15 May, 2008

the City of Angels




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 my other housemate. He held the air of pragmatism, and the confidence of former football player. 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, we blinked and he moved on to a large woman in a velour tracksuit. I could tell tracksuit 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 blooming to her man's advances, I got into my first LA 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 would pick pieces of sewing machine thread off my blouse and out of my hair, how people who would come to visit would feel compelled to reach out and remove random bits of thread and fuzz from my disheveled mess of hair or throat.
Or that I was making a quilt... that I hadn't any other idea of what to do with myself, untilone day I ended up on a road trip that I would change everything and leave me utterly to destiny... How I now lived behind an old restaurant amongst Chinese antiques. I expounded on the irony of sleeping in an antique Chinese wedding bed with a million pillows that were probably drenched in semen... How my house mate had misled me, convincing me we would start a gallery in the old restaurant, a gallery of yesteryear with a hotdog stand and manual typewriters amongst the understated brilliance of gallery which forgoes the usual hype.
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. How I felt confined by the bus and grocery store strikes, and nervous of the forest fires that were creeping up San Bernardino and down my simple street.
The driver turned around and asked for twenty dollars.
It was worth it. To finally have someone to talk to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow. what a way with words, like tasting the feel.
miss you lots, think on you often.

~PaTricK

Anonymous said...

tasting the feel