Now it was blocking the 101, so it had to go.
This entire city was either being pulled down or built up.
They’d already started on the Harbor Parkway,
which would cut off the whole west side, north of Figueroa
three blocks away from Bunker Hill,
joining up with the Hollywood Freeway
to seal off two sides of downtown.
They stopped off there, one day, among bulldozers
and backhoes, cement trucks and cranes,
to get some shots of the progress,
but the pile-drivers . . . the hammer-drills . . . the blasting
from the building site . . .
the noise . . .
The noise of it, the noise of the guns, the heavy machine-gun fire, and nowhere to hide and they were getting closer all the time and the flares were burning and the noise was so loud, and all the shouting and the guns were going and now their 88s had found us, they’d found us out and were pounding our positions, pinning us down, pinning us, so many of us down.
He had his hands over his ears for twenty minutes,
even in the car, and they took it easy, driving round,
before stopping at a bar on 2nd and Spring,
near the Press, for a drink.
‘You okay, buddy?’ Sherwood slid him a shot of whiskey,
shaking out a smoke.
‘Yeah. Thanks.’
‘You were in the war, right? I’ve seen this happen before –
guys getting triggered off by something – crowds, sudden noise . . .’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Yes, my friend – you better be. If you want the job, that is.’
*
The city’s windows catch and flash the first sun, signaling to each other, it seems like: winking open, one by one.
People come to Los Angeles for refuge, sanctuary, but what they get is this massed, mechanized population moving in a confined space almost without collision or accident. The sounds, the movement of war: a ballet of battle without the guns.
When I went off to fight, Mother didn’t know what to say, so she handed me a scarf.
May, 48
*
It was spring, but the wind was full of leaves. The roads were closed with broken branches, fallen trees. I thought I heard the sound of a truck coming on, but it was the storm again, gaining on me. My way was lit by the raw white gashes in the sides of trees, the torn and opened bark. The ground was bright with lichen the wind had stripped from the wood: gray, white, red and yellow in the dark.
*
He walked through Grand Central Market
with its blaze, its pyramids of fruit,
rubble-mounds of potatoes, sheaves of bananas
revolving on their hooks,
prickly pear, okra, eggplant.
He stopped to watch, at La Casa Verde, the watermelons
cleavered: falling open, rocking
slowly into still and perfect halves.
Melton’s Meats had rows of joints, bacon, short ribs, heads – all
behind a bead-curtain of sausages –
ranks of sweetbreads, steaks, chops.
Scent-trails led to a soda fountain
for root-beer floats and malted milk; a Mexican stall
with birria burritos, tortas, chicken tacos;
Peerless Cheese and Week’s Poultry
sharing a color-scheme of white, cream and gray.
Next door: stacked bags of dried fruit and candy,
trays of spices, burlap sacks of beans, pecans and pine-nuts,
and hanging above them, clumps of dried chilies
like lavish, papery, red-and-orange birds.
At the entrance, the sweet smells
of coffee, doughnuts, bagels, flapjacks.
From Stall A-1, Grand Central Liquor,
he picked out a pack of Luckies,
a bottle of Red Top and a brown paper bag.
*
Life at an angle, a 3:1 slope. Outside the window:
the palm trees, creaking in the breeze like doors;
Angels Flight, the funicular, the twin diagonal cars,
the moving diamonds
riding all day from Hill up to Olive, Olive
down to Hill, on Olivet or Sinai.
He eased the cork from the whiskey bottle
with the ceremonial . . . ssspuck . . .
and sat there, raising a glass to the slide.
*
We were running up the hill, zig-zagging like we were taught, when off to my left I saw a sudden pink puffball, which was Cargill’s head being coughed apart.
*
Coming to on his low, steel-framed bed: thin drapes,
a chair and table with a bowl for shaving, a mirror
with its glass split through.
His eyes are bad. He feels things
shift in the corners
but there’s nothing there.
His stomach’s in pieces.
The floor moves
and he thinks he sees rats running
right across the door.
There’s two of something in the mirror.
His kidneys hum.
He turns on the light and the whole ceiling’s crazed
like old pottery. He blinks, looks again.
The cracks all gone.
The night’s drained out of the sky, and it starts over.
The bottle’s lying on its side
but there’s still a drink in it.
The cockroaches watch from the walls.
*
He went down to Clifton’s for some split pea soup;
chili and beans,
corned beef hash if he could.
The line was long at the glass counter, but it moved quick.
HELEN was his helper of the day.
She readjusted her weight at the servery,
breathing heavy, a dampness in the creases round the neck,
the ladle like a teaspoon in her hand.
Heaping his plate with brown mush,
she grinned through tiny teeth, ‘Growing boy, ay?’
and winked. The eye lost in its brittle pleats.
