Flash

by Jim Miller

  Just have a few minutes to get this out before work. Things are going OK with my classes but none of them are very interesting. Other than the job thing it’s hard to see the point. English is boring, math tedious, and political science lame. I’ll try to stick it out as you advise but other than the “better job” thing there’s not much I’m learning that I couldn’t learn on my own. I know you said not to follow your example, but you never finished school and you have a job, right? Not giving up yet, I’m just saying I think you did all right, no matter what that asshole Kurt says. Maybe it’s just having to stay in that house to save money. Shit, I’m in my twenties! Mom and Kurt are fighting all the time and it gets me down having to listen. Sorry to dump all this on you, but I know you’ll understand. I’ll be OK. Off to serve coffee to the masses.

  Love, Hank

  P.S. How ’bout a visit sometime? Or me down in SD?

  I smiled, shook my head, folded the letter up carefully, and put it back into the envelope and then in my back pocket. Hank always sent his letters to the PO box since I moved a lot. He and a few select friends were are the only people who have that address other than the junk mail people who seem to be able to ferret you out no matter where you try to hide. I insist on letter writing; it’s my nod to a dying art and the notion that fast isn’t always better.

  The bus was lurching up the hill toward my stop and I stared out the window into the night at the lights in the front windows of apartments and houses—strangers doused in the dull glow of TVs or sitting down for an evening drink. I got off the bus when it hit 25th, to head to my flat. On the way there I nodded to the doorman smoking outside the Turf Club and glanced through the window at a few solitary faces staring at laptop screens in the Krakatoa Café. I lived behind a Victorian house that the owner had chopped into four claustrophobically small units. My place had a postage-stamp lawn and little porch outside the studio. I had made it—I was in my forties and still doing the work I did when I was in my twenties. And my kid seemed bent on replicating my mistakes. If my mom’s stories about my “hobo” ancestor were correct, maybe it was in the genes.

  Long ago I had been relegated to weekend visits, so I was the “cool dad.” It was true, Hank’s stepfather Kurt was an asshole, but unfortunately that seemed to be sending Hank the message that people who could support themselves adequately were all assholes. Partially true perhaps, but a dangerous generalization. Trisha, Hank’s mother, had left me back when he was a baby. I had been working for the LA Scene, an upstart alternative weekly in the days before they were all bought up by media corporations. Anyway, I had been out covering a Jane’s Addiction show at the Howl club down by McArthur Park and came home to an empty apartment and a note: “Sorry Jack, I can’t do this anymore.” By “this” Trisha meant living on my shit wages with a baby. She had been a hairdresser, but quit when she got pregnant, to my surprise, apparently expecting that fatherhood would transform me into a proper provider so she could stay at home. Instead, she got a live-in boyfriend who had to leave her alone at home a lot so he could bring back an inadequate paycheck.

  We’d been living in a cheap apartment in the San Fernando Valley with a banner perpetually strung on the side of the building, which read “Move In Now!” Perhaps the owner thought he needed to advertise endlessly because the combination of the 24/7 smell of greasy chili burgers emanating from the Tommy’s next door and the pungent odor of late night hops from the Anheiser Busch Brewery across the street drove everyone who could afford to leave out of the complex. None of our neighbors spoke English, a fact that Trisha frequently commented on, along with the 5:00 AM Norteño music that the neighbors blasted from their pickups as they took off for work. “It’s a hard life,” I’d tell her.

  After she left, she moved in with her mother, who consistently referred to me as “the loser” during my son’s formative years. This made for a painful and ambivalent childhood for Hank. Nonetheless, the harder Trish and her Mom tried to push him away from me, the more he pulled his way back. Even as a very young boy Hank would draw pictures of “Daddy at a music show” or “Daddy writing.” It drove them fucking crazy and I loved him for it.

