by Ken O'Steen
We were rolling, really rolling on the 101. We were headed south, me in the front with Lila, Bob in the back with a fatty in his mouth. No fooling around with the strictly scenic PCH route for us. When the 101 branched away from the Pacific Coast Highway we branched with it. At the Hollywood Freeway and Ventura Freeway split, we barreled down the lanes heading into LA. When the time came, we dared anyone to decelerate even the slightest for the Universal exit ramp. The Dead Kennedys were blaring and we meant business.
Bob was in need of refills, both the legal kind and extra-legal. Lila and I were his transportation, as well as his escorts for the day. The two of us intended to kill most of the time we would be required to wait for him to make his acquisitions hanging about in bookstores and record shops, and also taking the opportunity to eat and drink in sophisticated urban milieus again. The most important stop we would make however was to be made on our way home. Lila had been invited, through her friend Cindy, to hang a show in a gallery…not a very big gallery…in Hollywood. She’d spoken with one of the owners there, and had told me she felt camaraderie enough with the couple’s sensibility to consider putting her work up in their little nook of art. So the idea was to give the place a look, and for Lila to briefly chat the proprietors up as we were blowing town.
In the meantime we flew the friendly freeways. But nearer to downtown the winds of resistance began to slow us down. Finally we hiccupped a couple of times, and then were choked to death by the traffic noose. The air had been whooshing through the windows so hard that only the slowing of the car allowed aroma to return to us in the automobile, in this case, the unique-ish LA aroma combining fruit and grit.
The first stop, following the resurrection of our velocity was at the pharmacy around the corner from the moldy building where the lawyer working for Bob kept his office. For Lila and me, this was a simple drop-off, since Bob had a long agenda there and the pharmacy personnel would need a sizeable block of time to accommodate it. Bob shuffled in, and the two of us set off on the quest for lunch.
We meandered some, reacquainting with our metropolitan beginnings, then, after a cruise-inspired brainstorm went to take in beer and subs, and to sit at the long, long, picnic-style tables at Felipe’s near Union Station. As we stood in line for the counter with the afternoon lunch crowd we remarked on how odd it seemed to be surrounded by such a glut of humanity after so much time removed, relatively speaking. We also remarked that we not did consider this removal in any way to be our misfortune.
We sat down on one of the benches, trays bearing French dips piled to the heavens with meat, deluged with au jous sitting in front of us now. Snapping a mouthful of potato chips into mulch while she pointed, Lila directed my attention toward a tall, dark-haired, tough-skinned man in a natty suit, a conspicuous business sort with an anachronism of a tidy mustache on his upper lip. “Know who that reminds me of?” Lila asked, once her mouth was clear.
“Yeah…but I can’t quite place it.”
“New York?”
“Uhhh…almost, but….”
“West 84th Street?”
“Right. That prick.”
She laughed. “Yeah, him. I don’t remember his name, do you?”
“Not in a million years. ”
The gentleman to whom we alluded had been a vice president located in the Manhattan branch of a Boston-based bank. He once had sublet us a room in his brownstone near Central Park. An ass with more pomp there never was. The greatest contribution to his infamy in our eyes was his regulation of the heat. One blast to the radiator in the morning, and another in the evening was all you got. Rest of the time you were on your own.
“He was a prick,” Lila confirmed.
“Insufferable, even for pricks.”
“The time I was standing on the sidewalk talking to him out in front of the building and…it must have been some Freudian rebellion, because I normally would never use the word irregardless, instead of regardless, but for some reason in this conversation I did. Boy, he leapt on it like a hungry hyena. I thought he was going to spit on me from the look he gave.”
“What a petty glop of dung he was.”
“The best landlord was the Greek guy on Columbus Ave. “
“It was never colder than about eighty in that place, day in and day out, twenty-four hours a day for the whole winter.”
“Kept his hot dog carts in the building next door. Remember how Jimmy would pull up with that flatbed truck every morning and load the carts? Then drive around the city dropping them and the hot dog vendors off?”
“Jimmy. Whoa. Jimmy would park the Greek guy’s truck in Central Park at night, and rent the back out to people to sleep in. Didn’t he have a little television he plugged into the cigarette lighter for the guests to watch?”