Then to her mouth again: the tongue
was moving over the lips,
moistening, back and forth, re-applying.
The tray seemed small
as he slid it down the rails to the cashier, nodding at the sign
NO GUEST NEED GO HUNGRY FOR LACK OF FUNDS
before shuffling on, ashamed, to the darkest corner,
behind the plastic redwoods and the waterfall, to eat.
*
The soft lands of the Margaree, the flats, the river-meadows, thick with trout you could catch with your hands as they lay still under the ledges, gazing upstream. Reaching for the most tentative touch, just there above the tail, then gently up under the belly till it accepts your hand and you can rock it in the water, back and forth, lulling it easy.
Difficult after that, to pull it up by the gills: to kill it and clean it and open it out on the fire, but you will.
*
He couldn’t sleep nights. So he walked.
A different route each time, just to pay attention.
South along Olive, past the rows of frame houses
toward the giant neon signs – the Richfield Tower’s oil-well
pumping black gold on 6th and Flower,
the Church of the Open Door
with its lettering on the roof reading JESUS SAVES –
to the Biltmore and the dark of Pershing Square
– the rustle of men, busy among the palms and bamboo.
Alo
ng Clay, down 2nd to Main and all the way to City Hall;
down 6th to Broadway and its theaters: the Los Angeles,
the Palace, the Orpheum, the Globe.
Or he’d stay up on the Hill, on its highest point
on Grand, near the Dome Hotel, or the benches
over the 3rd Street Tunnel,
and watch the lights of the city guttering below.
The streets and stones held the heat of the day
as the palms turned to silhouettes in the silver-blue of evening.
He noticed bats, flaking their way
across the rooftops, over the air-conditioning units;
the neon blade-signs below
clicking like bug-zappers, sparking through the night.
It was four one morning when he saw it through the rain
– the coyote – nosing out of the Spring Arcade onto Broadway,
slinking down the asphalt: suave, long-limbed, eyes
dabbed with neon
from the theater signs on either side,
then disappearing down the blind alley behind the Roxie.
He went in after it. Nothing.
He would see it again on Cinnabar Street, or Lebanon,
on Sack Alley, in the vacant lots below Hope, between 7th and 9th,
or flickering up from the Hill Street Tunnel: yellow eyes
like headlights.
*
He got the job: cub reporter on the Press
at twenty bucks a week. Working the City Desk
with Sherwood and Rennert. Anything else, after hours.
*
‘You know, Walker, it’s not like in the movies.’
Sherwood was eyeing him steady in the rear-view mirror.
‘What?’
‘Los Angeles. Y’know, the beautiful woman
turning up in your office, unannounced. The cigarette girl,
the hat-check girl, the waitress in the diner,
the singer in the bar downtown.
And it’s not about private eyes, the gun in the desk drawer,
bottle in the filing cabinet, the body on the bed,
body on the floor, a hole in the body, holes in the wall.
It’s a mess. And not a pretty one.’
‘I can see.’
Sherwood was just about to start over when a black-and-white
braked and turned, hitting the siren, squealing off south.
‘Let’s go.’
They were eating up Broadway and spitting it out:
3rd, 6th, 8th, 12th, till they slid to a stop
behind the cops, in a driveway, jumping out
and going after them, round the side of the house,
where the pool was lit, deep blue, with dancing spots and long
streams of aquamarine
– like the back of a kingfisher, he thought –
and a body resting on the bottom.
He stood watching as the flashbulbs went,
as Sherwood talked to the cops;
the kid was five or six maybe,
a ribbon of red
floating up between its legs.
‘C’mon, we’re going,’ Rennert said.
‘LAPD lock-down. This is a Mob house.’
*
Finding the otter’s slide, then seeing it, suddenly, nosing across the pool, its wake a turbulence like silk twisted round a blade. Your eyes tune to the shape of birds, and you see them everywhere: the kingfisher’s flash, the wing coverts of a jay. There are spokes of light through the dark pool.
*
He walked the monochrome world of the city, after hours,
in the dissipating heat
watching his shadow feed in front of him, tightening
under the streetlight, sidling up each wall
then folding into it, bending like a stick
slid into water.
*
‘Hey, stranger! Yeah, you.
Why’n hell you standin’ there, drinkin’ on y’r own?’
‘Beats me.’
‘Well . . . ain’t that the damnedest thing,’
she looked around, astonished.
‘Handsome here don’t know why he’s drinking!’
His smile didn’t reach his eyes: ‘I know why I’m drinking.
Just don’t know why I’m here.’
‘You must be a few cents short of a dollar, honey,
’cause this here is the City of Angels, Tinseltown, sit-yoo-ated
in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’
‘Yes. Los Angeles,’ he looked at the sweat patches
in the dress a size too small, the paste jewelry, the caked mascara.
