by David Louden
LOST ANGELES
A NOVEL
DAVID LOUDEN
Copyright © 2012 David Louden
First published by Venice Books, CA
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages…
…so there!
ISBN-13: 978-1477563649
ISBN-10: 1477563644
DEDICATED TO MY TWO BROWN-EYED GIRLS
KIND WORDS FROM GOOD PEOPLE
It’s a fantastic first novel that delves into the picaresque genre, creating a very modern romantic hero, or perhaps antihero. A novel that can be read and re-read but will still retain its moment in time due to its episodic structure. It is an ultimately multifaceted piece of literature that at its heart beats a debauched, messed up look at love and loss.
Dr. Dawn Hargy PhD
Louden has a knack for writing sentences that seem too off-hand to be coy, contrasting urban grit and philosophical ideals […] Louden also exhibits an admirable facility for handling changes in time and place. From the narrator’s memories of childhood and lost loves in Belfast, to his episodic wanderings through L.A., the reader is whisked back and forth in time and place with ease. The novel feels as if it must have been carefully plotted, yet reads with a naturalism that contradicts that.
Wendy Powers – The Testament of Judith Barton
There was a point that I didn’t know if I wanted to throw the book out of sorrow and frustration or kill the characters! It was so…emotional, heartbreaking, thought provoking. Honestly, a great book. I would have never thought to look up this book. Honestly, there was point where I wanted to slap Doug so hard! Screaming at the book and while you’re reading you realize that while everything is happening you’re shaking, or clenching your muscles, god it was heartbreaking!
GoodReads.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost I have to acknowledge the life I have now, the love that populates it and the peace of mind that’s given me to be able to pen an existence that differs so greatly from my own. To my darling better half, you’ve always been there to believe when I didn’t, be proud when I wasn’t and understand when I couldn’t. You’re my awesome tag team partner…big up! Special acknowledgement to all the people who’ve inspired me. Apologies if my words have fallen short of your experiences and emotions. I tried. To Wendy, thank you for your kind words, encouragement and electronic conversation. Finally to the good people of Los Angeles, you have a gorgeous city that attracts so many to come and find themselves and a select few who come to lose themselves. Remember them where you can, they need it. Much love LA!
1
“How the fuck did I end up here?!” I asked myself.
This wasn’t a matter of direction; I had always been a talented maps man. I remember being a small child and being dragged out from my cartoons to go shopping with my mother. Having taken a wrong turn on the Shankill Road with her we were facing the prospect of being blind lost in a part of Belfast which was, at the time, no friend of the Roman Catholic. I was able to lead her back to the main road and familiar grounds because it was the same direction as a Superman action figure I had seen and immediately coveted. I never got the figure.
Situationally I ended up in fucking God knows where the majority of the time because of my mouth. Seemingly it’s cabled with a high speed fibre optic connection whereas my brain was still waiting it out on dial up circa 1994. No, the reason for my quizzical rhetoric was a completely different one. It was however one I was unable to confront while my stomach was trying to digest itself. Thankfully one hundred yards away was the welcoming glow of a McDonald’s Golden Arch, it’s depressing to admit that my first act on Hollywood Blvd was to capitulate to the capitalist agenda but I was fresh off a thirty hour budget journey and still slightly perplexed as to how the fuck I ended up here. How it had all come to this moment.
The supposedly comforting thing about multi-national fast food establishments like these is that they’re all the same; their familiarity breeds a homing sense in the timid and unadventurous. Wrestling my fatigue and hunger cramps I dumped one lead foot in front of the other down the most familiar street in the world. I was almost hyperactive with the sensory stimulus that emanated from every Yellow Cab, hot dog vendor, beat-boxer and Marilyn Monroe impersonator. The sound of a city was always my favourite part of travel. The bus trip to Belfast International Airport and away from what passes as a buzzing metropolis in Ireland weaned me off the natural sounds of the urban sprawl. Airport noises are the same in whatever city you reside in. People of all Nationalities quizzing people of all Nationalities on where their gate is, inaudible P.A announcements and the crying of children never seems to gets tired, regardless of time zone. The first time you can tangibly understand that you’re not in Kansas anymore is the moment the automatic doors in Arrivals spits you out on to the street like an un-wanting mother. The temperature, the light, the hum infects you as you experience the heartbeat of the City.
Eventually you get used to it and you lose the ability to hear its rhythm, the beautiful sound of a place in existence. Los Angeles had an odd rhythm; you were convinced you knew it. Hollywood had saturated your waking life with enough representations of it that you’re openly confident that when you experience it the life of the City will beat as one with the heart in your chest but that’s total bullshit. The sound of L.A is louder, deeper, more fierce and animalistic than you know. The night air is gentle, the automotive sound rampant and unrelenting, the glow dreamlike. It’s one of the most exhilarating first encounters you’ll ever have, it seemed almost cheap to taint it with a burger flogging clown but the gut wants what the gut wants and mine had a hankering for a beef patty with the option of a toy.