“Somebody told me he did.”
“He’d be walking around eating a piece of raw meat. He said it had something to do with the alkie thing.”
“Protein or vitamins that helped his depleted liver.”
“And he was our building’s super.”
“You know, old man Colosanto in New Haven was pretty generous with heat.”
“He was extremely generous with heat.”
“The place in Vermont got enough heat, but the place was drafty.”
“With a forty mile an hour wind off Lake Champlain and a temperature of twenty below, that’s hard to avoid, even if the place had been sealed tight.”
“Been a long time since we’ve been in snow.”
“Sometimes I miss it.”
“Sometimes I do too.”
“One of these days, Alice.”
At the halfway point through my sandwich I returned to the counter for a second round of beers. As I was parking myself on the bench again, Lila asked, “What was that Deli on Madison Avenue? I think the subs here are even better than those.”
“The Carnegie Deli?”
“No. I think that’s the one on Fifty-seventh. This is the one we ordered from when I was working nights.”
“It was around 50th seems like.”
“Right. Big pickles.
“Big Pickles was the name of the deli?”
“No, they gave you three or four of those great, big pickles.”
“They did…right.”
“That much I remember.”
We finished up, and having a little more time before we were due back at Bob’s pharmacy of choice we cruised again, zigging through sections of downtown, West Hollywood and Hollywood, rolling on something of a Donovan-led Tour of the Star-studded Sites of Donovan’s Recent Detour on the Highway of Life for Lila’s benefit, and riding pleasure.
“Jenna’s house in Canada was pretty warm…insulated well,” Lila was mentioning to me as we were passing Oscar’s.
“It was cooler in our room in the basement, but never so much as to make it really uncomfortable. I don’t think I even looked at the thermostat the whole time we were there…being a guest.”
“I don’t remember Jenna or Will complaining about their heating bills. I assume the insulation had something to do with that, how well they build houses for warmth there. They should damn well know how, if anybody in North America does.”
“I liked the outlet in the wall in the driveway for hooking that engine warmer thing up.”
“I remember the beautiful snowstorms.”
“I remember how expensive a pack of cigarettes were. But I liked the snow and that otherworldly, North Pole, Santa’s Workshop feel of the little town.”
“Cornwall.”
“Cornwall. Cornwall, Ontario. Beside the St. Lawrence river.”
“What were cigarettes, like five or six bucks a pack? In today’s dollars that would be nine or ten?”
“Beats me.”
We stopped at a store on Melrose, which Lila said was one of the few places selling a special hair aid, or maybe it was a facial cream she said she l
iked. I waited in the car. For a couple of minutes everyone who passed was clothed in black, making it seem as if I had time-traveled to a distant, uniformed future, or to another planet, one with a strict, round-the-clock nightlife imperative.
Lila got back in, putting the bag with the lotion or crème designed for faces, or for hair, or both, for all I knew, in the seat between us. I had long suspected the products in Lila’s many bottles and containers were the domestic equivalent of claim markers staking territory in the bathroom rather than actual toiletries.
“We better swing back over and pick up Bob,” she said, turning the ignition.
Bob was sitting on the curb smoking a spliff when we drove up.
“Been waiting long?”
“Nah. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Let’s go.”
The illegal stop was the second stop of the day. We ferried Bob to de-facto Pharmacy # 2, returning to our neighborhood of old on the Westside, ending up on what looked to be the blandest street in all Westwood. There was no place to park, so we dropped him off. Lila set sail on what was to be an epic encirclement of the block. In an effort to make a large enough circle to afford us an arrival time at the destination at precisely the moment Bob reappeared Lila swung wide.
Sitting at a stoplight on a busy street, Lila and I became aware of yelling. I looked out my window and saw a wooly man I had never seen in my life, who seemed certain he recognized Lila and me, standing in front of a clothing store, waving his arms frantically to attract our attention. He was looking dead straight at me, and hollering, “I’m ready to go bowling, I’m ready to go bowling, I’m ready to go bowling.”
Even after our circumnavigation of the world surrounding Pharmacy # 2 we still ended up having to wait for Bob. Eventually, he emerged from the front door, crossing the porch as though he were walking barefoot across a field of broken glass. At the bottom of the steps he began his search. It was difficult to tell whether he saw us or not. He crossed the yard weaving like an infantryman dodging flying lead, but a little slower.