  A couple of years after Trisha moved out, she hooked up with Kurt, an ex-frat boy from USC who had a job in real estate. They got married and Kurt set about ruining Trisha’s life in a whole new way. He had affairs, berated her in front of Hank, and dissed me constantly. Kurt was an all-star. His saving grace: money. Hence Trisha was long-suffering and materially comfortable in West LA.

  Trisha and I met back in 1987 at Al’s Bar, the legendary punk spot in the loft district of downtown LA where a lot of artists lived. It was walking distance from the Atomic Café on the edge of Little Tokyo. I loved Al’s, both for the good music and for the fact that it was a place where Bukowski used to drink. The neon sign behind the bar said, “Tip or Die.” I was there that night to cover a tiny theater troupe’s version of Kerouac’s Tristessa. They put the show on in the alley behind the bar and an audience of a dozen or so people sat on the same kind of metal bleachers they have at little league fields. It was a dramatic adaptation of the Kerouac novel about Jack and his friends in Mexico City, and Jack’s brief dalliance with a soulful, tragically beautiful prostitute, whose name means “sadness.” The actors entered stage right from the back door of the bar and did a decent job of invoking the beat mood with no set, no costumes, and no music. Spare, earnest, and bittersweet. My review was entitled, “Beat in the Alley.”

  I remember spending a lot of time during the play staring up at a high rise framed by the narrow alley and glancing over at Trisha. She was dressed in all black (a sort of uniform then) with long hair dyed bright red. Her eyes were blue-green and she had a sweet smile that lit up her face. After the play, we both stayed to listen to a cowpunk band from Austin, Texas, named Hillbilly Tryst or something like that. I bought her a beer and we talked about the play, about the Beats, about music. We agreed that life was tragic. She let her friends go home and left with me, strolling down the dark street lined with sleeping bodies under dirty blankets or flattened cardboard boxes. When we got to my car I kissed her softly and gazed into her alabaster face. We looked up at the crescent moon above the looming skyline. The whole city was mine, the big wide world. I was in love. We went home together, and it was all good, for quite a while.

  Back then, Trisha rented a room in a big house up in the Hollywood hills from the guy who ran The Grave on Hollywood Boulevard. Actually she chipped in for his rent. The place was really owned by a nearly senile old woman in the valley who lived there when she was a kid. She hadn’t done her homework, and Zane, the Ghoul, and Trisha were getting the whole two-story house with its nice yard overlooking a canyon and a view of the Hollywood sign for a mere pittance. Zane, who managed the club at night, had a day job with the Water and Power Company so he more or less had his shit together. The Ghoul, on the other hand, played in a local band called Night of the Living Dead and was a full-on junkie.

  By this time in my youth, I had grown my shaggy hair out to about shoulder length and usually never wore anything fancier than jeans, a t-shirt, and black converse sneakers. Trisha used to make fun of my lack of fashion sense. That said, the Ghoul, who rarely bathed, never washed his clothes, and made little effort to conceal his track marks, made me look like a GQ cover boy. He usually lounged around the basement room in a leather jacket with no shirt underneath and boxer shorts. When I came over Trisha and I would do everything we could to avoid being drawn down into his lair. Suffice to say we never chased the dragon.

  The rest of the place was fantastic. Zane, a manic Aussie with a thick mane of long red hair, had an impressive collection of Marilyn Monroe photos that lined the hallways upstairs: Marilyn in Playboy, Marilyn in Bus Stop, Marilyn pouting, Marilyn teasing, Marilyn tragic and innocent, Marilyn in death. He and his girlfriend, Cat—an aspiring actress who had her own place but basically lived with Zane—had filled the living room with vintage furniture carefully selected from st
ores on Melrose—late-fifties and early-sixties Moderne. The end tables of the leopard-skin couch were littered with copies of Screw, The Hollywood Reporter, and BAM.