I kissed goodbye to my cherry popping encounter with the sensory fuck that was Hollywood Blvd and stepped into the harsh fluorescent world of cheese burgers and supersize. Unsurprisingly for a fast food eatery on the busiest street in the world the place could do with a little tenderness being shown to it. The floor tiles were chipped and had an odd grey colour that imbued everyone who stepped on it and left them with a squeaky embrace with each step. I was so hungry, so wowed by the life of the City that I hadn’t given consideration to how I was going to pay for my Big Mac meal. I had money but it was all the money in the world to me.
It was the noughties, a retarded Floridian pretending to be a cowboy was in the White House and it was two US Dollars to the one British Pound. This meant if I was going to complete this transaction with the nice but clearly tired Ethiopian gentleman behind the counter I was going to have to tug at the ten thousand dollars in my back pocket. I would have to pray to God that my wallet didn’t ejaculate my entire life out on to the floor in front of a vagrant half-conscious man in the corner of the room and a group of aspiring hip hop artists free-styling the shit out of it twenty feet from me. Wriggling around, two fingers deep in my back end like some teenage boy unsure what he should be tugging at inside his girlfriend’s nether region I wrestled a fifty free. Granted a little bigger, a little flashier than I was looking for but at least I wasn’t trying to fight six people off everything I had left in the world.
As I’m sized up by 25 Cent and M&M I take my first non in-flight meal in over a day and sit at what is the furthest table from everyone. The G-Star sponsored crew offer up rhymes about bitches while the vagrant is now very awake, beyond alert and having a fully fledged argument with himself.
&nbs
p; “If I had half the chances you had I’d been twice the man by now you ungrateful shit,” he snarled before spitting back with “you cheeky son-of-a-cunt, I ought to beat you where you lie.”
The one-sided nature of the argument washed past the staff without the slightest flicker or acknowledgement. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was causing great unease in the NWAnnabes I would have been slightly more disturbed and less amused by the whole situation. Swallowing my burger in three bites I moved on to the fries, “before this night was over I might have to hit this place again” I thought. The profanity spitting hobo let out an enormous roar. His attempts to stab himself in the hand with a plastic knife proved more successful than he could have predicted. The force placed on the white child-friendly blade caused it to snap creating a newly formed sharpened splintered shard of a utensil that, under his momentum struck bone between his index and his fuck you finger. The howling of the hobo caused the gang of youths not to hear the door open nor the footsteps of five more children of the hip hop generation enter. They didn’t hear the door close either but they heard the next part for sure.
“Oh no the fuck you ain’t muthafucka!” Howled the Alpha of group two.
The tough bravado was back on the faces of the NWAnnabes as they got to posturing and what the kids kindly refer to as ‘fronting’. Ten teens stand toe to toe deadeye fucking each other. All the while, the staff considers whether to break them up, throw them out, stop the vagrant from assaulting himself any further, or call the Police. As a child of “the Troubles” and a product of the green side of the City I was raised in a community that held a deep rooted mistrust towards authority. I had often remarked how I had never seen so many fat unemployed people with such a dislike for bacon. At that moment in time I would have gladly taken the blues and authority of Los Angeles’ finest. But they didn’t call the Poe Poe; instead they simply sank to the ground behind the counter like a well rehearsed ballet.
“What the fuck you talkin’ about bro?!” Retorted the NWAnnabes leader “You know we settled this, you better believe we’ll settle this again.”
“Any place any time bitch! This is our muthafuckin’ table and this fuckin’ crib, yawl better bounce your fuckin’ asses elsewhere.”
Which side drew first I wasn’t entirely sure of, when there are ten guns being waved around gangsta style by people barely old enough to understand the damage they can do it’s not really that important. It wasn’t the first gun I’d seen in my life, that one was a lot bigger and spitting out rounds, it wasn’t even the first gun that was pointed at me, but it was the first that I was convinced could accidentally fire, setting off a chain of trigger fingers that would make Quentin Tarantino hard for months. For some unknown reason I ate through the entire standoff. Whether the mundane reality of a jetlagged Paddy munching carnivorously on whatever was put in front of him or the realisation that shit just got a little too real was what pricked their perception I don’t know but both sides dropped back down to Defcon One before agreeing to resolve this territorial dispute on another occasion. The NWAnnabes were visibly relieved; I fought the urge to say something I deemed hilarious enough that it needed to be aired. I figured even if they had shit their pants, five testosterone fuelled teens carrying Glocks wouldn’t take kindly to it being highlighted, especially in front of someone who was visibly doing the same. As the vagrant’s face passed through forced concentration to orgasmic pleasure, the smell of the human condition coincided with a satisfied grin. The sharp stench of shit hit the air-conditioned off-white cell of the McDonald’s consumer foyer as I took the last sip from my large Coke and forced myself back on to my barking dogs. 25 Cent made eye contact with me, for the first time since I walked into the eatery I was on the same page as the NWAnnabes.
“Keep pimpin’ Easy D.” I said half hoping that my Irish accent was thick enough and unfamiliar enough that the comment would sink in long after I was gone.
