by Susan Orlean
After losing his job with Vines, Harry started running errands for law firms—one in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco. The lawyers found him blundering but generally reliable. One of them, Robert Sheahen, even counted on Harry as a defense witness in a murder. Sheahen said that Harry, ignoring rules that were explained to him, chatted with jurors on his way to the stand. “That was Harry,” Sheahen told me. “He just did things his way.” Harry gave his testimony as instructed. Then the district attorney, hoping to discredit the testimony, asked Harry if he was an actor. Sheahen had anticipated the question and had advised Harry to call himself an office assistant, because saying he was an actor would cast doubt on the sincerity of his testimony. Nevertheless, Harry answered that he was an actor. All the credibility he had on the stand crumpled. Harry didn’t care; he got to say he was an actor, and he was getting attention, which meant more to him than anything. It was the one thing he seemed to need most in the world.
Even if it was frustrating and humbling and impoverishing, Harry Peak’s life in Los Angeles was at least luminous with possibility. It was in the chemical makeup of Los Angeles; possibility was an element, like oxygen. In Santa Fe Springs, there was no sense of potential coursing through the air; what you saw—the lawn, the house, the job—was what you could hope for. In Los Angeles, moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open, and in them you might find a movie star, or a successful audition, or a chance encounter with a powerful person who, with a snap of his fingers, would change your life, like a wizard. The feeling that luck might be about to reveal itself kept Harry nourished enough that he couldn’t imagine returning to the dullness and dead-ended hope back in Santa Fe Springs. As soon as he imagined himself as a person of note, supersized, lit up by fame, he couldn’t picture himself back there. But he didn’t have much purchase on the life he was trying to create in L.A. He hovered between what he didn’t want anymore and what he wasn’t very likely to have.
His days went by in bits and pieces. He did a few hours of work. He got jobs and lost them almost as fast. One time he was hired as a valet at the Sheraton. On his first day, he parked a car in some back corner of the garage and then forgot where it was. The car couldn’t be found for hours. He was fired on the spot. Working or not, he spent a lot of time at bars, especially during happy hour, where he could drink a lot for very little money. He went to acting and modeling auditions. To his great dismay, he discovered that he had a bad case of stage fright. The only thing that helped him overcome it was his love of attention, which overrode his fear of being onstage.
He’d told people that at one of those auditions, he met Burt Reynolds, which launched their friendship. I left messages for Burt Reynolds and told him I wanted to ask if he remembered Harry Peak, but he never called me back. I had a feeling that if he had met Harry, it was maybe a handshake on a set or a brief encounter in passing, and he might not really be able to single Harry out from among the many blond, strong-jawed young men who probably spun in and out of his orbit without ever truly crossing his path. Nevertheless, Harry’s supposed friendship with Burt Reynolds had the power of legend in his family. His father and his sisters told me that Burt Reynolds once called Harry’s mother as a surprise for her birthday, and that she almost hung up on him because she didn’t believe it was really him. I wanted to believe what I was learning about Harry, but the more I heard, the more his life seemed like a series of tall tales, conjured scenes full of wishful thinking. I came to believe that it was quite unlikely that Burt Reynolds had ever met Harry Peak at all.
Large blocks of Harry’s time during this period are unaccounted for and left no trace. He built no résumé, had no steady employment. He was a tumbleweed, lifted and carried wherever the wind took him, alighting briefly in this job and that and then blowing along, leaving little behind as he rolled on. In 1980, he was hired to be an extra in the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. On the set, he struck up a friendship with another extra, a photographer named Demitri Hioteles. Within a short time, they became involved, and Harry moved in with him. Hioteles lives in Florida now, and we spoke on the phone recently. “Harry was the sweetest thing on earth,” he said. “There was something almost angelic about him.” Like everyone else who knew Harry, Hioteles had little patience for his mythmaking. He said that Harry was always coming up with something unbelievable. “He’d come home and say to me, ‘Guess where I’ve been? I was having cocktails with Cher!’ ” Hioteles said. “And I was like, ‘Sure you were, Harry. Sure.’ ” After three years, the relationship ended because Hioteles grew tired of what he called “Harry’s show”—all the lies and stories. What was strange, Hioteles said, was that even though Harry had a such a flair for storytelling, he couldn’t bring that flair to acting. He was more comfortable spinning his stories to an audience of one.
One place Harry found some solid ground was an organization in Echo Park that was part mission, part religious group, and part community center. Known as the American Orthodox Church, it functioned as a kind of way station for a ragtag bunch of young men who knocked around Los Angeles, aimless and unmoored. The church was not affiliated with any traditional religious association. Its founder was a man named Father Archie Clark Smith, who also went by the names the Very Reverend Basil Clark, Mr. Basil Clark Smith, and A. C. Smith. The church’s cofounder was a chiropodist named Homer Morgan Wilkie, who was also known as the Right Reverend Nicholas Stephen Wilkie. Wilkie and Clark/Smith wore black Russian Orthodox–style cassocks and kept regular hours at the French Quarter, a café on Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood. The church, as it was, is now long gone. Wilkie and Clark/Smith are also long gone. Like Harry Peak, they had the strange quality of appearing, existing, and then vanishing, leaving no residue of memory or information about who or what they really were. The one lasting impact Reverends Smith and Wilkie had was that they eventually provided Harry Peak with his alibi for the morning of the library fire.