  Trisha worked on Melrose in a salon called the Union Jack, which the owner had decorated with British rock posters, Sex Pistols, Clash, The Who, etc. Whenever I could, we’d meet for lunch or for drinks after work. We scoured used-record stores for hidden gems, had lots of coffee, and looked through second-hand shops. During that period, Trisha never said a thing about money. We just talked and made love and went out to see music. She read a lot so we rapped about books mostly. We’d both started and then stopped college and figured we didn’t need to pay somebody to tell us what to read. She liked the Beats, but also Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Thus the talk had a lot to do with sex and death and suffering and angst and carpe diem. One thing Trisha didn’t share with me was an interest in politics. I just assumed we were in tune at a basic level.

  Sometimes we’d go downtown between the Nickel and the Garment District to Gorky’s on open mic night to listen to bad poetry for laughs. Gorky’s was a hip Russian-themed cafeteria that served borscht, brewed their own beer, and had music, art, and poetry every week. Before I met Trisha, I had a brief flirtation with poetry. I read a lot of Bukowski and wrote a few pieces about waking up with a bad hangover and hating the world. When I went to my first open mic night at Gorky’s I discovered that everyone else had read a lot of Bukowski and had a lot of hangovers. We all sucked. After that realization, I still liked to go to Gorky’s, but solely for amusement. One night, Trisha and I almost bust a gut laughing after an English grad student from USC read a poem about a roach crawling on her IUD. The woman wasn’t pleased with our response and flipped us off. Of course, this only made us laugh all the more.

  Sometimes there would be surprises though. One evening, after a series of poets who overcame their lack of skill with the language by yelling at the top of their lungs, a petite young woman in an X t-shirt nervously came to the mic and read an elegy called “Anonymous” about a man who died on the street outside her loft downtown. It was a cry for those who die unknown in solitary rooms, a howl for the utterly forlorn. It was so stark and beautiful after what had preceded it that quite a few people, myself included, were moved to tears. It was beyond irony, for once.

  I was pretty busy then with the LA Scene. I did a whole series on the culture of the homeless men who lived by the Los Angeles River. I spent a week sleeping under bridges and hanging out in homeless camps interviewing men around bonfires. One group I found was a band of scavengers. They sold scrap metal on the black market so they’d rip it off of anything they could find and bring it in to the yards. It was a good enough gig to get some of the guys out of the camps and into hotel rooms in the Nickel. Some, though, thought that rent was a waste of coin and preferred to live alfresco. I remember one night in particular. It was February during a cold snap and I was sitting by a fire under a freeway bridge sharing a few bottles of wine and cheap whiskey with twenty men. There was a kind of code in the camps that reminded me of those scenes in The Grapes of Wrath where folks on the road would help each other out sometimes. Some of the veterans remembered the old days too. That disappeared when crack hit the scene and people started killing each other for pocket change. A few months after my series, the LA Times did a similar thing, but I never got a call or a credit from anybody.

  Speaking of crack, I also did a story on the “Contra Cocaine” posters put up all over the city by guerilla poster artist Robbie Conal. The poster featured a skull in the tradition of the calaveras in Mexican Day of the Dead art, but this one was wearing a pinstriped suit with a camouflage background. The heading provocatively made the connection between the Reagan Administration’s support of the contra insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua with the little known fact that the contras were flying coke into the US with the help of the CIA. Overnight, 10,000 of these posters went up all over the city, from the alley near my studio apartment in Venice to telephone poles and other public spaces in LA and in seventeen different American cities. I got a photographer to take some greats shots of the posters in Skid Row downtown and interviewed Conal and a local professor at UCLA about the significance of the gesture. The CIA-funded drug runs during the explosion of street gang warfare in LA was strong stuff and despite CIA denials, it turned out to be true. I followed up that story with a piece about Salvadoran death squads chasing down and murdering leftist refugees in Los Angeles. One of my sources got killed before the article went to press. It was one of those epiphanic moments in my life when I realized that anything, no matter how menacing, was possible.

