The Los Angeles Diaries

by James Brown

  I sit down to write him a letter the night after I return from San Jose. In it I want to tell him that I admire him for his accomplishments, his drive and ambition. At twenty-seven he has already worked in over forty television shows and starred in two movies, Bad Company with Jeff Bridges and Daisy Miller with Cybill Shepherd. You should be proud, I want to say. You didn’t know anybody when we first moved to L.A. and in a few short years you’re a contract player for Universal taking home five hundred dollars a week. That’s not bad for a kid. And it was just the beginning. But things changed. You started drinking too much and hanging out with some fucked-up people. I’d like to blame them. I’d like to blame Hollywood and all it stands for but I know it’s not that simple—that blame isn’t even what it’s about. What matters now, and this is all that matters, is that you straighten up or you’re no good for anyone, especially yourself.

  Look, I want to say.

  Take a good hard look.

  You haven’t worked in three years except for this lousy role in a low-budget movie, a role you never would’ve taken if you hadn’t needed the money, and you have to ask yourself why. What brought you here? Don’t blame it on bad luck. Don’t blame it on a bad childhood. I’d like you to come stay with me for a while. I think you need to get away from Hollywood, and when you’re strong again, when you’re ready, you can always go back.

  These are the things I want to tell my brother, and I do. They aren’t the exact words—I can’t remember what I actually wrote—but the sentiment is the same, and I sent the letter off the next morning on my way to school. About a week later I get a phone call. It’s close to midnight, and he’s drunk again.

  “I got your letter,” he says, “and you’re right, man. I have to do something because I’m going nowhere but down and I can’t stop it. I mean the drinking. I can’t fucking stop. Every morning I wake up, I say ‘Today I won’t drink. Today I will be sober.’ Then my head starts pounding and my hands start shaking and I sink into this deep depression, this deep dark ugly depression. It’s a horrible place,” he says, “and it’s killing me. I know that. But it’s killing me if I don’t drink.”

  I’m convinced that it will pass—the depression, the fears. I’m convinced that I can make the difference. We talk for well over an hour.

  We work things out.

  Here is our plan: Final exams begin for me next week but as soon as they end, on Friday, I will borrow our father’s truck and drive down to Los Angeles that same night. We’ll take as many of his things as we can in one trip and store the rest in Marilyn’s garage or give them away to the Salvation Army. Of course we’ll need to bring his bed, because I only have the one. And having his couch would be nice, if we can fit it onto the truck. I’m excited discussing the details. I think we’re both excited with the prospect of living together again, of making a fresh start. From that point on there will be no more drinking. I will quit with him in moral support, quit my own balancing act between drinking and studying. Every morning, where before Barry would wake up hungover and immediately reach for a drink, I will make him coffee and a good breakfast. Later we will run on the beach. Maybe we will join a gym. We will sweat the toxins out of his system and soon the bloat will vanish. His eyes will clear. At night we will relax and take long walks or fish off the pier or go to a movie, and it won’t be easy, I understand this, but in time his depression will lift and the compulsion to drink will pass and I will have him back, the brother I remember.

  “Friday,” I say.

  “Friday,” he says, just before we hang up. “I’ll see you next Friday.”

  But of course that Friday never comes. On Tuesday of the following week, three days before I was to leave for Los Angeles, I get a phone call from my stepmother. It’s around four o’clock in the morning, and I’m up, wired on No Doz and coffee. I’m cramming for finals.

  “Jimmy,” she says. “You need to come over as soon as possible.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just come over,” she says.

  “Is it my dad? Is he all right?”

  “He’s okay,” she says. “But he needs you right now. It’s your brother,” she says. She says, “He shot himself.”

  On the darker stretches of Highway 101 I feel motionless. Like the truck is not moving. Like I am standing still, fixed in time. Ahead only a small patch of road is illuminated by the headlamps, and behind me, when I glance into the rearview mirror, it’s just darkness. Fog has settled over the highway, and the glare, the bright whiteness reflected in the lights, is blinding. I drive slowly and hope that the fog will lift soon. I listen to the engine, the rhythm of the pistons rising and falling, and do and do not think of my brother. He comes to me in flashes, his image stirring as if from a pool of still water, breaking the surface momentarily and then submerging again.

  Beside me on the seat is a pint of vodka, and I sip from it as I drive, trying to make it last. I don’t want to be inside my head. I do not want to have to feel. I do not want to have to think. These are some of the reasons why my brother drank, and why, when the alcohol no longer worked, when it became a problem greater than the problems he drank to escape, he found another way. I would like to respect his decision. I would like to forgive him. But these things are not possible for me and I can’t see how they ever will be. I take a drink and stare into the fog. I light a cigarette and roll down my window. The air that rushes in is cool and smells of salt and rotting seaweed, and I know, because the ocean is near, that I don’t have much farther to go. I am returning to Los Angeles for my brother’s funeral. I am returning to Los Angeles to claim the things that the dead leave for the living.

