20th Century Un-limited

by Felice Picano

  “You really expect this thing to work, don’t you?”

  “I don’t see why not. I repaired every part of it that was in any way frayed or not completely perfect. Had to wait until the invention of microchips to get it right. Then had to wait again for platinum anodization to get some stuff really miniscule. Remember, you won’t be able to fix it until the mid 80s or 90s. I’ll leave the mechanism in this house with your name on it, in case you want to use it again.”

  “But you don’t advise it.”

  Morgan said nothing.

  “My cell phone?” I asked.

  “You can take it, but there’ll be no towers. No satellites. It won’t work.”

  “What about music?” I showed him my tiny MP3 player.

  “That could go with you. What’s the storage?”

  “Up sixteen gigabytes with storage chips I can slide in.”

  He pried open the back. “I’ve got a battery half the size of a dime to go in here to keep it charged. It’s made from exotic minerals. It will last eighteen, twenty years.”

  “By all means put it in!”

  “First let me extend the storage to about twenty-four gigabytes. That’s about a thousand hours of music. Download all that, and then I’ll seal the USB port connection and use the battery. It’s made of something that decays really slowly. Also, I’m noticing that this player’s tuner is FM only. You’ll need an AM bandwidth for the 1930s. FM only goes commercial in the late 1950s. I can fool around with it. Take a few tiny ear buds with you too, black ones. The only headphones they have are bulky things for crystal radio sets, and the plugs won’t fit. Remember that is for private listening only. If anyone asks, they’re earplugs. Oh, by the way, it’ll probably be quieter most of the time.”

  “How quieter?”

  “Well, cars are louder but there’s a lot fewer. Ditto for trucks and busses too, which are smaller and fewer. Streetcars are noisy but they’re limited too. And there are no commercial jets, which provide a lot of noise we no longer even consider in cities. So I believe it will be great deal quieter.”

  “Okay. To recap,” I began, “I shouldn’t carry metal, and I should wrap well any plastic like the MP3 player within clothing. I can carry a small duffel bag, made of canvas or cloth. Put what I need to wear inside that. What? A couple of changes of clothing. The cash. What else can I bring?”

  “Clothing is crucial. I had to hunt vintage shops all over for my clothing once I knew I was headed back to the 1960s. I suggest wearing your windbreaker, because we don’t know what time of year you’ll arrive. It could be cold and raining, and if you need to you can fold it to the size of your hand and easily stash it. You’ll need a cap of the era. A newsboy cap, maybe. Beaked. Not a baseball hat. Only baseball players wore those. Make sure it’s got no logos. Cloth printing of that kind was pretty primitive back then. A short-sleeved and a long-sleeved cotton shirt with buttons down the front—and regular collars. No Izods or Ralph Lauren or Polo shirts. Maybe a white undershirt. Unprinted! Cut out all labels on your clothing, unless they’re American made. A pair of light or dark chinos. Maybe work pants. And sturdy, all-leather shoes. Two or three neckties. No running gear. No denims: only farmers wore them then. When you arrive, buy yourself a good sports jacket. Take simple white briefs, or better yet, cotton shorts. Cotton socks above your ankles. This way, aside from the windbreaker, you won’t stand out. Cut its label out too. The tighter the jacket, the better because you’ll be younger and smaller.”

  “You’ve done a lot of research,” I said.

  “At one point I thought I’d go back again.”

  “But not now? Why not?”

  Morgan shrugged. “You get tired.”

  “Tired of being alive—after 116 years?”

  “The Hindu Vedas give a life span as 114 to 120. So maybe that’s enough for me. Now! Don’t forget medicine. Do you take any?” Morgan asked.

  “Nothing besides my blood pressure pills.”

