According to Ventura, the universe doesn’t know from random. “Happens all the time,” he used to say confidently to the most peculiar instances of synchronicity. So there might well have been meaning—though I’m not claiming one—in the coincidence of the letter I received right after turning in my resignation. It was from the Committee of the First and Only Annual Craters of the Moon Film Festival, inviting me as a guest to the festival’s opening night, where there would premiere the long lost but rediscovered and restored silent masterpiece The Death of Marat. The festival was also pleased to announce that the film’s director, Adolphe Sarre, would himself attend. My first reaction, particularly given the timing, was that the joke had been taken rather too far. But then I remembered that I was, after all, the one who had taken it there.
From the summit of Laurel Canyon, the second light to be seen in the northern hills on the other side of the Valley—if you move your gaze westward—is my mother. She lives there where she’s lived my whole life, in a two-bedroom flat above a little theater she used to run. From the summit of Laurel Canyon it used to be twenty minutes by freeway to reach this light; now it’s a little under an hour by surface streets. Now the only ones who live in the Valley are the ghosts of the Indians who lived here to begin with, until the Spanish monks came and built the mission, and the keepers of the lights in the hillsides, of which I count no more than six or seven most nights, and on some nights not that. If her eastern neighbor, whoever he might be, leaves his house dark, then my mother becomes the first light rather than the second, and I have to backtrack.
My mother is in her late sixties. As one is supposed to do but rarely does, she seems to have gotten better at life as she’s gotten older. With my father gone she hasn’t had much choice, unless she was going to give it up altogether; and though in that first year following his death she may believe she came close to such an option, no one else who knows her is likely to think so. Give me the rest of my own life and I’ll see if I can remember my mother ever giving up on anything. I worry about her being alone, of course—I still wince at how easily, just months after my father died, I almost left L.A. with Sally—though sometimes I think she worries about my solitude more than I do hers. For a woman of such strong ideas about things, it must have taken all of her will to resolve, sometime after I left home around eighteen, not to tell me how to live my life; but she hasn’t, even if once in a while she hints gently. Driving out tonight I already know she isn’t going to be happy with my two bits of news: that I’ve quit my job; and that Viv has left. Quitting a job on principle is the kind of grandstanding self-congratulatory gesture I’ve been making my whole life, so she’ll probably get used to that one, but as for Viv, my mother is more partial to her than to anyone I’ve ever been with. The two of them have the same edge, as well as a nearly genetic hostility to ambiguity, however much wisdom may have taught them how much life is ambiguous. “If you ever let Viv go,” my mother laughed not all that long ago, “I’m afraid I’d have to kill you.” She was only half kidding when she said it. She had drunk only enough wine to inspire her to say the truth, rather than so much as to say what she didn’t really mean. She fears and dreads, I think, what she senses is my true nature: to go it alone in the end. But recently I’ve come to suspect it’s only part of my nature; just how big a part is what I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now, along with everyone else who blindly, haphazardly wanders across the firing range of my life.
My mother cooks dinner and we discuss movies, the empty theater beneath our feet and the days when it wasn’t empty, and politics and the country. We disagree a lot about politics, except that as time passes each of us moves toward what the other views as an evolving reasonableness. We usually have a good time in these discussions, though lately, as things in the country have gone the way they’ve gone, I guess I don’t enjoy it quite as much. “Your father couldn’t talk about these things without getting angry,” she remembers correctly. We don’t talk that much about my father; perhaps both of us sometimes wonder if we should, though it doesn’t feel like there’s something significant that’s being avoided or left unsaid. When he died we didn’t have a funeral or a memorial, since the one thing we all shared, my father most of all, was an abhorrence of ritualizing death. He was privately cremated and his ashes cast at sea, as I would want to be. Still, there are times I wonder fleetingly if maybe we should have done something after all. I don’t know. I suspect not doing something seemed stranger to other people than it did to us. Having married the man when she was eighteen and spent over forty years with him until his death, my mother was baffled and a little annoyed with herself when, a year after he died, she wasn’t over it yet. She may be the kind of person who couldn’t function in her indomitable fashion if she allowed herself to believe that, in fact, she would never really be over it. Being the sort of person I am, I accepted that from the beginning, and that somehow made it easier.
Now when we speak of my father it’s a fond reference, like to him getting pissed off about politics. I’m sure I’ve thought about my father at least once every day since he died. It’s in the most casual way, not with grief but rather as an aside: I’ll say something to him as though he’s there, something that would make him smile or laugh. In one way, as I imagine it is with all children, I’ve not accepted his death at all: his absence hasn’t sunk in, the way it must sink in all the time for my mother. When I think about him I don’t think of him as unhappy, the way I used to. My mother finally, gently corrected an earlier misimpression on my part that my father hadn’t been all that content with his life; and as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to see she’s probably right, because I’ve come to see how one makes his peace with the passing of his dreams, or how those dreams are displaced by ones at once less grand and more full, at once more ordinary but no less profound. I was too haunted, after he died, by a confession he made fifteen years before, when I was about to leave for Europe and no one, including myself, had any idea when I would be back; and in the early morning hours before my plane flight, my father asked that I forgive his “feet of clay.” I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. I had never thought his feet were anything but stone, because what I admired about him wasn’t the fulfillment of any big ambitions but the small moments that few people witnessed, like at his brother’s funeral, for instance, when he stood up to all the assembled aunts and cousins to comfort my dead uncle’s ostracized, grief-stricken ex-wife. Now I suppose if there’s anything I do regret not saying to him before he died it’s how much I admired that moment.