‘A few improvements wouldn’t hurt, here or there.’
‘The hell y’driving at? Look, sugar, you’re cute as all get out,
so let’s give this another shot.
What say we go to my hotel, get acquainted?’
‘I don’t think so. Thanks all the same.’
‘Don’t give me no brush-off. C’mon, let’s highball outta here!’
‘I’d say you’ve had too many highballs already.’
‘The nerve.’
‘Beat it, sister. Go on, dust.’
‘Hey, Johnny! This guy’s putting the bite on me!’
A crash as Johnny goes down, the table with him,
the door slamming shut.
*
There was a new face at the paper.
He’d started at the bottom, in the classifieds,
then swung a job as copy-boy on the Press: gopher, dogsbody,
running copy to the subs, running for the editors
and for Mr Overholt, the boss.
He watched this kid –
tall and very pleased with himself, clicking his pen,
always moving, hanging round each desk,
learning to wave his sheaves of carbon-paper
just like the big boys.
He wouldn’t leave old Overholt alone, unctuous
over each sentence, each page design: his voice,
his laugh, louder every day.
He watched this kid very carefully, taking notes:
They call him Pike, short for Pikesville, where he’s from: lean, swaggering and clearly young, no time spent in the wood. An unusual oily top-note, close to fish- or bicycle-oil. Too pushy on the palate: smooth, but with no complexity. So smooth, in fact, as to be almost slippery. Loud, full of brag, but strangely thin and artificial: chemical notes of turps, film-cases, acetone. Started sweet then dried fast, turning astringent. Immature, so the finish is hot and short and bitter: like sucking on a dime. Assertive, but with no real personality, no balance or integrity. A lightweight needing a great cask and some depth: any kind of character.
*
Billy was hard to find, but there he was
in the King Edward, 5th and Los Angeles,
sitting up at the bar with a book.
Walker hung his hat, and sat up at the next stool,
tapping out a couple Camels. ‘Drink, Billy?’
Billy grinned with his big strong teeth, ‘Could use a straight shot.’
The barman set them up, and they raised their glasses:
‘To Nova Scotia!’
‘Idaho!’
‘So – how’s the newshound? Putting the world to rights?’
He was pretty ripped already, but that was fine.
‘Yeah, it’s good. I’m getting to know this place, eh.’
‘Not like home, I bet? Bit livelier?’
‘Everything’s livelier than Inverness County.’
‘You got a girl back there?’
&
nbsp; He wasn’t expecting that, but he rallied: ‘Used to.
Don’t know now.’
‘Hard to keep them, ain’t it. After what we seen.’
It all just flooded in then, and he talked and talked
about the flashbacks and tinnitus, the hearing loss and panic attacks
and how he’d flipped at the building site.
The way he held himself together like a piece of glass.
‘I used to have a family of two hundred men, a company,
and we were all we had. Watching each other’s backs.
And after that, I’m lost. I’m fucking lost.’
*
They talk about the city as this place to get on, meet people, have fun, but sometimes it just feels like a labyrinth: that old game of survival and loss.
People keep saying the Mexican border’s only a couple hours away. Like that makes everything OK.
June, 48
*
He saw film-crews all the time around the Hill:
Angels Flight, Clay Street, Grand Avenue, the drop down 2nd
from the Dome to the Hotel Northern.
They were shooting in the 3rd Street Tunnel one night
and he stood around, watching a guy run through, shouting,
toward the cameras, again and again till they got it right.
He found out the name of the director – something strange
like ‘Cinnamon’ or ‘Sinnerman’ and went back
to look for that scrap of paper, and the number he wrote
five months ago in that bar with the tin ceiling
on 18th Street, in New York City in the snow.
‘Zinnemann. Fred Zinnemann. Friend of mine. From back home.
Who’d you say you were again?
Oh, right . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Ah, yes – the young man from the docks.
I remember. And you say you’re here? In Los Angeles?
In Bunker Hill. Hm. Well, we’re there on . . . let’s see . . . Tuesday.
We shoot in the afternoons. Best light for this one.
It’s the 200 block, North Hill Street. Come over and say hello.’
So, it’s the other side of the Hill Street Tunnel,
between City Hall and what’s left of Fort Moore Hill.
He goes down Court Street and sees cameras rigged
above the north end of the tunnel, where it opens onto Temple,
shimmering and doubling
in the midday heat; people standing round vans,
eating sandwiches, drinking coffee, and there he is, he’s sure:
glasses glinting under a panama hat, laughing with the crew
below an electric fan and a board that reads CRISS CROSS.
The Long Take Page 5