by Ryan Ridge
If I Were a Thoroughbred
Flashback: Something shattered, and Dad said, “Old age and treachery always slay innocence and optimism.” I said, “How do we even exist in this negative-energy dimension?” He had no answers. I spent much of my youth faking leg injuries to skip out on track practice. If I were a thoroughbred, I’d have been put down.
Location
You are not paralyzed on beer by a diminishing river. You are not setting the doghouse on fire on the lawn. You are not banking in Zurich or London or any of the secret tax shelters of the Caribbean. You are not camping under a bridge downtown or beneath any of the great expressway ramps in the suburbs. You are not getting high on the roof of the hospital with a rowdy orderly named Ronnie. You are not dancing with yourself at your best friend’s second wedding. You are not developing a film in an undeveloped country. You are not returning to school to become an X-ray technician. You are not breaking down on an LA freeway on your way to a Silver Lake pot-luck. You are not drinking port wine with the longshoremen in San Pedro again. You are not stealing Roberto Bolaño books from the nearby library. You are not posing for the spy satellites at a teenage riot. You are not riding your Triumph straight into the sea. You are here. You are still here.
Echo Park
In the 1880s, when the workers were building the reservoir for the human-made lake, you could hear their voices echoing off the canyon walls. “It sounds like a park of echoes,” someone remarked. “An echo park,” someone else said, and it stuck. And it stuck. And it stuck.
Echoes of Echo Park
American Apparel apparel, American Apparel apparel, American Apparel apparel … beard, beard, beard … coffee shop, coffee shop, coffee shop … dive bar, dive bar, dive bar … Etsy design, Etsy design, Etsy design … fixed gear, fixed gear, fixed gear … glasses (extra-thick), glasses (extra-thick), glasses (extra-thick) … headphones, headphones, headphones … irony, irony, irony … judgment, judgment, judgment … kombucha, kombucha, kombucha … lifestyle brand, lifestyle brand, lifestyle brand … millennial, millennial, millennial … novelist, novelist, novelist … owl tattoo, owl tattoo, owl tattoo … PBR, PBR, PBR … quilter, quilter, quilter … Ray-Bans, Ray-Bans, Ray-Bans … screenwriter, screenwriter, screenwriter … typewriter, typewriter, typewriter … undercut, undercut, undercut … vinyl, vinyl, vinyl … witty banter, witty banter, witty banter … Gen X, Gen X, Gen X … YOLO, YOLO, YOLO … zombie, zombie, zombie …
All of us. All of us. All of us.
Church
The gangs have gone away, priced out to Eagle Rock, El Sereno, and the innards of the Inland Empire. On weekends, they return to their home turf in old Mercurys and souped-up pickups. They do this as a way of reconnecting with their roots. And if it’s true what they say about place giving rise to spirit, then the spirit of Echo Park is positively Western in a cinematic sense. Most Saturday nights culminate in a gunfight. Tonight shots ring out on Preston Avenue and echo on up to Avalon. Now an aspiring gangster is dead in a stairwell on Armitage. Tomorrow, I will step under police tape on my way to church. My church is called the Gold Room on Sunset. This is back when you could still get a PBR and a shot of tequila for four bucks. The peanuts? Free. I will sit at the end of the bar, drinking and praying for work. I won’t be able to tell if the drinking enhances the praying or if the praying improves the drink. Amen. Lord, hear our prayer.
Coyote
Night calls the animals to the streets. I’m on the Triumph shifting gears amid my own shiftlessness. At the corner of Mohawk and Reservoir, a scrawny coyote sifts through the contents of a trash can. In neighborhood newsletter editorials, coyotes are nuisances. In folklore, they are trickster figures—whenever one shows up, watch out: something exciting is about to happen. I’m stopped at a traffic light, watching the coyote lap up leftover malt liquor from a forty of Colt 45. I admire a coyote that drinks. I give my horn a quick tap of approval. The coyote looks at me with its eyes aglow. I look at the coyote. And for a split second we understand all there is to understand; we understand each other. Nothing lasts. The light changes.
Noir
There’s the slant of the shoreline and the lights of the oil derricks reflecting off the black water like a miniature city, and when the detective arrives to make the cash drop at the dark edge of the pier he’s struck by two things at once: (1) the vast existential loneliness of LA at night, and (2) a blackjack to the back of the head.
