkie-talkies, so that my father and I can coordinate our actions, working from the inside and out. The first two items are easily had; the rope I buy, a hundred feet of good nylon five-hundred-pound te
st, and my father owns a German Luger. We’ll steal her away to Mexico in our Chevy stepside. But there’s a catch. Finding a guard’s uniform to fit a sixty-pound kid will take some doing.

  It isn’t funny, either.

  Every detail has to work or I will fail.

  Lives, real or imagined, are at stake.

  In that novel I wrote, a father plays a prominent role in a boy’s life. His mother disappears years before. The boy, the narrator, can’t recall knowing her, because she deserts him before he has the power of memory, and toward the end of the book he decides to pull up stakes and go looking for her. In my own life, when I try to remember exactly what happens the night that my father asks me to dance, I get confused.

  Maybe it isn’t 1962 in that cramped apartment on the poor side of San Jose. Maybe it’s 1963. Maybe I’m closer to eight than seven, and why my mother is sent to prison doesn’t really matter because she is never coming back, not the same woman anyway, and what I did know of her—before—is little more than imagined.

  For dancing, I am too awkward, too timid and full of anger and blindness. But when I write today, when I write now, when I write this, the drunken smile on my father’s face no longer annoys me. I let him take my hands and guide me across the cracked and yellowed linoleum floor in that kitchenette with Patsy Cline playing on the old reel-to-reel tape recorder that is probably stolen. I feel the warm harsh breath of his whisper in my ear and I smell the whiskey. I smell the sawdust and sweat.

  “Smile,” he says. “Dance. Your momma’s coming home tomorrow.”

  That’s fiction. But, in fact, it doesn’t matter.

  I let go of the table and dance with my father and the song is always “Crazy.”

  Fall 1988

  THE FACTS

  Someone is watching me. Someone has been watching me off and on now for sixteen hours. But every time I look out the window he slips behind the refrigerator in the yard of the abandoned house down the street. All I see is his pants leg. All I see is one foot, a tennis shoe, before he ducks out of view. This is happening to me at the E-Z Eight Motel on Macarthur Boulevard in Oakland. I haven’t slept or eaten in three days. I check the locks on the door again. I check the window and turn away. On the TV a young woman is fucking two men and I watch them for a while. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and in a few hours I have to lecture on Huckleberry Finn to a class of undergraduates.

  In the bathroom mirror I look at myself. My eyes are bloodshot. My face is drawn and pasty and there’s a distinct chemical odor emanating from the pores of my skin. Over the last few weeks my weight has dropped from a hundred and seventy pounds to a hundred and forty, and I’ve lost the feeling in two fingers on my left hand. Nerve damage. A short circuit in the brain. I look closer. There are delicate, threadlike patterns of broken blood vessels along the bridge of my nose. The condition is called spider angioma, and it comes from drinking heavily over a long period of time, when the liver can no longer freely cleanse the blood and it begins to clot. The tiny vessels burst. I know this because my brother had it. I know this because I’ve read dozens of books on alcoholism and drug addiction, though none of them, no amount of knowledge, has helped me to stop.

  I undress. I turn on the hot water, only the hot water, and step into the shower and bear it for as long as I can. The pain distracts. The pain is good, and when I step out I am pink all over, the flesh tender and inflamed. Naked, I return to the bed and lie down, my arms to my sides, like a corpse. The movie is still playing, a continuous loop, but now the scene offers two women. They’re stretched out on a bed in what looks like a motel room, a motel room like this, with a loud bedspread and cheap vinyl furniture. One is only wearing a garter belt and stockings. The other is dressed in tight jeans and a halter top. I want to keep watching them but instead I shut my eyes. Sleep is what I need, even if it’s only for a few minutes, but my body is a live wire. I get up and go to the window again and peer through a break in the drapes. The streets are empty and quiet and most of the apartments and houses that line the block have bars on their windows and doors. The sun is just rising and so far as I can tell I’m no longer being watched. That or he’s hiding somewhere else. At best this is only a temporary reprieve and yet I’m thankful for it. I am relieved.

  At the corner an older Buick pulls to the curb and a woman steps out. She crosses the street, a little unsteadily in her heels, and when she disappears I turn away from the window and start to dress. I put on a pair of wrinkled Levi’s and the oxford shirt that I wore to class last Friday. I comb my hair. I use my finger to brush my teeth. Then I put Visine in my eyes and stand before the mirror and try to convince myself that I look like something other than a drug addict. By the time I leave the motel the morning traffic has begun and soon I’m surrounded by other cars and trucks on Interstate 580, all of us moving at a steady seventy miles an hour, all of us trailing closely together.

