The Los Angeles Diaries

by James Brown

  “It ain’t over yet,” I say.

  My wife wakes.

  “Who you talking to?”

  “Nobody,” I say. “I must’ve had a nightmare.”

  Later that afternoon, on my way home from work, I stop off at Home Depot again and buy a bag of spiked plates. Each is three by five inches and boasts twenty-four razor-sharp points. Typically they’re used for joining rafters in rough frame construction, but I mount them on the opposite side of the gate, leaving the treacherous spikes exposed. Pigs have extremely poor eyesight, and so I mount them just before dark. I mount them while she’s distracted, devouring her evening meal. I want it to be a surprise.

  “Eat up,” I say. “Enjoy.”

  Where my initial reprimands succeeded in quieting Daisy for about a week, and the rocks nearly a month, the spikes fail miserably from the very beginning. The difference is that I’m not asleep this time. For most of the night I lie awake, partly because I’m worried about things—my marriage, my children, my writing and drinking—and partly because I’m excited. I want to be awake for this. I want to experience the moment—that bloodcurdling squeal when she first encounters the spikes. But at five that morning, instead of a painful squeal, I hear the banging of the gate again. I get out of bed and go to the window. In the dawn’s early light, Daisy is rubbing her rump against the spikes as if she’s simply scratching an itch. At this point I snap.

  I put on my pants. I put on a shirt and a pair of shoes and hurry quietly outside to the storage cabinet. This is where we keep our household chemicals, half-empty buckets of paint, cans of lacquer thinner, wood stain, quarts of motor oil and a spare gallon of gasoline in a red can. I carry the red can around to the backyard. I empty out a spray bottle of window cleaner and refill it with gas and walk calmly over to the pigpen. The sun is rising, and I can see clearly now. I can see everything clearly now. I know what I must do and I am not thinking of my children or my wife and how my actions might endanger them.

  “Daisy,” I say. “C’mere, Daisy. I have a little surprise.”

  I hold the bottle up to her snout. Immediately she recoils.

  “Like that?” I say. “Huh? It smell good?”

  I spray the rocks with it. I spray the spikes and the gate and the dirt all around it. Then I start back into the house, confident that I’ve solved the problem, if only temporarily, when I hear something that stops me dead in my tracks. At first I can’t make out what it is, or maybe it’s that I can’t believe it, but I hear it again. These wet slurping noises. Slowly I turn around.

  She is licking at the rocks.

  She is lapping at the spikes. That’s how I lose it. My mind. I walk back to the pen. I squat down. Face-to-face. Pig to man.

  “Like it?” I say. “Gas? This good gas? Want some more?”

  Daisy glares at me with those beady little eyes and snorts. I lower the nozzle. I slip my finger around the trigger and I’m just about to squeeze down on it when my wife calls to me from our bedroom window.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Nothing, honey.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “What smell?”

  “It’s gas. I smell gas.”

  She sees the red can that I set nearby on the ground. Then she looks at the bottle in my hand.

  “My God,” she screams, “is that what you’re spraying? Are you trying to kill the poor thing? Are you trying to burn down the house? You’re sick,” she says. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  She threatens to call the Humane Society. She says something about calling the cops, too, but I don’t stick around to see if she’ll follow through. I take refuge at a local bar and wallow in my anger, an anger that has been building now for some time. Like an ugly hangover, it carries over from one day to the next, and eventually I don’t think my wife and I even know what we’re fighting about anymore. We fight, I guess, because the anger is never resolved and we’re unaware of it, how left unchecked it only grows, how that anger turns to resentment, that resentment into coldness. A bitter coldness. The kind that kills.

  A storm has moved in this morning. It’s pouring outside and the place is packed with construction workers taking advantage of their day off. The guy beside me has a cigarette dangling from his lips. He’s patting his pockets for his lighter, and I hand him mine. I strike up a conversation. I tell him about the pig, not the whole story, just parts. In no time he’s laughing.

  “My brother-in-law had one of those,” he says. “Lived twenty-two years. Weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. They’re tough fuckers, you know, from the jungles of Vietnam.”