  “You probably won’t need those. You’ll be much younger. But take a ninety-day script if you want to play it safe. I’d include some antibacterial ointment, and non-steroidal pain pills. They’ve got aspirin back then. But you’d better bring antibiotics—I’ve got a hundred Keflex I’ve stashed. Remember that people died of simple infections back then. All they have is sulfa drugs to combat them, and you might be allergic. Coming back here, I got minor infections from germs that I guess didn’t exist in my time and had to see a doctor. Good thing I was a kid; kids get everything that’s out there. That old Timex, wind-up wristwatch you’ve got on now is fine. Nothing digital and nothing with quartz or a battery, right?”

  “Are you going to show me what it looks like? Your time machine?”

  “It looks like a double mattress on the floor with electrodes all over your body attached to the mechanism, which is small. However, it uses a lot of electricity in one punching volt. So the neighborhood will have a blackout when it works.”

  “I still don’t understand why you chose me.”

  “I didn’t. Ralf did.”

  Almost asleep, Ralf looked up and barked twice.

  “Why did Ralf choose me?”

  “Ask Ralf. Listen. How many people will you need to sit down to explain that you’re going away for a very long time, possibly forever?”

  I thought so long that he interrupted me.

  “You told me your partner died and you moved out here from the other coast. Since your partner died and you moved up here, you have no real connections down there, do you? No people who’ll really miss you?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “That’s what Ralf thought…We’ll work something out to make it look like you died here in an accident…I’ll give you three weeks to get everything you need ready.”

  3

  The last thing I remember Morgan saying was “Close your eyes tight. There’s going to be a big flash.”

  He’d told me that ten minutes earlier and I’d said, “So that was you, making the big flash? I always thought it was some photographer who lived up this hill!”

  No, it had been him, Morgan confirmed, trying to see if it the machine was up to speed before he used it on me.

  I was on my back, fully dressed, with the duffel bag held tight in both of my hands, with all the electrodes on me: face, hands, torso, legs, feet, lying on the double mattress he mentioned before, the wires going into a bureau with a few dials and lights.

  I remember thinking, “So this is how I die? Electrocuted by the maniac at the top of the hill who says he’s from 2061. Well, it’s different!”

  There was a big flash even with my eyes closed, so I closed them tighter. Then I felt my body drop, like it sometimes does when you’re in bed about to nod off and suddenly your body relaxes totally and you feel like you’re falling and you try to catch yourself but you’re not going anywhere, not really.

  But this time I did drop, maybe four or five inches, and I grabbed both sides of the mattress and I felt—grass!

  We’d been in his garage, I’d been on a mattress laid upon a concrete floor.

  I reached out gingerly a little farther on each side. More grass, tufts of hard, wild grass.

  I slowly opened my eyes. I wasn’t in a garage. I was lying on grass and it was nighttime. I sat up and looked around and I zipped up my jacket including the extensible collar. It was chilly, and wet. Not raining but foggy or…

  I tried to see where I was in the dark, in the light rain. It had been three in the afternoon when I lay down in that garage. Now it was definitely night.

  The fog parted a bit and I could make out dim light far away and way down below.

  Step by step, I told myself. Step by step.

  I stood up. Looked around. Reached into the pocket and pulled out my phone and turned it on to operate like a little plastic flashlight. I moved it around.

  I was on a hilltop. Well, not at the top. But twenty or so yards below it. All around me was grass. I tried peering down on all sides. J
ust hillside. But below, wasn’t that glow from old-time streetlights down there? I was almost sure that’s what it was. But the lights looked impossibly far away. No houses. No nothing. Just hilltop.

  I had been facing what had been the garage door: that meant a street had been put through here later. I closed my eyes and walked as I would do if I were walking out Morgan’s garage and onto the narrow street. I stopped.

  I looked around myself and it was still hill, but maybe a bit less hummocky here. I closed my eyes again and turned right, as I would do going down the hill from Morgan’s house on my walks up the hill, and then after about twenty-five steps, I stopped, and closed my eyes again. I was assuming that the developers had taken the most natural route going up the hill when putting in the road. I knew this route by heart, having trudged up it so often. Next would be a left-hand turn down. Sure enough, the flashlight’s tiny light on and off confirmed my footing, then after another fifty feet there would be a wide right turn, and here the fog parted again and I could see how very high up I actually was. Without a road and houses on either side, I was very high on a hill above what would later be West Hollywood.