Either that, or I’d have tried to tell him it never really mattered to me that he couldn’t read my books. I assume this bothered him a lot more than it did me. He just didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, any more than I knew what the hell that feet-of-clay stuff was, not to mention that I wasn’t always all that sure myself what I was talking about in my books. I never thought it was all that important that I completely understand what I was saying, I knew the books came from some place more real to me than any literal understanding; and if my father could have read them that way, well, then I guess he wouldn’t have been the person my father was. For him to have confronted that would have been to further confront, as he must have already done, the most mind-boggling part of being a parent, which is that even the child who comes from you is not ever wholly of you, that there’s always a part of the child that is always beyond the genes or shared soul of any father and mother. What my father did understand was that this was my dream, to write these books, and that I had held on to that dream long past the point any sensible person would have. He may have also envied my plain dumb luck that I always knew what my dream was, when I don’t think he was ever sure what his was, until those last fifteen years when he realized it was the life he had had, the wife, the son, and that no other dream was ever likely to have been better. Maybe he suspected that, in knowing my dream, I also knew something else, something he didn’t. What I know now is that he k
new something I didn’t, and haven’t yet found the wisdom for.
They seem so slight now, so insignificant, my very specific dreams compared to his vague ones. One writes first to find himself, then one writes to find the universe. One writes for wisdom: the writing is the road and the wisdom is the place to where the road is going. This remains true until later when, over the course of much writing bad or good, inconsequential or important, one has constructed a literary persona, the purpose of which then becomes its own self-perpetuation. Then you begin to suspect that only the persona is the place to where the road has been going—which means you have not been on the road to wisdom after all. You begin to suspect you’ve only been processing wisdom, as you’ve processed all your experience, as you’ve processed and used all the material of your life in order to prop up an identity, a shabby romantic image of yourself; and in the process you’ve missed everything. A few years ago I realized that while I had always written on my own terms, I had come to evaluate the worth of that work, and therefore my own worth, on the terms of others, and that not only was this corrupt, it was the very kind of contradiction from which insanity, the insanity of true lostness, is born. Faced with such a realization I was either going to, out of genius or courage, persist—or, out of genius or courage, desist altogether, disappearing like Rimbaud with nothing to say, although if that isn’t a load of self-romanticizing horseshit, I don’t what is. Fresh out of genius and running a tad low on courage, I’ve neither persisted nor desisted, which, whatever the dangling participle of life’s sentence this has turned me into, has at least left me wondering; and brought me back to my father.
I wait for wisdom; and still wait. It may be a while. I live in the shadow of my own life. Having developed a literary persona, the writer inevitably reaches the point where the only real remaining test of integrity is whether he or she is willing to smash that persona and see what’s left when the dust settles—with the terrifying possibility that nothing will be left. Now I tire of never being old, never being young, never being either child or man. I tire of a perpetual adolescence, without either childhood’s purity and wonder—not to be confused with innocence, since children are the least innocent of creatures—or adulthood’s weight and power. I was an old man in my youth and I feel adolescent in my aging, old before my time and immature after it. Even as I imagine death always hovering, I still haven’t reached the moment when I can really imagine my own dying, which is what I’ve always assumed the moment of true wisdom to be, even as it might also be the moment of true madness, or even as it might be a leap of imagination beyond even a madman’s ability to leap. I’ve been caught between the certain knowledge that my dark impulses are destructive, and the certain dread that it’s a collapse into a premature kind of death not to sometimes follow those impulses into sensual experience. I wait for wisdom and the moment when my life is revealed to have ballast, and in the waiting I’m left believing, fifty-one days out of a hundred, that God exists—or at least that life exists on the level of Mystery—but also just suspicious enough, just faithless enough that, in my suspicion and faithlessness, I’m bound to proceed through the remaining forty-nine on the awful, nearly unspeakable assumption that there is no mystery at all, only molecules.
In the passenger seat next to me, though, on the long drive back across the Valley, my father makes the case for mystery. On the long drive back through the wind-washed night, he doesn’t have to say a thing, he only has to be there in the seat next to me: it isn’t the first time. He’s been there before, on other nights. I’ve dreamed of him often; in all but the first dream, I never had any doubt they were anything but dreams, dreams in which we were together again, back before he died. But in that first dream, not long after he died, I was quite aware he was dead, and we argued a long time about whether it was a dream at all. My father won the argument, the way the ghosts of Indians on the road back to Hollywood win their argument, making the case for their own mystery, before they scatter.