  Twenty-two years.

  I roll those words over in my head. Twenty-two more years of this and I will be an old man. I will be full of contempt and self-loathing. Our children will be grown and gone. Without them, my wife and I will become one of those bitter old couples who have their own bedrooms and only talk to each other when they have to. Crippled with regret and remorse, we will push on gallantly, battling it out to the bitter end.

  The bartender approaches.

  “Another drink?” he asks.

  “Why not?” I say.

  He looks at me and sniffs the air.

  “Do you smell gas?”

  “No,” I say. “But something around here definitely stinks.”

  I’m not sure when I return home. What happens once I get a few drinks in me is that I want something more, and once I get that something more there’s no stopping me. I’m off and running. Generally my binges don’t last longer than three or four days, and because it’s still storming when I run out of money, drugs and booze, I’m guessing that, at most, only a night or two has passed.

  I run out of gas about a mile from my house and have to walk the rest of the way. It’s late at night and cold. The rain is coming down hard. My clothes are soaked and I’m chilled to the bone. When I last slept, I don’t know, but I am weak with fatigue. What I need is another drink, some clean dry clothes, a warm bed. I stagger across the driveway and pull myself up the porch steps. For a while I lean against the hand railing, struggling to catch my breath, then I fumble for my house key. I try to slip it into the lock. I try several times before I realize that it no longer fits. Suddenly I’m enraged. I pound on the door. I shout for her. I shout for my children but no one answers.

  A light glows in the living room. The curtains are drawn but there’s a space between them, and when I stumble into the flower bed to look through the window, I see Daisy sprawled in my La-Z-Boy, one hoof hanging over the armrest. She is staring at the TV, the screen flickering with static.

  Summer 1977

  PERSONAL EFFECTS

  My brother is standing outside the baggage claim dressed like a cop. This wouldn’t be unusual if that’s what he did for a living, police work, but it’s not. Barry is an actor and sometimes he just doesn’t know when to stop. I pull to the curb and tap the horn. He looks through the traffic, spots me, waves. We’re at the airport in San Jose and I’ve come to pick him up. I’ve come to take him to see our father who was taken to the hospital the night before.

  I’m driving the old man’s truck, and it’s a tired one, a real workhorse. There’s no radio or heater and it won’t go into second gear anymore, but it’s served our father well through the years and I like it. How it rides bumpy. How you have to wrestle the wheel when you make a turn. My brother climbs into the front seat and I put it into first gear. He doesn’t look good. He’s gained too much weight, his face is bloated and his eyes are dull. But I don’t say anything. I give it some gas and we go.

  “How’s he holding up?” he asks.

  “He’s doing okay.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They never tell you much. I don’t think they know much or they won’t let on. But they moved him out of intensive care this morning.”

  “That’s a good sign,” he says.

  Our father, he had a stroke. I called Barry with the news after our stepmother called
me and that’s why we’re here. I took the Greyhound in from San Francisco. Barry flew in from L.A., just off the set with a small role in a B movie called Piranha. Our sister, she has a little girl to look after and can’t make it on short notice. She lives in L.A., too.

  “What’s with the uniform?” I say.

  He lifts the badge from his chest with the tips of his fingers and smiles.

  “Looks real, doesn’t it?” he says.

  “You know you can get in serious trouble going around like that.”

  A plane roars by overhead, the noise almost deafening. When it passes I look over at my brother again and try to smile. But it’s a forced smile because he worries me. He’s worried me for a while now. His drinking has progressed rapidly over the last few years. “I didn’t have any clean clothes,” he says. “And I didn’t have time to do the wash. That all right with you?” he says. “I just got your call and jumped on the plane.” He reaches around to his back pocket and takes out a half-pint wrapped in a brown paper bag and offers it to me. I wave it off. It’s only about ten o’clock and already he is drunk or well on his way. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s truly drunk, because he drinks so much and because he’s so good at maintaining. I’ve seen him put away a fifth and not slur his words or weave when he walks. But the smell, you can’t hide that. It fills the inside of the truck and I crack my window and let in some fresh air. He takes a drink and caps the bottle and rests it between his legs.

