by Gary Indiana
Kevin hurls himself into the fray, circumnavigating the bar with breezy smiles, unfazed by the lack of attention he’s getting. I see straight off he isn’t made for these places: he’s short, incipiently potbellied, overly fem, his cuteness dissolves into facelessness beside so much fashion perfection. I know I’m too skinny and mentally complicated, too lacking in muscle tone, too neurotic to elicit any interest, and focus on drinking. I seldom smile. When these camera-ready types ever speak to me at all, it’s to say that I look sad, tell me to cheer up, as if the way my face settles threatens their world view. I can’t feature hooking up with any of these bitchy, emotionless Creatures of the Beach, even if they wanted to. At least with an ex-convict, there’s a little damaged tenderness.
We can’t peel free of these bars. Venice has many. When we exit one, Kevin remembers another. He’s obsessed with getting dick. Of course it has to belong to a real beauty. He clocks every godlike underwear model on entering a place, makes a beeline for the most impossibly hot one, then the runner-up, and third place, ultimately exposing himself to rejection by the consolation prize—buys them drinks, laughs at their idiocies, flatters them, flirts, gets exactly nowhere but presses on undaunted, circling over now and then to keep me up to speed with his progress. He’s determined to hook up with the unattainable, I think, to make me believe it’s what he normally gets. If I weren’t around, he’d probably settle for a perfectly nice, plain-looking schlub—there are a few, scattered around, abjectly nursing lonely beers.
Naturally we’re drinking, a lot, gin and tonics, drinking to sustain an attitude of superiority in the face of all the nasty reception he’s getting. Even I draw pitying looks in these shitholes, and I’m conspicuously not checking anyone out, or even looking at them. I can’t believe Kevin doesn’t know how misplaced he looks among perfect bodies with perfect faces who’ve spent all day adoring themselves in mirrors. I’m not sure he understands how banal all their preening perfection is, either. But eventually, as one o’clock arrives, he becomes palpably frustrated, even petulant. He scowls at his failed conquests as they pair off with one other. After the fourth bar, it occurs to me that I’m wasted. I see triple unless I squint. But I’m beyond prudence. I let him talk me into a nightcap, at yet another gay dump.
It’s a cramped, crowded joint, more like the familiar meat racks on Santa Monica Boulevard. I seize an empty barstool and order … a Southern Comfort, for some reason, while Kevin, hope springing eternal again, canvases the detritus … my back to the room, my eyelids droop shut and I slip into momentary unconsciousness, then jerk awake forgetting where I am and how I got here. This mystery only fully clears up when Kevin swims into view, en route to another prospective turndown. I go out of consciousness several times. It’s scary, I’m absent only a couple seconds but then it feels like days have passed when I refocus the room and the men crammed into it.
I find Kevin after several micro-naps, to tell him I’m leaving. I’ll drop him off, unless he wants to find his own way home.
“Naah, I’m wrecked …”
In the car, he veils his disappointment with bright, queeny chatter, about nothing whatsoever. I consider asking if I can sleep on his couch, but it’s possible he doesn’t have one, and it might be freaky to wake up next to Kevin in the morning. I can only drive with one eye shut. I pull up to his building.
“Are you okay to drive?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, then, see you at the theater …”
As I drive away I haven’t a clue where the freeway is. There’s always one when you don’t need one, so there has to be one somewhere. Trusting my sense of direction, which doesn’t exist, I get lost on surface roads for an hour. It’s as if neighborhoods shift around a la Dark City, planting themselves in my path a few seconds ahead of me, after I’ve already driven through them. I discover I’ve navigated in a circle of several miles’ circumference, suddenly arriving again at Kevin’s house. I’m tempted to park nearby and sleep in the car. Scouting a suitable alley, the nose of the Volkswagen unexpectedly picks up the scent of a freeway on-ramp.
In my own mind, at least, this will be a straight shot to the Rampart Street off-ramp and the Wilshire District. The freeways are practically forlorn at this hour. The road and all I can see from it has the desolate look everything in Los Angeles has after midnight, when the epic space the city occupies reveals its human-shrinking emptiness.