He nodded and with the scent of an old man’s faecal matter burning at my nostrils I stepped back into the buzzing, beeping, blinking and screaming pulse of City of Angels.
The hostel was at the top of a flight of stairs over a beaten down tattoo parlour that had, somehow, managed to survive the regeneration project that was Hollywood attempting to take pride in its most famous street. That’s not to say it’s the only tattoo parlour on the Boulevard, far from it –but it’s the only one that looks like you could catch ‘the herpe’ from flicking through the artists catalogue. The hostel was run by a Russian gentleman and his son who both looked like they lived in their once-white vests. It was far from the industry standard when it came to cleanliness, but at ten dollars a-night cleanliness could stay right by the side of Godliness, my purpose resided in lower places than the house of the Lord. I had been in such a rush to explore my temporary home-land that I had failed to notice that the six man dorm room I had been allocated was, at least, partially populated by the possessions of like minded explorers and deviants.
Thirty hours of travel was wearing thick upon me and with the stench of an unfamiliar turd partying in my nasal cavities a strategic retreat was the best course of action. I needed to feel like a new man if I was going to tackle this City on night one. The showers were those you’d find in an older model of school or military barracks; communal, no privacy. The wooden swing doors of the shower acted as a shield of sorts from the toilets. They were a beautiful barrier to the visual assault of swinging man meat from the eye-level vantage point of the seated toilet dweller. The shower heads needed a little bit of muscle and lubrication to get going but once they did I found that the two settings would either kill any libido known to mankind or leave you on the burns ward, it was made tolerable by the idea that the female showers looked exactly the same.
Cleaned up, dried off and dressed not to impress but to at least look less like a tourist who’s slept in the same clothing while sitting upright twice. I made my way down the narrow carpeted corridor that lead to my room. Music and world accents emanated from the communal space at the front of the building. The hall lighting flickered and flashed revealing the sins of years past; the neglect of what must have been a once loved building. The fluids that have been wiped off the walls but never properly cleaned, the traces of damage that leads all the way up to the slightly warped ceiling, the… Bumping into a six foot blonde in bikini top and Daisy Dukes threw me for a second; I hadn’t expected to have collided with someone who in any other City would be out on a Friday night. Her face was without spot, wrinkle, flawless. Her eyes soft blue and her lips inviting; when she spoke it was with a Scottish finish to her sentences.
“Christ…sorry!” Stumbled out of my mouth.
“Sorry I wasn’t really looking where I was goin’.” She replied as she handed me back my cleansing products.
“Perfectly fine, though we should probably exchange insurance details just in case.” I said.
She laughs and a smile breaks “Jen,” she offered.
“Doug,” we shake hands. It was playful but something was stirring.
“I’ve got to get back to my…” Pointing to the communal room. Jen smiles one last time before rushing off, her hips see-sawing me to near hypnosis.
Entering my room I’m gifted with the sight of a grown man’s asshole as he stands bent over, naked, in the middle of the room rummaging through his suitcase. He is discarding everything seemingly everywhere looking for what must have been the treasure of the Sierra Madre.
“Woo! Hope to god that thing’s not loaded, I’ve had enough things pointed at me this evening.” I quipped.
Rising to a vertical stance he turns to face the sarcastic voice from over his shoulder. I hadn’t even met this person by traditional standards and I was already too familiar with his brown eye and now his man brain. Forcing eye contact I introduce myself and once he throws on some fucking clothes he tells me his name is Rob. He was originally from London but his folks took the decision to extract him from the English capital at an early age and reloca
te to Birmingham where his dad built ugly buildings for three decades.
“Concrete cocks!” Rob called them.
Once retired his parents made the decision to move again, this time to Ibiza where they run a commune for fans of loud music and orally induced class B narcotics. It was while working here that he met Rosie. Not only was the alliteration pleasing but they were inseparable that entire summer on the party island. Rosie ditched her job in Leeds by phone the night before she flew home and was waiting on Rob a week later when he touched down at the airport. They were married before the Christmas of the same year and now, with the summer on the horizon again and their one year anniversary only just in the rear view he’s sitting in a hostel room smoking cigarettes while his wife is shacked up with a social worker named Gavin.
Rob was a man of fine spirit, especially when you consider the practical joke that fate had just fucking played on him. He had arrived in Los Angeles a few days prior judging by the redness of his face and bald head. As he lit another cigarette, the one that would see him power through to the ending of his story, he threw on a short sleeved Ben Sherman shirt. A heavy black tattoo sat on his forearm; I passed no comment on it. I had seen enough tattoos to be able to spy a cover job and something was telling me I would have got short odds on whose name once adorned his right wing.
“That is one sorry tale of woe you got there buddy.” I said as I exhaled a wave of smoke.
“It is what it is man, you know?!” He batted philosophically. “I mean I miss her, I wanted to be with her for life, but life goes on. You got any plans for tonight?” Asked Rob.
“Well seein’ that I’ve already bore witness to your balloon knot I was thinking about heading out and trying to forget some of the sensory interactions I’ve had tonight.” Said I.