When he got into the backseat of the car we could smell that powerful skunkweed he’d got possession of.
“Stinkpot,” Lila said.
Sheepishness crossing his face, Bob said, “That’s all right,” meaning I think, that temporary exposure to pungent greenery was a small price to pay for storing him up with pills and weed. He also alerted us that he had picked up a little gratis powder, the “bonus” another “show of appreciation” from his generous “guy.” And again, being an anti-powderite he would pass the gift along to us.
Lila wanted to take us back to West Hollywood, so she could buy a book or two at Book Soup. I liked that idea as well. Bob said it would be okay with him if we would stop at a liquor store so that he could get himself “some little donuts and a quart of beer.”
As soon as I got inside, despite the excellent selection, I realized I wasn’t at all in the mood to shop for books, and turned around and returned to the car to sit with Bob and share a little donut. This also saved me a sum of dollars I then would have available for music at the Virgin Megastore…which at Bob’s suggestion and with Lila’s and my agreement had been added to the afternoon’s itinerary. Lila came out carrying a single book and slid herself back into the driver’s seat. We rolled up Sunset on our sawed-off jump to the music store, rounded the corner and stopped long enough to snatch a ticket out of the gray machine, then sailed down the chute into the subterranean parking garage.
The three of us split up, going our separate ways as soon as we had passed the doors, entering the store as if we were a black-ops team on an abduction mission. After searching up and down the rows of Rock I commuted to Jazz, to find out what if anything Bob was buying. Just as I approached him, the building began to move, bumping and grinding a couple of times and coming to a halt. On the second of the bumps and grinds, the lights went out. Bob and I stood looking into the darkness awaiting what was next. A few seconds later, the lights returned.
“Little temblor,” I said. Bob brought up the subject of how we might conduct ourselves should the lights go out again, next time for a longer duration in the event of larger shakes.
“I’m thinking we could get some of these into our pants, and get the out the door before the lights come back on,” he strategized.
“One more good shake and looting could officially commence,” I said. “As an act of insurrection against the high CD-pricing bastards in the music business. This may be the only good opportunity to loot we’ll ever get.”
“Yeah…that’s…the thing I thought.”
But nothing happened. Terra firma. Another perfectly good, possible Act of God shot to hell.
In the end I bought one, Lila bought two, and Bob purchased three for himself. Then we embarked on the start and stop extended trek from West Hollywood through Hollywood into the Cahuenga Pass.
Once we passed the Ford Theater at warp speed, and pounded down the hill to Barham, the gallery was practically in spitting distance. We crossed the Hollywood Freeway via the Barham bridge, and nudged our way into a parking space in the tiny lot of the cookie-cutter strip mall sculpted from American cheese which by dint of its wedging into a Hollywood Hill, acquired a rustic look.
Zooma Gallery (not to be confused apparently with Zuma as in Zuma Beach) was painted in candy cane colors and stripes across the window glass, the interior of the gallery blocked by purple curtains. I remembered Lila had asked me to look at the gallery’s web site and to tell her what I thought, and I’d forgotten to do it. Bob wanted to tag along, his eyes as big and round as china plates.
Inside, Lila went to the back to scare the owners up, and Bob and I drifted toward a wall of hanging art. The exhibit consisted both of smudged pencil drawings, and watercolor pastels, all of which looked to be depicting crime scenes. Personally, I thought they were very good. Bob told me he liked them, too.
“Lila’s paintings aren’t like these,” Bob said to me after we’d looked them over.
“Hers aren’t as violent. Not as many of hers are figurative,” I answered.
“Oh,” he said, meaning whatever I wanted it to mean I think.
Lila waved us over to meet the owners. The husband and wife both sported long, gray ponytails, and wire-rimmed glasses. Bob looked at them long and hard and fondly, as if discovering a related species. They were unpretentious, and had a darker sense of humor than might have been expected from their looks. Finally Lila excused herself and them, as she and the proprietors retired to their office in order to talk shop. Bob and I were abandoned to our own proclivities, and we sauntered toward the art again, this time to a patch of wall near the entrance to the hallway, where the restrooms, and further down, the office and storage and work areas in the back were, the only works in the gallery not done by the featured artist, whose work Bob and I had seen before. They were paintings of a sort that might be described as the highest order of finger painting. The canvases were loaded up with images of the worm-like, and the tubular, all of them squirmingly colorful.