  If the car ahead suddenly threw on its brakes, I wouldn’t be able to stop in time. Neither would the car tailgating me. In an instant the freeway would be littered with bodies, steel and glass. I hold the wheel tightly and concentrate on the road. Ahead my exit is approaching, and I need to change lanes. There’s an opening but I don’t trust myself, whether I looked carefully enough, so I check again. I check three, four times. A mistake at this speed in rush-hour traffic is deadly, and I know I shouldn’t be here, that I have no right to be behind the wheel of a car. But I make it, as I have so many times before, in even worse condition, and once I’m safely parked in the school lot I take a deep breath, thankful to have again reached my destination alive. I light a cigarette and just sit there for a while, smoking, listening to the engine tick itself cool. On the radio the weatherman predicts another bright sunny day.

  The month is October but for the last several weeks temperatures have been in the eighties. Students are dressed as if it were still summer, the young women in shorts and skirts, the young men in T-shirts and rubber sandals, and as I start across campus I wish for dark skies. I wish for black clouds and strong winds and rain, hard rain, the kind that washes out roads. The kind that knocks down power lines. But the sky is perfectly clear. Already I’ve begun to sweat.

  My briefcase is heavy with papers and books—The Norton Anthology of Literature, The Story and Its Writer, the Bantam edition of Huckleberry Finn—and two classes’ worth of undergraduate essays, about sixty in all, that I can’t bring myself to read. The students will be disappointed. I said I would have them back today. I said I would have them back the week before and now I have to offer up another excuse, another promise I may fully intend to keep but which I will most likely break. My office is on the third floor of the humanities building, and though I’m short of breath I take the stairs. I take them because I don’t want to risk being trapped in the elevator with someone who knows me and having to carry on the pretense of a polite conversation. I’m not ready for that yet, or the crowds, all the people. All the noise and commotion. I need to ease into this slowly, retreat to my office, lock the door and do another line.

  The hallway is long and narrow and the walls on both sides seem to merge at the end, into a point, like a diagram in perspective. The fluorescent lights overhead seem extraordinarily bright. Some of the professors are in their offices, and to get to mine I have to pass by their open doors.

  The trick, I tell myself, is to stare at the floor. To walk quickly.

  I almost make it.

  The professor in the office directly across from mine is at her desk having a conference with a young Japanese student. She speaks slowly and loudly as if she’s instructing the deaf. Teaching English as a second language is her specialty and she addresses all of her foreign students in this manner. While I’m fumbling with my keys, trying to get the right one into the lock, she glances over at me.

  “You look like hell,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I said you look like hell.”

  “I’ve been up all weekend,” I say. “Working o
n my book.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “right.”

  I resent her snide remarks, I resent her as a person for talking down to her students, but I’m in no condition to react. All I want is to escape into my office. She says something else—something rude, I imagine—which I don’t catch because I’ve finally gotten the door open, stepped inside and shut it behind me. I lock it. I check it just to be sure and then I take the small plastic bag from my pocket and empty it onto my desk. I have a razor in my wallet and I use it to cut the crystals into a fine white powder and draw them into two long lines. The rest I return to the bag. For a straw, I roll up a dollar bill. The tissues inside my nose are swollen and raw, I’ve been bleeding, and it’s several tries before I can do the first line. It makes my eyes water, it burns, and I like it. In a matter of seconds all the fear and paranoia, all the things I don’t want to think about or feel, slip away. I take a deep breath again. I let it out slowly and wish that I were someplace, anywhere but here. The next line is easier.

  My wife hasn’t heard from me since I left Friday night. What we fought about, I don’t remember, but I imagine that it had to do with money. It always seems to be about money at first and then turns into something else. I pick up the phone. I make the call. It rings and rings, and as it continues to ring it crosses my mind that this could be the last time, this could be the end. I picture an empty house. I picture empty closets and unmade beds. But then she answers, slightly out of breath.

  In the background I can hear our second child, Logan, crying loud and sharply. He is three years old and so far he has not been as easy to raise as his brother. His eyes are highly sensitive to light, his ears to noise, and he cries often, constantly testing his mother’s patience. Usually I’m the one to calm him, to hold and walk the boy until his chest stops heaving. He is more used to my arms than hers.