The ribbon of the empty road releases an ectoplasmic copy of itself as the car passes over it. Gusts of foggy mist sweep across the blurry lanes, like spectral tumbleweed. Some headlights on the southbound lanes glare across my windshield. In no time, a cluster of twinkling downtown towers appears on the right. I brace for the upcoming divide of the 101. Opening both eyes, I see sixteen lanes instead of eight. I’m not sure which eye to trust.
Despite the nervous responsiveness of the VW’s steering, my habitual contest with the freeway system eliminates all sense of caution. With a brainless feeling of mastery, I prod the wheel left, quickly pull right, back left, back right, executing a brilliantly supple, snakelike, diagonal line across all eight lanes without grazing a single speed bump.
Then, as if an insensible number of frames have been spliced from a movie I’m watching, the car slides into the underpass to the Hollywood Freeway, instantly skidding insanely back and forth. Yanking the wheel sends it into an uncontrollable zigzag between the massive pylons holding up the Hollywood Freeway. In a flash of grotesque literary reflection, I recall the final paragraph of A Charmed Life, where Mary McCarthy’s heroine smashes head on into another car: as the fatal collision occurs, she has a second in which to realize that, in the town she’s living in, this wouldn’t be happening if she had been driving, as everyone did there at that hour, on the wrong side of the road.
I’m going to die now, I think. It’s my last lucid thought for a while. Miraculously, the VW clears the underpass without guidance, but after rounding the corner careens straight up the embankment, flips over, flips over again, teeters on two wheels, completes a final flip, and settles upside down with a sickening thud, a foot or two shy of the road surface.
Strapped in the bucket seat, I contemplate a strange view of torn-up ice plant and gnarled embankment through the shattered, upside down windshield. My head has smashed against numerous surfaces in spite of the seat belt. I test myself for brain damage. I conjugate several French verbs. I struggle to recall the specific year of General Gordon’s siege of Khartoum. I grope around for the door handle. It falls off. Unclasping the seat belt, I test my limbs for mobility. My entire body feels damaged, but after much probing around seems miraculously intact. I crawl out the upside down window.
Crouching in the stubbly ice plant, it occurs to me that I might spend the night in jail. No, I won’t, I vow, forcing my grudging limbs and the rest of me to crawl further uphill, until I manage to stand and climb to the upper lip of the embankment. In what you could truly call a leap of faith, I scramble over the retaining wall, and drop several feet to the shoulder of the Hollywood Freeway—which has traffic moving on it, and looks like foolproof suicide to cross.
In an onrush of complete idiocy, I sprint across gaps in several lanes of angry headlights, reaching the other side in a fanfare of enraged horns, feeling mid-freeway that something’s broken or ruptured below my ribs.
On the other side, a steep escarpment rises from a narrow, eerily vacant street way below, in a neighborhood, if it is one, that I guess to be somewhere between the Rampart District and Echo Park. An unknown area that passes in a blink if you’re driving, but stretches for miles through alien terrain if you’re not. Every part of Los Angeles is like that: things that appear close through your windshield are really puzzlingly far away.
A half hour later, I’ve stumbled and slid down a crumbling declivity of rocks and dirt. The street at the bottom traverses a malignant-looking neighborhood of scattered two-story houses festering in dark overgrowths of vegetation, none showing any lights or evi
dence of occupancy.
I slog off in a tentatively western direction. When I consider that I should have died an hour earlier, a Valium calm flushes through me. Single-mindedly intent on hobbling all the way to the Bryson Apartments, miles from here for all I know, my idea is: if I make it home, and sleep, and sober up, if my face isn’t a bruised pulp in the morning, I might get away with claiming I was home all night, that the car was stolen from the Bryson garage. I don’t know anything about it getting wrecked beside the freeway … yes, exactly, but then … the California Highway Patrol can check the car registration from the plates in fifteen seconds, find out where I live, for all I know they’re waiting to surprise me in the Bryson lobby already. I could hide somewhere until I sober up. I’ll tell the cops I spent the night at a friend’s house. But I would’ve taken the car, in that case. Anyway, where do I imagine I can sleep? If I hide behind one of these houses, an alarm could go off, some property owner might come out with a shotgun.