Bob asked, as we stood shoulder by shoulder looking at the pictures, “What do these say about life?” leaning forward and squinting his eyes as if to examine the paintings for clues.
“That it’s futile to try and understand.”
“You see…symbolism, in all those knots and curlicues and…those rainbow pasta pipe things?”
“I see the same things you see…one man’s symbol is another man’s…”
“So what’s the meaning?” he interrupted.
“That thinking is for pleasure…or it’s good as an exercise, but not for solving anything impractical or of a metaphysical nature.”
“Metaphysical…shit.”
“I know.”
“Man, those colors…those lines kind of jiggling,” tilting his head to get a be
tter look at one, “they give me a funny feeling.”
“The funnier the better.”
“Art…”
“Exactly.”
“You know…this is nice. I like these. It’s a way to…spend time. I love, you know, to be distracted for a really…a really long, LONG time…like, when I listen to ‘Filles De Kilimanjaro with a good bowl.”
“Exactly.”
When Lila still hadn’t come out from the back after ten or fifteen minutes had passed I decided to capitulate to the quickly gathering storm of ideas for encyclopedia entries, and retrieve the pen and the notebook from the glove compartment, and kill the next leg of the wait jotting entries out. I sat on a bench on the gallery floor across from a painting titled, “Death Takes a Chevrolet.” Bob was crouched on the floor staring up at one of the finger paintings. I began to write. The door opened, and a man in a Levi jacket, jeans, sneakers, with skin that was vibrating tan, came inside with a female escort, a woman in a business suit. I heard the man say to the woman, “You’re going to be surprised.”
After writing twelve or thirteen minutes I had written:
Vince Foster
On July 20, 1993, a man named Vince Foster, Deputy White House Counsel for the Clinton Administration finished his lunch, drove across the Potomac to Fort Marcy Park, and used a pistol to scatter his gray matter across those of God’s natural wonders in his closest proximity. He had been, as they say, down. Naturally, the conservative brain trust in America concluded he must have been the victim of murder!
He in fact, had been ax-murdered in editorials by the Wall Street Journal; and after his factual death butchered for scraps by the same gang only to needle the Clintons. As a childhood friend of President Clinton and a fellow lawyer in the firm that had employed Hillary Clinton in Arkansas he’d landed in Washington with a bull’s eye on his back. After a few months lawyering, and most notably for the Anti-Clinton Apoplectics, lawyering involving a dispute over the firing of a group of putative deadbeats in the White House Travel Office, the Brahmins of the Loopy Right at the Wall Street Journal had featured him in another of their school plays: Clinton Conspiracy Theory #99, in other words. After clinical depression, this was Reason Number Two that Vince was down. Once he showed up dead in the park, there could be no doubt: Foster had been capped because he was going to sing like a canary about a heinous Clinton plot, or a fiendish deed; Vince and Hillary were fuck-buddies, and he had to go; Vince had known where the bodies of the multitudes swimming with the fishes for double-crossing the Clintons were sweetly resting in peace; and the blues would cause him to squeal, should he stay among the living.
A ripped note was found in Vince’s briefcase in the aftermath. In it he had written that while neither he nor anyone else in the White House ever violated a single law, “the public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff. I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington…here, ruining people is considered sport.” One clear lesson of the Foster suicide was: the truth hurts, even if it isn’t the truth.
Also found among the departed Vince’s papers were notes that included a list of psychiatrists, and an "argument with himself," as those who had read one of the notes described it, strong evidence for all but those breathing political laughing gas that the man was severely depressed right before his death. Of course, along with the sci-fi plotting, and the unending zeal of the unsuccessful effort to blot the Clinton presidency out of their brittle psyches, the Right-wing necrophiliacs kept humping Foster’s corpse for years. Whether knowledge of facts ever shall supplant so much mendacious fiction in the minds of however many Americans greeted the Foster fictions with a degree of credulity, one can never know. But what a world.