  It has been less than a month since our father had his stroke, and on his doctor’s advice he is not making this trip with me. But I believe that the real reason has less to do with matters of health than those of shame for a son who has taken his own life. The fog lifts when I pass Ventura Beach and turn inland and soon the traffic thickens. The night air grows warmer and instead of the salt and seaweed it smells vaguely of exhaust now. I get off the freeway in Studio City and cross an overpass that runs high above that concrete channel called the L.A. River. From there it’s just a few blocks to my sister’s place, and when I pull into the driveway I see that she’s left the porch light on for me. It’s late, maybe two in the morning, and I figure she and her husband are asleep. The house key is supposed to be under the mat, that was the arrangement so I wouldn’t have to wake them, but I don’t have to use it. Marilyn greets me on the front porch, we hold each other tightly, and in the dim light I can see that her eyelids are red and swollen. “Oh God,” she says. “Tell me this isn’t happening.” But I can tell her no such thing. She is by nature timid and shy, she has always felt too much too intensely, and I worry for her. I worry that this is something from which she will never recover, and I worry for myself, too, because we are very much the same.

  He’s dead, I want to say.

  I want to say those words over and over to take the power out of them, but I say nothing. I hold my sister for a while longer and then we go inside. Her husband makes us drinks and sets out a mirror, a razor and a straw on the coffee table. We do not talk about Barry. Not a word. The funeral is tomorrow morning and we ride out these last hours by numbing ourselves with vodka, Valium and cocaine. The combination is potent, and with the cocaine we are able to drink far past the point where we might ordinarily pass out. We drink and drug until the living room windows begin to fill with the morning light, and my little niece wanders in on us, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She is wearing jumper pajamas. Her father hides the mirror on a shelf above the stereo and my sister rises unsteadily to her feet. “Munchikin,” she says. “My little munchikin. C’mere, give me a hug.” But my little niece hesitates, she looks away, and when she does step into her mother’s open arms it is with a certain awkwardness. She is only three years old, and though she has no understanding of death or of the drugs we are using, she senses that things are not right.


  “You better get her dressed,” her father says. “The sitter will be here soon.”

  When they leave the room he pours us another drink, and later, in the car, we all do another line. I am impressed that he is able to drive so well. I am impressed that he is able to drive at all, or that he doesn’t get us lost. Our only mistake is that in our fucked-up state of mind we don’t think to leave the house early enough, and by the time we arrive the services are already under way. This is at Forest Lawn in Hollywood, and it is our mother’s choice, for a funeral befitting an actor, to hold the services here where the stars are buried. She is sitting in the front pew with her new husband, ironically a Mormon from Utah, and my sister, her husband and I take seats in the back.

  The chapel is small. There are maybe thirty, forty people present, and on a stand up front, near the podium, rests our brother’s casket. The priest wears a solemn expression on his face and talks of Barry as if they had been intimate friends when in fact they had never known each other. As he drones on our mother rocks back and forth in her seat, keening. Then a strange thing happens to me. Their voices seem to fade. They grow fainter and fainter until I’m only watching their mouths work, and I suddenly feel very small. I watch the funeral play out in front of me but it’s as if I’m viewing it all from a long distance, like you might in a dream. None of it is really happening, and I am somewhere else now. I am somewhere very far away.

  It is an old house in a neighborhood of Echo Park that is not safe to walk at night. The paint is chipping off the sides and the shingles on the roof are cracked and brittle from the sun. The lawn is dry and yellow. There are no hedges or trees, no shade or cover, and if you stare long enough you can see waves of heat rising off the asphalt in the driveway. His car is still parked there, an old battered Volkswagen squatting on its axles, the backseat packed with boxes of books and clothes that he had planned to move, throw out or give away. The registration tag is nearly two years old.

  On the front porch is an upturned wicker chair with the weaving broken out of the seat, and on the door is a warning from the Los Angeles city coroner: Removal of this seal is a felony. The day is hot, and I am sweating. The Fourth of July is near, and as I reach for the doorknob, turn it and find it unlocked, I hear the snap of firecrackers from somewhere down the block. For some time I have contemplated this moment, wondering if

  I could go through with it, and I’m surprised at how easily I enter, without hesitation, without a second thought. The odor is overpowering. Immediately my throat tightens, and in that instant I want to turn back, but I do not. On a table in the hallway, just past the door, is a stack of unopened mail, and in the living room cardboard boxes are scattered across the floor. Some he has already packed but most are still empty. I’d like to think that he was preparing to move in with me. I’d like to believe that I could’ve helped if he’d given me the chance. But my sister tells me that he never mentioned anything about moving in with me and instead had borrowed money from her and rented a room in a run-down hotel in Hollywood not far from where he used to live, when he was just a teenager, when he first moved out.

  I walk slowly through the house. A pile of neatly folded towels rests on the couch, and nearby, on the coffee table, is a basket of clean clothes still in need of sorting. The police uniform, the clothes I last saw him wearing, is among them.

  I don’t have to go far.

  I don’t have to search.

  The living room adjoins the dining room and that is where he killed himself. I don’t know why but he had dragged the box spring and mattress from his bedroom into this room, set up the nightstand, a reading lamp and portable fan. Maybe it was cooler here. Maybe it was only late at night, long after the sun had gone down, that my brother was able to sleep. I sit on the edge of the mattress. The pillow is dark and heavy with blood. There is still the indentation where he had rested his head.