5.
Burning Books (2006)
By Bosmajian, Haig A.
098.1 B743
Burning Rubber (2015)
By Harlem, Lily
E-book
Burning Chrome (1987)
By Gibson, William
SF Ed.a
Burning Love: Calendar Men Series, Book 8 (2014)
By Carr, Cassandra
E-book
I decided to burn a book, because I wanted to see and feel what Harry would have seen and felt that day if he had been at the library, if he had started the fire. Burning a book was incredibly hard for me to do. Actually, doing it was a breeze, but preparing to do it was challenging. The problem was that I have never been able to do harm to a book. Even books I don’t want, or books that are so worn out and busted that they can’t be read any longer, cling to me like thistles. I pile them up with the intention of throwing them away, and then, every time, when the time comes, I can’t. I am happy if I can give them away or donate them. But I can’t throw a book in the trash, no matter how hard I try. At the last minute, something glues my hands to my sides, and a sensation close to revulsion rises up in me. Many times, I have stood over a trash can, holding a book with a torn cover and a broken binding, and I have hovered there, dangling the book, and finally, I have let the trash can lid snap shut and I have walked away with the goddamn book—a battered, dog-eared, wounded soldier that has been spared to live another day. The only thing that comes close to this feeling is what I experience when I try to throw out a plant, even if it is the baldest, most aphid-ridden, crooked-stemmed plant in the world. The sensation of dropping a living thing into the trash is what makes me queasy. To have that same feeling about a book might seem strange, but this is why I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away? It doesn’t matter that I know I’m throwing away a bound, printed block of paper that is easily reproduced. It doesn’t feel like that. A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the th
oughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press—a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books “the potency of life.” I wasn’t sure I had it in me to be a killer.
It is easy to copy anything these days, and most books exist in endless multiples; a single book no longer has the preciousness it had when books came to life through a cumbersome, labored process. So burning one ordinary book should have been easy for me. But it wasn’t, not at all. I couldn’t even choose a book to burn. First I thought that I could burn a book I didn’t like, but that seemed too aggressive, as if I were delighting in a sort of execution. I knew I couldn’t burn a book I loved. I suppose I could have burned one of my own books, but the psychology was simply too much for me to sort through, and I own so many copies of my books that they have become something of a generic commodity in my home, more like flour or paper towels than actual books. So while I made the decision to burn a book, I put off choosing a book for weeks, trying to figure out what standard I could use to select the one I would burn. Nothing seemed right. Just as I was about to give up on the idea, my husband presented me with a new copy of Fahrenheit 451, a book about the fearsome power of book burning, and I knew this was the one to use.
I chose a windless, warm day and climbed to the top of the hill in my backyard. The San Fernando Valley flung itself before me—all the treetops and houses and buildings blurring together into a wash of stippling and speckling; it was a pale quilt stitched here and there with a flash of red taillights, and above it, in the blue sky, a plane clicked by, dragging its tail of white foam. I had been living in Los Angeles for four years. I’d never thought much about fire before coming here, but now I knew it was prowling everywhere, and that I had to crush any scampering ash and drown any wandering flicker. I’d learned a lot since moving to Los Angeles. I knew the Westside from the Eastside; I knew to avoid traffic on Oscar night; I knew the exquisite beckoning of beauty and acclaim that sings out to anyone here who aches for a life like a highlight reel. I could picture Harry Peak now because I saw him every day in the handsome overgroomed busboys who waited on me, and in the gym-trim extras I sometimes came across when there was filming in my neighborhood—I could recognize their anxious posing, as if each moment bristled with the potential to change their entire lives. I saw him in every person slumped over a laptop in a coffee shop, writing the role of a lifetime, and in the pretty girls wearing too much mascara and nail polish at the grocery store, just in case, just in case. I had come to love Los Angeles; I even loved its preening, grabby, ambitious silliness, its Harry-ness, because it pulsed with emotion and wishfulness and ripe brokenheartedness, animated in the most naked way.
But now I was at the top of my hill to burn a book, so I turned away from the view of the valley and laid down the copy of Fahrenheit 451. I put down a pitcher of water, a box of matches with a rooster on the cover, and an aluminum cookie sheet on which I placed the book. I didn’t know if the book would catch immediately or if it would smolder for a while; I didn’t know if it would occur in a burst or if I would sit and watch the book go up page by page by page. I had chosen to burn a paperback, even though the books in the library had been hardcovers, because I worried that a hardcover would burn for so long that my neighbors would see the smoke and sound an alarm. People in California jump at even the hint of fire, and to be honest, I was a little afraid of what might happen if the fire got out of control.