  So I was completely immersed in my life as an underpaid jack-of-all-trades, if you’ll pardon the pun, for the LA Scene, not paying much heed to the future. When I wasn’t crashing at Trisha’s house in the Hills, she was staying with me at my studio in Venice. We took walks by the canals to feed the ducks and bemoaned each time a McMansion took the place of a cottage. We strolled down the boardwalk on lazy afternoons watching the fire jugglers, listening to pitches from religious cranks, and stopping to be serenaded by troubadours on roller skates. We’d buy books in Small World, and read over beers until sunset. The only bad thing that went down during that period happened back at Trisha’s place, when a friend of the Ghoul’s OD’d in the bathtub during one of the gatherings in what was an endless stream of house parties. There were tons of people there, and when Zane discovered the body he cleared the house, screaming at everyone to “get the fuck out” and insisting that the Ghoul and his buddies drag the guy’s body out of the house. I almost got in a fight trying to persuade them to call an ambulance. Trisha packed up her stuff that night and moved in with me. Within a month she was pregnant.

  To be honest I was surprised she wanted to keep the baby. I had told her that it was her body and I’d be there either way. She thought about it and decided to have the kid. “Because I love you,” she said. As you might expect, I was scared shitless at the prospect, but soldiered on. Trisha quit her job, and we moved to the Valley to be near my mom’s house, as Trisha’s family was not too keen on the idea of her having a kid “out of wedlock.” I was surprised people still talked that way. In my eyes, Trisha just got more and more beautiful when she was pregnant. She let her hair, naturally black, grow out, and she was radiant. I would write up my pieces and go get her snacks when she needed them. I was with her in the hospital and got up at night to feed little Henry (named after Henry Miller and the “Hank” character in the Bukowski stories).

  During this period, there was never any discussion of Trisha being unhappy. Quite the contrary—I remember getting up to feed Hank (Trisha pumped breast milk in bottles so I could do some late night duty), and I walked with him cradled in my arms out onto the steps in front of our place. Despite myself, I got lost in the wonder of my baby boy. The fragility, the improbability of life. I could smell the hops cooking across the way and it was deep and sweet in the hot summer air. At that moment I swore that I’d try to be there for him for the rest of my life. Trisha came out and kissed me on the cheek and we looked at the moon. I’d never felt more love or more peace than in the ocean of it that subsumed me at that moment.

  The next night, I drove over the hill to cover the Jane’s show at the Howl. I wandered around the gorgeous hotel lobby, went into a room taken over by dozens of huge screens featuring a Burroughs-like cut-up of random black and white stills, some of iconic images like Robert Frank, others looked like family photos, then some blurry color footage from a handheld camera. It lost my attention and I went over to the bar and bought a vodka soda. In the next room, some guy dressed up like Jesus, with a big cross strapped to his back, was crawling around on all fours begging for a gin and tonic. This got old fast so I walked back out to the top of the big staircase in the lobby. It was an elegant setting, a fitting backdrop for Mae West in her prime. By now it was littered with tall, sexy girls, posing by the railing, practicing various stages of enn
ui. A few looked high on H. They were the kind of women who never gave me the time of day and I was out of the game now anyway.

  Jane’s Addiction played in another big room that looked as if it had once been the hotel’s chapel. The crowd was jammed in tight, flesh against flesh. You could feel the rush of anticipation surge through the room when the band came on stage. They opened with a hard driving version of “Pigs in Zen” and Perry Farrell was in top form, prancing around the stage theatrically and leaping in the air. Everybody went nuts for “Jane Says,” but I preferred their cover of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the way Farrell’s voice poured out longing when they closed with “I Would For You.” It made me think of Trisha, and I just wanted to get home. I walked out past the lounging and posing and desiring crowd to my beat-up Mustang. I popped in a Los Lobos tape and glanced up at the downtown skyline as “One Time One Night” came on, and I rolled onto the freeway to head back to the Valley. When I got home, I found the note in our empty apartment. It was a warm summer night and the thick smell of hops and hamburgers made me want to throw up.