  On the floor beside the bed is an empty fifth of Kessler’s, and I imagine him lifting it to his lips, draining the last of it before reaching for the revolver that he’d bought for home protection several years before. I imagine that the reading lamp is on but that it barely lights the room and that the fan is purring, turning back and forth, back and forth. Outside, maybe, he hears a car pass along the street. Maybe a dog is barking. I see him pull the drapes shut and stretch out on the bed. For a while he just lies there, staring at the ceiling. Does he think of me? Can he see the faces of our sister, father and mother? He places the barrel of the revolver in his mouth. He cocks the hammer. Where is he, in that instant between life and death, when he pulls the trigger? Somewhere down the block I hear more firecrackers go off, and I see him then, recoiling from the blast.

  Sometimes late at night I will wake up in a cold sweat, unable to catch my breath. Sometimes when I am playing with my children, teaching class or talking with a friend, that scene will visit me. I could be reading the newspaper. I could be watching TV. I could be wasted or sober and suddenly I’m there again, just a college kid, sitting on the edge of that bed in that house in Echo Park where my brother ended his life. Now I’m forty-three years old, a middle-aged writer, and whenever I drive into Los Angeles on business, or to visit a friend, it fills me with a sense of dread. On every street, around every corner, I come face-to-face with the memory of my brother. Bronson Park. A restaurant on Sunset Boulevard where he once took me for lunch. Laurel Canyon where he lived in better times. Larry Edmund’s Books in Hollywood. They are different moments but they all lead to the same place. There is no answer for suicide, no final reconciliation.

  That afternoon in July I load our father’s truck with my brother’s belongings and vow never to return to Los Angeles. On Highway 101, while I’m driving along the coast smoking a cigarette and staring blankly out the window, I notice a sign up ahead. It’s for the Pismo Beach turnoff, and seeing it I recall the day when our mother left our father and first moved us to L.A. We stopped here along the way to play in the ocean and have our picture snapped by a stranger. We are just children, my brother and sister and I, posing for the photo in front of an older Buick Special, squinting against the glare of the sun. He has his arm draped over Marilyn’s shoulders, and later, in the car when I begin to cry, my brother will hold me and whisper something into my ear, something that will make me smile.

  Spring 1984

  ON SELLING A NOVEL TO HOLLYWOOD

  DEAL I

  I am twenty-eight years old, confident and self-assured. When Warner Brothers options my second novel I am ecstatic. In a year or so they’ll make the movie and I will join the ranks of the rich and famous. Because the movie will be a phenomenal success, my novel will rocket to the top of the best-seller list. I will appear on all the big talk shows. My face will grace the cover of Esquire. Above all the New Yorker will finally stop rejecting my short stories and recognize me for the brilliant talent that I am. In the meantime the celebration begins. I run out and buy an eight-ball of coke, a few cases of Heineken, a half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s, Absolut and Johnnie Walker Black and invite all my friends over for a party. The last guest leaves at dawn but I’m just getting started.

  The novel I sold is about three teenage brothers growing up in some seedy parts of Los Angeles with their widowed mother. The oldest brother is an aspiring actor. The middle brother deals cocaine and methamphetamine. The youngest is a habitual runaway. They are poor kids. They are reckless kids on a collision course with life, and because I have lived this life, because I know these characters intimately, I want to write the screenplay.

  I meet with the producer at Warner Brothers. At the main gate that afternoon is a long line of cars waiting for the guard to check them through. Ahead of me are a Mercedes, two BMWs and a Porsche. I am driving an eleven-year-old Nissan pickup with a broken muffler, and it’s loud. People are staring at me and I’m suddenly self-conscious. On a whim I put it into reverse, and instead of parking on the studio lot as I was instructed to do, I leave my old truck at a meter down the street and walk back
to the guard’s booth. He passes me through, and a few minutes later I’m in an air-conditioned bungalow seated across from the producer and his assistant, an attractive girl who barely seems out of her teens. She’s wearing a tight skirt and a low-cut blouse. The producer is in his early forties, fit and tanned. He is beginning to lose his hair.

  “It’s a terrific book,” he says. “But I’m a little concerned. Novelists are generally too close to their own work to make the necessary changes.”

  “What kind of changes?” I say.

  He waves his hand.

  “Nothing major,” he says. “We don’t want to lose your vision of the story.”

  As we discuss these changes the assistant takes notes. She gets us coffee and Cokes and phones in lunch. She is very accommodating, and I wonder if she’s just a good employee or if the producer is fucking her. On the wall behind the producer’s desk are glossies of old movie stars. Bogart. Jimmy Stewart. Jane Russell. Now and then I glance at these photos while we talk, and now and then, though I know better, I steal a look at the assistant. Once she catches my eye and smiles.

  When our meeting is over I leave the office determined to do a good job. I am prepared to be merciless. I am prepared to cut and chop. To rearrange scenes, create new ones, eliminate others. I work long hard hours and in three months I’ve whittled a three-hundred-page novel down to a hundred-and-tenpage screenplay. But the heart of the book is still there. All the characters survive intact.