L.A. part 1

The City of Angels. Part 1

L.A. part 1
After awkward moments at the courtyard and water fountain affair we climbed into Matt's dirty Camero and headed west. The big ex football player turned painter and I were going down to Melrose while Matt played his best Jack Kerouac with his ex girlfriend in her hotel lobby.
My roommate started buying me drinks at the corner bar while cars lined up the interstate on their way to Orange County and the Valley. He sat down with a Miller High Life, and earnestly suggested we fuck to relieve sexual frustrations towards Matt. He had the air of pragmatism, and I saw that he was looking for solutions to our muddled living arrangement. That and he was half crazy.
Our moment didn't last long, and he quickly moved on to a large woman in a velour track suit. I could tell track suit lady was into my roommate due to the amount of tacky lip-gloss she applied and reapplied to her voluptuous lips. Her lips were shiny and reflective. I watched my roommate move into her mouth like a ravenous binge drinker. The man does nothing in a small way.
Her lips were shiny and reflective.

I scanned the room for the love of my life, but knew he would be at home chopping wood and carrying water in some small, nondescript town. My heart sank counting the steps I had to take before meeting him.

Electricity came in off the street, Hollywood's best answer to a desert monsoon rain.

A few minutes later my head was on the table, and my roommate was pushing money into my hand, instructing me to get into the cab. Sweaty and loosing my grasp, I wondered if this was the night I finally felt the effects of coming off the anxiety medication. After a sideways glance at the shiny lipped woman subcoming to her man's advances, I got into my first L.A. cab, and slammed the door.
On the ride back to east Hollywood I caught a reflection of myself talking to the cabby in rushed, confessional tones. - How I had been living in the woods before this, that I was making a quilt, that I hadn't any other idea of what to do with myself, until I ended up on a road trip that I knew would change everything. How I now lived behind an old restaurant amongst antiques. The irony of sleeping in an antique Chinese wedding bed with a million pillows that were probably drenched in semen. How Matt had misled me, convincing me we would start a gallery in the old restaurant.
I noticed that the driver was only halfway down Melrose, thus launched into how I could not possibly return to San Francisco with all of its Swedish furniture. That I really just wanted to settle down, so I wouldn't have to rat race it out in this pigpen of a town.
I felt confined by the bus and grocery store strikes, I felt confined by the foreshadowing of rampant forest fires to come.
The driver turned around and asked for twenty dollars.
It was worth it. To finally have someone to talk to.