  “A couple nights ago,” he says, “I was driving home from the set and this woman cut me off. We’re on the Hollywood Freeway and when she exits I follow her off the ramp. I pull up alongside her while we’re stopped at the red light and flash her my badge. ‘Hey, lady,’ I say, ‘I could give you a ticket for cutting me off back there.’ ” He laughs. “ ‘But I’ll let you off with a warning this time. Just don’t let it happen again.’ ”

  He laughs harder. It’s his trademark laugh, a high-pitched laugh that I’ve always enjoyed, and it makes me want to laugh with him. But I don’t find the story so funny. I also don’t believe it. My brother likes to embellish. He likes to make up stories, and sometimes it worries me. Sometimes I wonder if he knows the difference between the truth and a lie.

  This is June and we’re in the middle of a heat wave. Yesterday it hit a hundred degrees before noon, and today doesn’t promise to be any kinder. The sun is beating through the windshield, and while we’re stopped for a light I notice that he’s sweating, heavily, like he’s sick with fever. The ends of his hair are soaked and he keeps wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. “Doesn’t this thing have air-conditioning?” he says, and I want to tell him that it wouldn’t matter. That what he needs to do is quit drinking or at the very least cut back to just beer and wine. I have a few myself every other day, and though on weekends I don’t usually bother to keep count, I believe that I am perfectly fine. I believe that I am far from becoming anything like my brother. But I tell him none of these things, and when the light changes I put the truck into gear and start across the intersection and onto the freeway.

  As we drive toward the hospital I look out over the valley. Where there were once apricot orchards, orange groves and wide-open fields, now all you see are housing tracts, strip malls, gas stations, fast-food places. We talk about this, my brother and I, how it’s all changed since we were children. We talk about the house that our father built for us and lost. We talk about the older San Jose, downtown, and how it’s blighted now, the different shops and stores all boarded up because people prefer the malls in the suburbs. We talk about anything but the man responsible for our being here on this hot morning in June in this beat-up old truck.

  Even at the hospital, as we ride the elevator up to see our father, we talk about other things. Barry tells me that he has to move out of his house in Echo Park. He has until the end of the month.

  “After that,” he says, “I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe Marilyn will let me stay with her until I get back on my feet.”

  “You can live with me.”

  I mean it, and when he doesn’t say anything I find myself suddenly angry.

  “Fuck Hollywood,” I say. “You need to get out of that place and sober up.”

  The elevator doors open. We step out and start down the hall, looking at the numbers on the doors. Our father is in room 614. “Did you hear me?” I say. We pass room 609. We pass 610 and 611 and he still hasn’t answered. It could be that he’s seriously mulling over the offer. It could be that he’s mad at me because I told him the truth. I don’t know. I don’t know if I have ever understood my brother. We are inside room 614 now, where our father lies, his eyes half closed, drowsing, with a tube running from one arm and wires connected to his chest. I am scared for him. I am worried. But as we approach the bed I am thinking, oddly, only of my brother.

  Strokes often come in pairs. Where the first is mild, the second can be fatal. And the chances of another striking are greatest in the first forty-eight hours. Beyond keeping the patient calm and relaxed as possible, and monitoring his vitals, there is little the doctors can do. But hope is on our father’s side and he does not suffer that second stroke, the one that kills. Unfortunately the first has robbed him of the use of his right hand, he can hardly open and close it, and for someone who has made his living all of his life working with his hands this is a particularly devastating blow.

  After three days the doctors send him home to his wife, Aileen, our former baby-sitter, along with a prescription for blood thinner and a rubber ball that he is supposed to practice squeezing. The idea is to rebuild the muscles of his hand, to somehow retrain them. “It’s the mind-body connection,” he tells us, when we’re back at the house. We have been back for a few hours now and we’re sitting around the kitchen table with a bottle of Canadian Club. It’s late in the afternoon and the drapes are drawn to help keep out the heat. Our father is wearing Bermuda shorts and his favorite Hawaiian shirt and I think that this is good, not to have to see him in that ugly hospital gown. Except for being a little pale, a little shaken for the experience, he seems fine. The hand, you can’t tell anything is wrong by looking. He is squeezing the ball as we drink, or trying to anyway. The fingers will barely move.