I struck the first match and it broke, so I struck a second, which spat out a little tongue of flame. I touched the burning match to the cover of the book, which was decorated with a picture of a matchbook. The flame moved like a bead of water from the tip of the match to the corner of the cover. Then it oozed. It traveled up the cover almost as if it were rolling it up, like a carpet, but as it rolled, the cover disappeared. Then each page inside the book caught fire. The fire first appeared on a page as a decorative orange edge with black fringe. Then, in an instant, the orange edge and the black fringe spread across the whole page, and then the page was gone—a nearly instantaneous combustion—and the entire book was eaten up in a few seconds. It happened so fast that it was as if the book had exploded; the book was there and then in a blink it was gone and meanwhile the day was still warm, the sky still blue, I hadn’t moved, the cookie sheet was shiny and empty except for some crumbs of black now strewn on it. There was nothing left, not a trace of anything that resembled a book, a story, a page, a word, an idea. I am told that a big fire is loud, clamoring, windy, groaning. This, though, occurred almost silently, with just the slightest wheezy sound of air, a sort of whoosh, as the book ignited. The pages burned so fast they barely crackled; the sound was soft, like a sizzle, or like the crinkly light sound of water spraying out of a shower. As soon as it was over, I felt like I’d just jumped out of an airplane, which is perhaps the natural reaction to doing something I’d resisted so mightily—there was the elation at overriding my own instincts, elation at the fluid beauty of fire, and terrible fright at the seductiveness of it and the realization of how fast a thing full of human stories can be made to disappear.
6.
The Humorous Side of Trucking (2016)
By Boylan, Buck
814 B7915
Organization, Administration, and Management of the Los Angeles Public Library (1948)
By Los Angeles (Calif.)
027.47949 L879
The Way of Adventure: Transforming Your Life and Work with Spirit and Vision (2000)
By Salz, Jeff
171.3 S186
How to Rehabilitate Abandoned Buildings (1974)
By Brann, Donald R.
Series: Easi-Bild Home Improvement Library 685
643.7 B821-1
In the course of updating its circulation system in 2009, the Los Angeles Public Library lost some of the information about its cardholders prior to that date, so it’s impossible to know whether Harry Peak had a library card, and there is no way to know whether he had ever even been inside Central Library. People pass through the library all the time, unobserved and unremarked upon. Libraries may embody our notion of permanence, but their patrons are always in flux. In truth, a library is as much a portal as it is a place—it is a transit point, a passage. Because Central Library is built around an intersecting pair of corridors, the building is open on every side, and you can cross through it from all directions. The ground floor has the same traffic pattern as Grand Central Station in Manhattan. Both places are animated by a hurrying flow that surges in and out of the doors all day long. You can bob along in that flow, unnoticed. The library is an easy place to be when you have no place you need to go and a desire to be invisible.
It seems simple to define what a library is—namely, it is a storeroom of books. But the more time I spent at Central, the more I realized that a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears. There were days when I came to the library and planted myself near the center of the main corridor and simply watched the whirl and throb of the place. Sometimes people ambled by, with no apparent destination. Some people marched crisply, full of purpose. Many were alone, some were in pairs; occasionally, they traveled in a gaggle. People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.
One recent morning, before dawn, I did hear the library in complete silence. I had come to see the shipping department, which opens at five, and then to meet John Szabo, the current city librarian of Los Angeles. Before going down to the shipping department, I stopped in the corridor near the main information des
k, just to savor the odd experience of the library heavy with quiet, a slumbering place, interrupted only by the occasional creak and sigh that all old buildings make when they’re empty. The shipping department is in the basement, invisible to the rest of the library. It is never quiet. The room is hard-walled and hard-floored; sound ricochets around it like a cue ball. This particular morning, eight men and one woman were at work, standing side by side at a long counter piled high with books.
When I first learned that the library had a shipping department, I didn’t know quite what that meant, because I couldn’t think of anything a library needed to ship. I came to learn that what gets shipped isn’t material going out into the world; it’s books traveling from one branch to another. The shipping department at Central moves thirty-two thousand books—the equivalent of an entire branch library—around the city of Los Angeles five days a week. It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books. The number of flowing books has been growing ever since the 1990s, when patrons first were able to request books online from any of the city’s seventy-two branches and have them delivered to their local branch. “After the Internet came in, shipping just blew up,” said George Valdivia, who has been the acting head of the department since 2010. “We used to be able to use vans to deliver the books. Now we have so many books that we need trucks.” He gestured across the room toward a truck backed up to the dock, its rear door opened in a huge yawn. The driver, a man with ropy arms named Gonzalo, was counting the plastic bins in the back of the truck. “We got twenty-two!” he yelled to the crew packing the bins, who were all wearing headphones, which were plugged in to their phones. No one responded to Gonzalo’s shout. He shifted one of the bins. “Encyclopedias?” he asked George. “So damn heavy.”