Suddenly the fact that every inch of this city is somebody’s private property makes the inspiration doubtful. I could call Dane. Ask him to rescue me. Except I don’t know where I am. I don’t know his number by heart, either, and don’t have my phone book. Furthermore, there’s no phone anywhere. If he came, I could stay with him. Except he might have already left town. If he’s still around, though, I could tell the police I was out of town when my car was stolen. “I only found out about it now, officer …” No, it’s hopeless and stupid.
An hour passes. I am still trudging down the dark road, through endless nothingness. Potholes scar the street, grass pokes up where tar has fissured and crumbled away. The street doesn’t end, doesn’t connect to anything, it’s a hateful, stupid cancerous-looking black tongue lapping the earth’s surface for miles, in a wasteland without a speck of life except an occasional flickering street lamp and invisible dogs barking in darkness. No view, a monotony of abandoned houses and weed-infested driveways. I’m going to get nailed by the law, or become the first male victim of the Hillside Strangler, or swallowed by this sinkhole of a neighborhood.
After hours … up a small hill … at an empty intersection … a gas station! A large! Bright! Gas station! Where nobody’s minding the store: four banks of Serv-Ur-Self gas pumps with spread-out fluorescent bat wings anchored twenty feet above them. A phone booth glows at the edge of the tar piazza. I abandon my impossible quest to reach the Bryson. Peering in all four directions, I don’t recognize a single feature of the neighborhood. All right. I surrender. I step into the phone booth. I fish a quarter from my pants. I call the police.
They show up in four patrol cars, sirens shrieking. Seven officers jump out of the cruisers with their guns drawn and surround the phone booth. There’s a lot of rough language, conveying their anger and disgust at my irresponsibility. There’s a pinch of homophobic ridicule, but not as much as I might have expected. They look me over, frisk me for weapons and drugs, then grill me about my employment status. They ask where I live, though they already know. They want to know if I have accident insurance. I do. They conclude that I’m harmless.
They say they’ve already inspected the car. They were able to tell by the torn-up ground cover how many times it rolled over. It’s the kind of accident, they assure me, almost with admiration, that absolutely no one walks out of alive. One middle-aged guy with a kinder manner than the others, an avuncular sort, advises that I should thank whoever’s up there—he indicates outer space with his finger—that I’m not paralyzed with a broken spine or blind or dead, because I really should be.
Since I did walk away from it, and because it’s the 1970s, before Mothers Against Drunk Driving turned drunk driving into the moral equivalent of serial pedophilia and murder even when nobody gets hurt, the cops don’t arrest me on a DUI. They don’t even take me in to file an accident report. “Even though I can see you’re wasted,” one of them grumbles, “nobody’s dead, seems like you came out of it okay—it’s basically a waste of our time to take this any further.”
I’m not entirely free to go, but I’m not under arrest. Instead, he says, I must wait here for a tow truck they’ve already called, and accompany the tow-truck driver to the scene of the crash, then ride with him and the smashed-up VW to the city impound. I can reclaim the car after three days, if I pay the towing and storage charges.
The tow-truck driver is totally nonjudgmental about the whole thing. He’s obviously pleased to get business thrown his way at such a late hour. He’s about fifty, mildly overweight, with a face like a peeled apple, wearing overalls and cowboy boots.
“You lucked out,” he assures me, “on account of you’ve got the insurance. No insurance, you’d be spending the night in the holding tank.”
En route to the impound, we pass through a bosky Mexican neighborhood lined with broken street lamps where people are still on the sidewalks in front of their houses, a pickup basketball game parting like the Red Sea for the truck to pass through it.
“Plus you’re white,” the driver adds. “With cops in this town, that’s one lucky plus.”