  “What’s it feel like?” Barry says.

  “It’s strange,” he says. “When you will it to move and it won’t.”

  Barry is wearing the pants to his uniform but he’s stripped down to his T-shirt. The alcohol is making him sweat again, and I would like to think our father would notice, that it’s a sign too obvious to deny. I am surprised then, when he smiles at Barry from across the table and tells him that he looks good. Healthy. That he must be working out. They haven’t seen each other for months, not since Christmas, and in that time my brother’s drinking has clearly escalated. It shows in his face, in the bloat, in the dull bloodshot eyes. But then I am no one to talk. I am no one to judge. I am drinking right along with them, shot for shot, when our stepmother comes into the kitchen. She’s been out shopping and is carrying a big bag of groceries. She sets it on the counter, looks at our father and shakes her head.

  “Don,” she says, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Mi vida,” he says. “No más un poquito.”

  “A little, my ass,” she says. “You know you’re not supposed to drink on your medication.” But he gives her a smile, and she softens. She shakes her head again. “A few hours out of the hospital,” she says, “and already you’re acting like nothing happened. I can’t leave you bums alone for a minute.”

  “C’mon, pull up a chair.”

  “I don’t know about you,” she says.

  “Have a drink. Jimmy,” he says, “you want to make her a drink, a screwdriver.”

  “Just one,” she says, and she means it.

  So I make her a drink, a screwdriver, and for a while it’s like old times, sitting around the kitchen table with my brother and father getting wasted on a hot afternoon. The liquor has taken effect and I
dismiss my concerns as petty and hypocritical. Barry will be fine. This is just a phase he’s going through. And our father, he’ll be all right, too. There is no reason to worry. We are just men doing what men do when they drink. We tell tall stories. We get loud sometimes. Or too sentimental. We solve world problems and make big plans and promises to each other that we will never keep.

  I am the youngest and I am proud that I can keep up with my father and brother. I am proud for the liquor I can hold. But we all have our limits, and soon after dinner the room begins to spin. I go into the guest room and lie down on the bed and shut my eyes. That only makes it worse, and I think I’m going to be sick, but it subsides, and a short while later I pass out.

  When I wake up the room is dark. Someone has taken off my shoes and covered me with a blanket. My throat is dry, I can hardly swallow. I get up from the bed slowly, because my head is pounding, and wander into the kitchen for a glass of water. It has to be around two or three in the morning and the house is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. I pour myself a glass of water, drink it and pour another. I’m so dehydrated that I can’t seem to get enough. On my way back to bed I notice that there’s a light on in the living room, and I walk toward it. I pause in the hallway. He is sitting in an armchair under the dim light of the table lamp with a drink at his side. He is reading a book. I do not know what book. But in the shadows of the light the bloat in his face seems to have disappeared and his eyes are clear and sharp. He looks up at me and smiles and in that moment I see him again, the old Barry, healthy and untroubled. Then he turns slightly, more toward the light and the picture changes. Something about the smile isn’t right. I don’t know what exactly, or how to describe it, but it looks almost as if it hurts him. It looks as if he’s doing it for my sake, on cue, like he might for the camera, and inside him I can sense something tightening, something closing down and pulling us further apart.

  I live in a dirty little beach town called Pacifica, about ten miles south of San Francisco. It is foggy all year round, but on those rare days when the sky is clear I can look out the window and watch the waves rise and break along the beach. My place is small, just one room and a kitchenette, and I don’t have a couch. I don’t have any armchairs or even a TV set. But I do have a table to eat on. I do have a desk and a typewriter and a bed to sleep in and for now, as a college student at San Francisco State, that’s all I need. For now, as an alcoholic, that is all my brother needs, a place where he can stay and dry out, and where at night, when you close your eyes, you can hear the waves breaking in the distance.