  The careful trek took me more than a half hour, with occasional stops to check my memory of the path with my eyes closed, and then to readjust and open them and move on. There was more chance for mistakes as the hill widened. At one point I was sure I was passing by the site where I had lived for years. It should have been the spot, and the terrain I could make out looked like it, although it was just trees and bushes. None of the tall eucalyptus that would grow later on, and of course there was no scooped-out section for the parking area.

  Ten minutes later, the first sign of a house arrived suddenly. There was a paved road and a streetlight, and I knew exactly where I was: where North Crescent Heights Blvd. had joined Hillside Road right here in my time. Four or five houses were being built on what was now a cul-de-sac—barely a quarter of the way up the hill, but no street signs were up yet. It wouldn’t remain a cul-de-sac for long. That house on the corner would become the green and white, half-timbered place that I’d driven past every day, and where Aldous and Laura Huxley had lived until the writer died of cancer, while taking a massive dose of LSD-25, in 1963. Another few sites down the road on each side, very widely spaced, and I knew now that this really was my road back in 2010: this was North Crescent Heights Blvd.

  I was strolling quickly down that paved road and onto where it met Hollywood Blvd. where that famous road ascends and twists into the western hills only to peter out after curving around a few bends, a half mile later.

  Proof, if any was needed, was here: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Storer House, dully lit behind his carefully designed, tinted stained glass. So I now knew two things: 1) I had gone back in time because what else would explain my hill without houses and roads but an earlier time? and 2) I had gone back in time to sometime after 1924, because that’s when this house was completed, when it had been the highest house on the hill.

  Another residence far away on the same side, big and old, then the hill I drove down daily that curved down to cross Laurel Canyon Blvd. before it headed north to the Valley. I walked that familiar down-slope, and it was far less foggy down here although sheets of mist would blow across my view every now and then. It was cool and chilly—what season was it?—I was glad for the windbreaker.

  What I saw looked familiar: the streetlights of Hollywood Blvd. level down there and moving directly eastward eventually into a lighted-up area of town. Palm trees eighteen feet tall, not sixty, as I knew them. Well, a dully lighted-up area of town, really, whether because lights were dimmer or it was later or who knew. I didn’t care, I was suddenly ecstatic!

  Fucking Morgan, I thought. That crazy motherfucker from the future Morgan had sent me back in time! He’d done it!

  Even though Morgan had said it was “period-anomalous,” I’d hooked a strap to my duffel bag and had it slung across my back and shoulder. I was able to lope down the road and onto the first level road, only two lanes wide, of course, and then across it and onto Hollywood Blvd.

  All the two-story apartment complexes I knew were gone—or rather not yet existent. Instead, there were scattered little shanty-like cottages spaced apart. Not the “upscale neighborhood” I knew.

  No one on the street, but then there, there was my first car.

  It was a Studebaker pickup truck and it was black and it was old. Really old, but it looked brand new. The license plate—only one, and on the front bumper, next to the curved radiator grille—had three digits and a letter! How cool was that? I looked around and took out my phone again. No bars. No shit! I thought. But the camera worked. I shot the car. Front, back, and sides. And thought I heard a house door slam and someone coming, so I hightailed it around the corner, down Hayworth to Selma Avenue. Again, a few little houses here, and then I saw the streetlights of Sunset Blvd. slanting down the hill ahead, and that’s where I headed.

  I stood on the northwest corner maybe ten minutes—just looking around.

  Only one building, a four-story apartment building on the opposite, south, side of the street, along with two little storefronts attached, was recognizable from 2010. But looking down Fairfax Avenue, the two—not five—laned road curved down just as it was supposed to.

  What time was it? I had no clue. My watch read 4:06. My phone’s clock was out, of course, flashing and useless.

  Then a car went by. A big old sedan, maybe from the 20s, speeding along Sunset, headed east.