The next day, bruises covered me from about the sternum to my shins. I was too lame to walk. But I had nothing broken, no concussion, and cabbed to a doctor who told me to stay in bed for a few days and I would be, in his words, “good to go.”
I was good to go, I realized. Once I got my bearings, I understood that commuting to Watts on a city bus and arranging how to get to Westwood at the end of the day, and home at the end of the night, was a step too far down the ladder, into the basement of the City of Dreams reserved for cashiered starlets and sad fixtures in piano bars who once upon a time had “been somebody.” I had never been anybody, and if I stayed in LA, I realized, I never would be.
I interpreted the accident as a sign. Not a sign from God, who, unless he’s truly the worst prick in the universe, doesn’t exist. It was a sign from an enormous, disembodied, imaginary fuck-you finger poking through “a dense gray cloud of you’ll never know.”
I packed my typewriter, clothes, a few books, and stashed the rest of my stuff in a storage loft at Chatterton’s. A week later, I took a cab to the airport. I had forty dollars, a TWA Getaway Card, and a friend’s address in New York.
Epilogue
I went back to the island for a few days, to see Ricardo: the worst possible time, as it turned out, Havana being overrun by American tourists set loose by newly relaxed travel restrictions. Alberto sold the apartment on 21 y G “out from under me”—we’ll never have that ideal place again, and the generically acceptable flat Ricardo reserved became suddenly unavailable hours before my arrival. We ended up in a dreary warren in Vedado during a bizarre four–day cold snap that kept us indoors, in a freezing bedroom, huddled under thin blankets, without much to say to each other and with nothing whatever to distract us. A true nadir: We spent many hours trying to force ourselves to sleep at times when we would normally set out for a night’s chance encounters and a bit of fun.
No doubt everything will change, some time, but for now most of what I’ve loved here has turned sour or disappeared. The Bim Bom scene was dispersed a few seasons ago by the placement of floodlights aimed at the sidewalks around the cafetería. The same has happened along the Malecón, with the installation of blinding lamps on the thruway divider. Nobody gathers there (or anywhere else) any more—except the incongruous guests of the Hotel Nacional, who’re ecstatic to photograph themselves in front of the sea wall and parade through the city on the open decks of tour buses, like an army of triumphant vandals. If anything, the improbable numbers of these new visitors has amped up the vigilance of the police, who interfere with any Cuban they see in company with any foreigner.
It simply isn’t possible to continue things as we’ve done for so long, hiring cars to take us anywhere we need to go together, or walking ten feet apart in the street, continually scanning for cops. There is practically nowhere left to go, in any case: The gay bar an Italian opened on Humboldt Street a year ago has been shut down �
��for drugs,” the Echeverria disco and its palm-studded, walled grounds is likewise kaput; all that remains is Toke, a snack bar–restaurant adjacent to the dreaded Las Vegas Club, its patio tables on Infanta Street cruised all night by a shifting assortment of out-and-out hustlers on the sidewalk, who all look like they just got out of jail.
The city feels shrunken, like a decrepit resort town full of long-shuttered attractions. A scattering of new, slightly-better-than-the-usual restaurants offers occasional queasy relief (but no culinary excitement) from the Apartheid-like constriction that dictates our time together. Ricardo is a kind of partner, but really just a friend. An intimate friend I feel vaguely responsible for. Whatever watery plans we once devised to get him away from Cuba have gradually evaporated. He doesn’t really want to leave: He just wants to secure a different nationality, as immunity against police harassment. (He’s the furthest thing from a criminal or a hustler imaginable, but his deep-black skin color makes him a favored target for the city’s criminal peacekeepers, who are mainly light brown or off-white.) This is something I can’t accomplish for him, given the Byzantine immigration laws of my country. And I can’t keep returning here. While writing my book in Alberto’s dream flat, all the circumstances that make life here meager and depressing were manageable, even easy to ignore: the cops, the boredom, the perpetual shortages of food items and medicines. But the book is finished, and the soft brutality of island communism has become unbearable. Ricardo is better off without a companion whose very presence makes him an object of negative scrutiny.