Then the ghosts of my beautiful dead city scattered. One morning Abdul’s apartment was empty, except for the trash strewn across the hardwood floors he was so proud of; he and his pregnant golden Indiana girlfriend cleared out in the middle of the night, beneath the wrathful surveillance of the Hamblin’s female tenants and under cover of a darkness that peers through the still unrepaired gash in the hallway ceiling. Veroneek sold Network Vs. and took off for Oregon, along with Joe the wolf who is possessed by the soul of a man. Shale moved his family back to Boston by way of New York, or New York by way of Boston, and Dr. Billy got a position at a university in Iowa teaching a course on Sex Addicts in American Literature, where to his dread everyone will feel compelled to call him doctor. His wife Jane is writing a novel.
I think Dr. Billy, and I know Shale and Ventura, had a fleeting hope the situation at the newspaper would become so galvanized one way or another that something radical would happen, a palace coup or a general uprising on behalf of justice. All of them are too smart to have placed much stock in such a scenario, but they couldn’t help hoping anyway. I still get messages on my phone machine from people on the staff. A lot of the calls that come in are hang-ups, the line disconnected long seconds after the machine begins recording, some mysterious presence hanging in the air wondering what to say or whether I’m really not there. Word has it that the mood of the paper is ghastly, and that Freud N. Johnson walks around the Egyptian Theater like a dead man. I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t find this satisfying, but beyond that I can’t say I give the whole thing much thought at all. It almost never crosses my mind. It’s pretty clear that, for me anyway, something is over.
Ventura has decided to go back to Texas, and there apparently isn’t anything I can or should do to dissuade him, any more than I could dissuade Viv from going to Holland. He is planning to take a circuitous route there, the exact course of which is known only to the universe or the moons of Jupiter or the tides of Bora Bora, which he trusts will be divulged to him when the universe is good and ready. Ventura might be audacious enough to take on the Twentieth Century, but not the universe. He wants to tour the secret volcanoes of America and stand at their rims long past the dusk, staring into the craters. God help us when he divines their lava, deciphers their embers; he’ll be damned impossible to live with. I worry about him. Of all of us his courage in quitting the paper was perhaps greatest, and now he is at the loosest of its consequences’ ends. I want to shake him out of it; but Ventura does his own shaking. When the day comes for him to leave, we share a shot of tequila and, when I can’t stand the tears in his eyes, I turn away, and pretend that when I turn back he won’t be gone.
The sun has stopped hurtling toward Los Angeles, having come as close as it wants to get. The city swelters. The Santa Ana winds whip through and everything is as crisp as the kiss of a fallen live wire. The distant trees beyond my windows blow slow and soundless as though to a gust from the center of the earth, so primordial that its roar still rattles around the deepest passages of the planet. The sky is a heat-shimmered blue, unviolated by smoke as it hasn’t been in a decade, none of the rings having burned since before the rain. After the rains passed, everything was soaked for weeks and then everything bloomed, grass grew, and then everything went very dry, so that one errant flicker of fire feels like it could set ten miles blazing in seconds. From billboard to billboard I see the Red Angel of L.A. peeling away in long strips that curl and hang, until all that’s left of her are the vertical remains, as though behind the bars of a jail cell; all the billboards of the city taken together might add up to one whole Justine. All the time zones have subdivided into smaller and smaller time zones, until everyone is his or her own time zone and the city is alive with time, a maelstrom of a million uncoordinated clocks all set at different hours and minutes. Out of the dark, after the sun falls, through the hole in the roof of the hotel hallway, the movies come at me one after another on mysterious airwaves, never stopping until I’m the one who’s hysterical: Touch of Evil, Johnny
Guitar, Sweet Smell of Success, Point Blank, Pretty Poison, Mondo Topless, Cutter’s Way, Lifeforce, Nightdreams, Wax, Twin Peaks Fire, Walk With Me, The Last Temptation of Christ. …
Their images fill a life that has apparently begun to vanish. I got two interesting letters just the other day. The first was a confession from K in Virginia. She’s been alluding to this approaching confession for some time now, it’s been on the tip of her tongue in the midst of a long fragmented story she’s been telling me about a love affair she’s having with a prison guard. Since I somehow seem to have missed the beginning of this story, I’m not clear whether the prison is real or metaphorical. It may not matter because, as K puts it, “it could be that nothing I tell you is true,” though I don’t know whether that’s part of the confession or a preemptive denial, undoing the confession before it’s made. For a while I thought the confession was going to be that she’s not beautiful; and indeed when she hints at this—“It’s ironic, you wouldn’t look at me 2X”—I’m ashamed that she believes this matters to me, that I’ve somehow made her believe it matters and my shallowness is so transparent. But that isn’t the confession either. The confession is this: “I’m a fraud,” she writes. “Not in things I’ve said necessarily, but in how I first got your attention. I had been given, as a gift, a letter you once wrote to someone else ten or fifteen years ago. In this letter you listed several areas of concern that seemed to be on your mind. So I decided to address those same concerns, one by one, and in the same order, so that, in effect, you were receiving a letter from yourself. This was the password into the secret room. When you received my first card, you thought you had found someone on your wavelength. You had, and it was you.”
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