  Another, newer, car came down Fairfax and turned on Sunset, and began going east too, but then pulled to the side of the road in front of the apartment building. The guy driving looked out his window. Then he waved at me.

  I gestured at myself—“Me?”

  He nodded—“Yes.”

  So I crossed Sunset. It was the first wide double-lane street I’d seen so far here, with a single two-color street light dangling high, hung in the middle of the road by a cross wire. All of Sunset as far as I could see in either direction was lined every fifty feet or so with tall, wooden street poles. I went over to the driver side window.

  This was a tan coupe with a darker tan or brown roof, very nice-looking, with swoopy side fenders, and it was shiny, possibly new.

  “You were gesturing at me?” I asked.

  The guy inside was wearing a felt brimmed hat and black overcoat with the narrow cloth collar up. His profile reminded me of the old-time actor Edmund O’Brien, but when he was younger; sharp and yet soft in places too.

  “You lost?” he asked. Surprisingly high voice. “You look lost.”

  “Kind of,” I admitted.

  “You jump ship?” he asked.

  Because of the duffel bag and the jacket.

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “I thought I saw you coming out of the canyon. You lose your ride there? He go down Crescent?”

  He had looked toward and thus he must mean down Fairfax Avenue. Note to self: it’s called Crescent. I lied, “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m headed this way,” he said, pointing east. “If you’re looking for a berth for the night, downtown’s your best bet.”

  “Downtown where?”

  “Geez. You really are lost. Downtown Hollywood. Unless you need to go to downtown Los Angeles?”

  “No. Hollywood’s fine.”

  He gestured and lit a cigarette. “Get in!”

  Once I was inside the car, it was odd. The cloth on the seats was thick and nappy and the Bakelite on the dashboard was amazingly smooth and gleaming.

  “It’s a Chevy Six.” He shrugged. “New.”

  “It’s neat.”

  He laughed, offered me a cigarette, and I declined. I noticed he didn’t start up the car yet.

  “So what’s your story?” he asked.

  “You mean because I’m walking alone on Sunset at what time is it, even? I think this watch stopped!”

  “It’s just after one a.m. But…you were on a boat, right? I’ve picked up e
nough hitchhiking Merchant Marines and sailors to recognize an ocean brat when I see one.”

  I thought fast. “Right again. I signed off some bucket up in Santa Barbara, and I hitched down the rest of the way. Took all day,” I added, I hoped, for verisimilitude.

  “So, now what?” he asked. And I thought, is this guy gay or is he just bored or interested or what? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t read his signals at all, and that stopped me. Really stopped me. What if that would be what tripped me up here in this time? Not knowing the intuitive gestures and language of the era?

  “I mean a kid your age and looks, nine out of ten come down here and try out The Pictures. Was that your idea?”

  And now I resisted, I mean seriously resisted, getting up in the seat and looking at myself in his dashboard mirror, to see what I looked like.

  “I don’t know. The way you say it, it sounds like probably I shouldn’t do that.”

  “I didn’t say anything of the sort. It’s just, well, I’ve seen some good kids go bad fast once they hit this place, you know? Especially when they get hitched up to pictures.”

  “Relax. I’ve got no illusions,” I said. “But I did hear there were a lot of, what do you call ’em, craft jobs, around all the studios. You know: Electricity? Carpentry? I’ve done some of that.”

  “On board?” he asked. “Well, that’s more sensible.”

  He threw his cigarette butt out the window and I resisted the urge to tell him it was a thousand-dollar fine.

  “So where to?” he asked. “The Hollywood Y is closed until seven a.m. tomorrow morning. I’m guessing you’re not terrifically loaded, and you didn’t plan on staying in the Roosevelt or the Knickerbocker hotel.”

  I turned to look at him and smiled. I liked him. But he was totally serious looking back and I now noticed he somehow had large soft eyes. Light eyes, maybe gray or green. But soft because of the heavy eyelashes top and bottom, and those were the only soft features in what was an otherwise masculine face. Thin mustache too. A 30s mustache, I remembered, from old black-and-white movies I’d seen.