by Ken O'Steen
No matter the incongruence of my location I was securely entombed in a book of Thomas Bernhard’s. I was sealed up in a tiny cosmos of Austrian anomie, wherein the armies of conquering stupidity were bloodily mangled, the universal peddlers of humbug surgically filleted, the forces of cultural mutiny adjudicated and their heads impaled; travesties of history were coughed up violently, and their perpetrators skinned alive; autocrats, plutocrats, top cats and craven multitudes were mercilessly belittled; wherein the concussively wounding and exquisitely hilarious absurdity of every breath of existence was memorialized in howls, and where the gutters ran with vomitus of disgust…my kind of place. I had decided to re-read all of them, the Bernhard books, though I had only one of them with me then. The others were stored with the rest of my material world.
I was sitting and reading at a busy car wash. I’d been noticing from the avenue as I walked by, the carefree customers sprawled outside in the folding chairs, browsing magazines on benches waiting for their automobiles to shimmy out, and for the climactic toweling off, when I got the idea of joining in. It was not difficult to stay mostly inconspicuous among shiny people and shiny cars. A first during this time of living off the land: earlier in the day the jungle had offered up a pack of cigarettes. The found booty was at my side all the while I was reading, and I puffed down half at least of what I had. The combustibility of my neurons was only improved by synergy: stimulation by language and tobacco simultaneously. I stayed there reading and smoking till dusk, when the car wash closed.
When I left, I was stung by a bite of nostalgia for proximity to the entirety of the books I owned. When you had them around you, they appeared to wall you in so to speak with priorities you cherished, and barricaded you in steadiness against grand mal seizures in the maledicted world at large. Observing the soaping, spraying, and scrubbing of automobiles had enflamed one more nostalgia, recalling for me the gratifications of regular grooming. Still in possession of a meager savings account, the unspent bills in my wallet to be used for a single night beyond the streets during my hiatus from habitation, I made a decision. The night had come to retain a hole in the wall, one with its own bath. There were only three more days before I could roll into Pyramid and lay claim to the last of the real paychecks. I sensed deep down, there was no rising tide of inspiration to martyr myself to thriftiness holding out the entire fortnight, and ending up with the paycheck, as well as retaining the pittance I still would have in my pocket.
The little slice of paradise I found, white stucco bathed for many years in California carbon monoxide and particulates, and now a slimy brown, was crumbling, marinating in bus fumes, and the neighborhood surrounding it vibrating with the droning racket of discount commerce, and legally unsanctioned trade. There were still palm trees in the yard, natch. After a meticulous process of selection the house had been chosen because of the sign in its first floor window advertising vacant rooms going by the night, the week and the month.
After the bill for my stay had been settled up, I hopped across the street to a pan-Asian-operated bodega there and scored myself a bottle of Gallo. This transaction, coupled with the preceding expenditure depleted me to a level of merely cents. But I was blessed with strong conviction that I could fend for myself successfully in the wild for three more days. I’d been given a prime location, on a corner of the structure, up on the second floor. Breathtaking wouldn’t be the adjective I would choose first to describe the vista I could view from the window. And while respiration never was interrupted, after observing the view for nearly an hour, more than once, a powerful reflex to hold my nose was felt.
I had pulled an assemblage of sticks in the form of a chair to the window, and sat there for some time watching the ghetto go by. Luxuriating, I foresaw a long evening ahead of smoking, drinking, reading, sleeping and bathing. The challenge of how many separate and clearly distinct naps I could complete during a period of slightly less than eighteen hours was enticing. As I tilted back the bottle and let the wine spiral down my throat, the sounds of this particular rooming house clanged, thudded and moaned around me. I came back from a visit to the pissoir and found a gaggle of LAPD in the middle of the street, and a slew of rollers parked every which way all across the intersection. I sat and watched while the blue-shirts extinguished the melee, whatever its cause, and dispersed everyone present for the ruckus. It reminded me of something I’d seen first-hand, or second hand, I didn’t know for sure. Whether because the windows were tinted, or due to the quality of light from businesses and lampposts, the intersection out the window looked bathed in yellow. It was a tint less brown and dignified than sepia, a brighter yellow than the dirty gold of old paper. But it put me in a historical frame of mind. As I slugged down more Moby Grape it struck me I should put pen to paper. There was a wire notebook and a Bic lodged somewhere in my pack. I spread the notebook open over the bedspread; then lay on my side, hovering above it with the pen. I wrote:
THE 1972 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION