by A M Homes
It is unexpectedly fascinating—the mood, the tenor, changes from room to room, office to office, door to door. Each is a different world. From the super slick film company with money to burn, to the doctor’s office last renovated in the 1950s.
In a town that doesn’t see a lot of pedestrian traffic, there is safety to being with the mailman; it provides a screen, maintaining an air of invisibility—otherwise you’d stand out as a suspect. No one except the mailman walks the residential streets of Beverly Hills unnoticed.
All along I’m thinking of questions: What’s the most exciting piece of mail you ever delivered? Your worst day as a mailman? How much do you walk in a day? Do you spend your off hours with other postal employees? What about the phrase “going postal”—do you worry about someone going crazy at the post office? What’s the deal with dogs and postmen—do you like animals?
We walk up and down the streets at a steady clip with Mark pushing the cart; the only problem taping an interview while walking with the mailman is keeping up and getting him to speak into the microphone.
MR. BENNETT: So what we’re doing now, we call the business. Every route has a section of business, a section of apartments, and a section of single family homes. Everybody has a variety of things. Today’s a very good day. I’m so glad we’ve decided to do it today.
MS. HOMES: What makes today a good day?
MR. BENNETT: What happens is: Mondays are heavy because of the weekend. And plus, places are closed on Saturday. So by the time Tuesday rolls around, it’s kind of quiet. Now, by the time Wednesday comes, people are corresponding, they’re answering the letters that came out on Monday. So by Wednesday and Thursday, boom!
MS. HOMES: And how does a business’s mail differ from residential?
MR. BENNETT: Just volume. I’m what you’d consider the slums of Beverly Hills, believe it or not. This is like not the most prime. Everyone’s always been up in the hills, because that’s where all the celebrities live. In reality, you never see a celebrity, you just talk to the maid. And no phones, no bathroom, no water. I’ve always been very lucky. I used to be a substitute on this route. The lady that had this retired, and then I successfully lobbied to get this route. And I’ve worked all over—which you usually do when you start out. It takes years to get a really good route. Have you noticed your mail delivery in places like New York? Because I worked in New York City, Times Square, for ten years.
MS. HOMES: Yeah, I do notice my mail, because I get a lot of mail.
MR. BENNETT: Do you find the mail to be every day, or just some days?
MS. HOMES: Well, Mondays are very, very heavy. You’re right, there is sort of a pattern to it.
MR. BENNETT: They had a forty-two cents due, I don’t care. They’re sweet to me. And these people, they’ll give you a hundred bucks at Christmas. I’m really tight with my people. There’s a mailbox in the street and I’ll pick that up on the way back. We have to do it on certain times. I have to hit one box at eleven o’clock, I have to hit one box at eleven thirty. I may be off a little bit today.
MS. HOMES: So how long have you had this route?
MR. BENNETT: Five years.
MS. HOMES: And you know a lot of the people on it.
MR. BENNETT: Oh yeah. I go to the Bar Mitzvahs. You get real close to everybody. I don’t have a family, so this is kind of good for me. Sometimes you’re out, and you’re trying to get back, and people are like, can’t you stop and say hello? And I’m like, Marge, it’s five o’clock and the sun’s going down. The barbershop’s hilarious. It’s been there a hundred years. It was featured prominently in a movie. And Mel Torme had his fatal heart attack in that barbershop.
MS. HOMES: See, Mark, these are the details I need!
MR. BENNETT: Oh, I can tell you some stories that will curl your hair! They have a local ragsheet called 213. The area code’s changed three times. It used to be 213. So it’s called Beverly Hills 213, and there’s another ragsheet called the Courier. Well the 213 is all gossip, and it’s the most hilarious thing. Here’s a doctor who treats only celebs. I love this building because it’s sort of scary. I come in the back; they have a secret entrance, and you’ll see a famous actress. Every day! Big-time stars—people come and go.
MS. HOMES: What’s the 90210 theory?
MR. BENNETT: The 90210 theory is that if you live in 90210 you’ve arrived. We’re actually 90212. So it’s still considered pretty much … Beverly Hills. Morning, Dinah! But not as posh.
MS. HOMES: I love this because you get to open every door in Los Angeles. You’re like hi, the mail’s here. And they’re all different inside!
MR. BENNETT: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite buildings, I used to be obsessed with … I used to tape The Fugitive reruns in black-and-white. After work I’d go home and watch The Fugitive. I don’t watch Fugitive any more, but when I come to this building it keeps reminding me of that.
MS. HOMES: Right. Because it is very like that.
MR. BENNETT: It’s very like that! Everybody in the building is somehow running scams. I hate that, when they’re running scams. Because then you don’t know who to call. For example, one of my customers, she was eighty, and she dies. Okay. No relatives, no husband, nothing. … It’s this incredibly spooktacular house. She gives the house to the next of kin, which was like this distant cousin who could care less. So what he’s doing is he’s living in it with his friends, except he’s trying to use her name. It’s just awful. So what do you do? I just hate that.
MS. HOMES: Are a lot of people who work in mail, mail people? Do they collect stamps?
MR. BENNETT: Some people are so into it. I got kind of hooked into that philatelic thing. But it didn’t last long. They actually have someone who has a separate little counter, where you can go buy stamps. They have sheets that have been canceled and there’s all this madness. There’s a stamp on an envelope, and they cancel it. They give them away as prizes. I use mine.
MS. HOMES: And what are the big themes for postal workers?
MR. BENNETT: Themes? This is what you live for. Your dream job. Your dream assignment, of which there are several in this town, is when you go in a huge office building. But the dream job is to have what they call a VIL, I don’t know what it stands for, but it’s an actual post office in an office building. You literally have no supervision. You are your own boss. You make sure that you take care of everything, and everything’s done. But other than that. … These are collection cards. They want to make sure that you collect.
MS. HOMES: That stamps it?
MR. BENNETT: No, you turn in this color today, and tomorrow I’ll turn in this color. It’s gotten so crazy that they have this little gizmo that you have to deal with all day, that I’ll forget to get the mail because I’m worried about this. [laughs]
MS. HOMES: That’s amazing. Are they in every box, or just in …?
MR. BENNETT: Yes! Every box.
MS. HOMES: Did you get the card for that box, or it’s one card for …?
MR. BENNETT: No, just one card for both, because you’ve got to do both. Because the minute you don’t … an inspector comes out, it’s this big red card that says “do not throw in outgoing mail, bring this back to your supervisor!” And that’s how they catch you if you don’t collect the mail. Now if you’re stupid enough not to collect it, they drop a card on you. I forgot to collect one time on my route, I didn’t know it. Or I collected it too early. They dropped a card on me. I come back to the office, and there’s your boss standing there like this, tapping her foot. Don’t you have something for me? Oh, do you want a sandwich or something? No, no, don’t you have something for me? And I’m going no, I don’t. Come with me. They took me out in the staff car, and I had to go get it.
MS. HOMES: Is it a tough business?
MR. BENNETT: You’re on a time clock. You have one lunch spot every day. And my lunch spot, whether I pack it or buy it, is right here.
MS. HOMES: You mean they tell you where you can sit and have lunch?
> MR. BENNETT: Or there’s a form you fill out every day that says what time are you having lunch and where will it be.
MS. HOMES: So you can pick where it is but you have to tell them where you’re going to be?
MR. BENNETT: I always say Simon’s café. Because if something happens, and they need to find me, they can zip over here at 12:30, they know I’m going to be at Simon’s café. That’s how they do it.
MS. HOMES: And what would they need to find you for?
MR. BENNETT: Believe me, I don’t know. Sometimes they have emergencies. Somebody gets sick. Like today.
EPILOGUE
Epilogue
Coming home that night, I find the night watchman standing in the hall, staring at my door—my room key is dangling from the lock.
“Thank God you’re here,” he says, “I wasn’t quite sure what had happened.”
I assume that when I went out I simply forgot to take the key with me.
“Do you want me to go in with you and make sure everything is okay?” he asks.
“Okay, sure,” I say, although I am not the least bit afraid. Together we open the door to make sure that no one has taken the key in the door as an invitation to enter. All is calm, quiet.
“Looks good,” I say to the man, “thank you.”
“You’re that super-cool writer girl,” he says to me.
Validation.
“Thank you again,” I say. “And good night.”
The night before I leave Los Angeles, I call downstairs and ask the clerk at the front desk to buzz me if Romulo, the overnight waiter, begins to sing. For years I’ve been hearing about Romulo’s impromptu late-night performances but had never managed to stay up late enough to see one.
At 2:30 in the morning the phone rings, yanking me from a dream.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” the fellow at the desk says. “I figured you’d be up late, writing.”
I assure him that despite the fact that I was sound asleep, it’s fine.
“Romulo’s singing,” he says.
“I’ll be right down.”
Romulo Laki is the night waiter, working the 10:30 P.M.–6:30 A.M. shift. He’s been at the Chateau for fifteen years. Usually I see him only in passing, he comes on as I’m going off to dinner and then off to bed. They say he’s the one with all the stories, he’s the one who’s up all night, who sees everything, who knows exactly what’s going on where—after all, he delivers the snacks. And when it gets late, and things are slow, he brings out his guitar and begins to sing. I find him in the lobby, surrounded by a group of slightly drunk young people. He’s singing John Denver’s “Country Road,” followed by the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By,” a song Mick Jagger wrote long ago for Marianne Faithfull—which I find extremely poignant since I’ve seen her here at the hotel on occasion. There is about Romulo a kind of steadiness—there’s also much talk about his black hair, whether it’s really his or in some way sprayed on to fill in what’s disappeared with age. He segues into a nice Elvis medley and then asks if I’d like to hear a song he’s written himself, a Spanish love song. It is as if he’s singing the guests to sleep, offering them a lullaby which they take as a cue to wind down, to call it a night; they sign their checks and stumble off to bed.
My time in Los Angeles is over. And while I’ve come to know the city in a purely navigational and geographic sense, I still don’t have a clue as to the truth or the heart of Los Angeles. I can drive the city from end to end. I know the order of the boulevards descending down from Sunset. I know where to get on and off the freeways, but I can’t begin to say that I know Los Angeles. What becomes apparent is that there is no one center, in all the sprawl there are thousands of wholly complete worlds, unique, disparate, enormously diverse. It reminds me of Washington, D.C., in that the divides between race and class are extreme. One can easily exist in a Los Angeles that is entirely white, or black, or hispanic, and unless one makes an effort to bridge the gap between cultures, the gap will continue to grow. It is dangerously easy to pretend that there is no world outside one’s own. In this city, it is every man for himself; each person makes his own reality. There are very few collective experiences—the weather, the traffic, the Earth itself.
And although I still may not know Los Angeles well, I have come to know the Chateau Marmont intimately. Around the world there are great hotels, legendary hotels, grand hotels, hotels known for their architecture, for their service, for the history of who has stayed there before. There are rarified boutique hotels, luxury getaways, hotels in places where man has barely trod, hotels where there used to be hotels. And then there is the Chateau Marmont.
It is a place where not just anything goes, but everything goes. There is always someone being photographed for a magazine in the lobby, a fashion shoot by the pool, or even in the pool. There are readings, wine tastings, musical performances, casting directors holding auditions in their suites. Writers who aren’t even staying here bring their computers to the lobby and sit down to work and absolutely everyone has their meetings here. As Billy Wilder famously once said about the Chateau, “I’d rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following for sharing with me their knowledge and impressions of Los Angeles: Mark Bennett, Tom Henyey, Dr. Fred Kogen, Tommy and Bobbi Farrell, Virginia McDowall, Hal Riddle, Griffin Dunne, Jennifer Beals, John Waters, Eve Babitz, Lisa Phillips, Todd Eberle, Ellen Krass, Anne Philbin, M. G. Lord, Jeremy Strick, Michael Maltzan, Richard Serra, Marc H. Glick, Marie V. Sanford, Dan Sonenberg, Amy Gross, and the Staff at The Motion Picture and Retirement Fund, Wintec Energy, and La Quinta Resort and Club. I would also like to thank Peter Gay and Pamela Leo and the Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. My agents, Andrew Wylie, Sarah Chalfant and Jin Auh. Larry Porges and Elizabeth Newhouse at National Geographic. And at the Chateau Marmont, great thanks to Andre Balazs, Philip Pavel, Pat Abedi, Carol O’Brien, Erin Foti, Romulo Laki, and the hotel staff.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A. M. Homes is the author of the novels Jack, In a Country of Mothers, The End of Alice, and Music for Torching; the short story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know; and the artists’ book Appendix A:. Her fiction and nonfiction appear frequently in magazines such as: Art Forum, Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. She lives in New York City.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES
JAN MORRIS A Writer’s House in Wales
OLIVER SACKS Oaxaca Journal
W. S. MERWIN The Mays of Ventadorn
WILLIAM KITTREDGE Southwestern Homelands
DAVID MAMET South of the Northeast Kingdom
GARRY WILLS Mr. Jefferson’s University
UPCOMING AUTHORS
JAMAICA KINCAID on Nepal
ROBERT HUGHES on Barcelona
SUSANNA MOORE on Kauai
LOUISE ERDRICH on Ontario
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN on Martinique
FRANCINE PROSE on Sicily
PETER CAREY on Japan
KATHRYN HARRISON on Santiago de Compostela
ANNA QUINDLEN on London
HOWARD NORMAN on Nova Scotia
BARRY UNSWORTH on Crete
GEOFFREY WOLFF on Maine
PAUL WATKINS on Norway
JON LEE ANDERSON on Andalucia
DIANE JOHNSON on Paris
WILLIAM LEAST HEAT-MOON on Western Ireland
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