The Second Detective
Have I mentioned the cam girl? She was not a girl at all: a woman, an artist. What I mean is she had a job that ran counter to her passion. The detective signed into the chatroom and scanned the comments in the right-hand column: men—assholes, virgins more than likely—were making demands. The scene reminded him of an amateur hostage negotiation. He lit a cigar, sipped his scotch, watched the artist pull her panties to the side and push the vibrator close. Now the detective sat back and blew a smoke ring. The artist closed her eyes. He swallowed his scotch hard, felt like crying. Instead, he typed: “This is no longer a missing person’s case. I’ll notify your family.” It’d been two years since they’d seen her. The family? They were from a Midwestern state that was all vowels and had no idea what was being broadcast from California bedrooms. “Tell them I said hello,” she typed back. “Tell them we all do what we have to do to live in this world. The dead would kill to live.” The detective didn’t argue. He extinguished his cigar. Case closed. The only reason I know any of this is because the detective told me the tale one afternoon at the Gold Room. Later, the detective disappeared, too. His family hired a private investigator to look into it, and, one afternoon, the detective’s investigator knocked on my door. I told him the story about the detective telling me about finding the missing girl online. The second detective didn’t think there was much to it, but he thanked me for my time.
Last Cigarette
“Every cigarette you don’t smoke adds another four-point-eight minutes to your life,” a concerned citizen said to me one afternoon in front of Paramount Pictures after I botched an audition. I did not light my cigarette. I left. Five minutes later, I stood at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery torching a Lucky Strike in front of Rudolph Valentino’s mausoleum. Now that guy liked his cigarettes. I was picturing him smoking in one of those old silent pictures when some punk kid interrupted my fun. The blood-red lettering on his T-shirt said: PUNK’S STILL DEAD. “Hey, man,” the kid said, “where’s Johnny Ramone?” I told him Johnny Ramone was in heaven now. “No shit, shitbird,” he said. “I’m looking for his stone.” I lit another cigarette. The kid made an outrageous face and said, “You shouldn’t do that.” I exhaled, said, “What?” “Your selfish, nihilistic attitude toward your own health is not only destroying you and the planet,” he said, “but it’s also exposing me to harmful toxins, and, because I’d like to grow up to be a successful entertainment attorney, I can’t have that. Either put out that cigarette or face the consequences.” I took another drag, and he pulled out a switchblade and stuck me in the stomach. I sat down on the side of the mausoleum, bleeding. The kid vanished behind a nearby tomb. I finished my cigarette.
Red Hill
Before WWII there were so many socialists living in the foothills of Echo Park that the locals referred to it as Red Hill. The place was a haven for druggies and radicals, witches and freaks. Woody Guthrie even lived there for a spell. Yes, Echo Park was an Eden unto its own. Then came the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare, and the Everyone-Is-Scared-of-Everyone-Else Scare. Names were named. Careers ruined. Lives wrecked. All for what? Ideas? “No ideas but in things,” said William Carlos Williams. Williams was blacklisted for a poem called The Pink Church. Everyone assumed the poem was about communism because it had the word “pink” in the title. I, too, flirted with communism when I first moved to Echo Park. Most days I walked around in a Che Guevara T-shirt and a beret. Then one night I got stomped outside the Griffith Observatory by a couple of coked-up bikers and thought worse of things. I had the fear, or the f
ear had me. Next month I bought the Triumph, a closet full of Western shirts, and a pistol. Day after, I bought another pistol and shot the original pistol and then took the Triumph up to Pasadena and tossed both pistols off the Colorado Street Bridge.
Adjuncts
It was teacher appreciation night at the wine bar, and, although they weren’t appreciated much in the larger pyramid scheme of the contemporary, corporate education model, the adjuncts drank for half off on Monday nights during the school year, and they drank double. I drank with them. I wasn’t an adjunct. I was an actor between roles, which meant I tended bar at a rooftop hotel in Hollywood and drove rich guys to LAX in a secret cab service that catered to execs and daytime television actors off the Fox lot. Sometimes the execs wanted handjobs, and, if the price was right, I offered them a hand. I was also adapting a Roberto Bolaño novel into a screenplay. The adjuncts spent their days in classrooms and their evenings on various inter-states. They were freeway fliers, scholars, and creative types: PhDs and MFAs who lived in Echo Park but taught in out-of-the-way places like Irvine, Fullerton, Long Beach, and Northridge. After a long day of shaping the minds of the future for minimum wage, they needed strong, cheap drinks and casual conversation. It was an eclectic crew: gay, trans, straight; you name it. I loved the way they spoke in such reverent tones about their prospects for tenure-track jobs, book deals, and lucrative freelance gigs. It reminded me of the way fellow actors talked about TV pilots and attributed movie work. That was what I had in common with these adjunct professors: we were all waiting for our lives to start. I’d step outside with my e-cigarette and check my iPhone to see if my agent had called. Mostly she had not. I’d take slow drags and exhale slower, watching the sunset die behind a row of palms.
Unemployment Office
My screenplay wasn’t working so I sent it to the unemployment office.
Extras
They give you fifty bucks a day to be an extra in the studio audience. The only prerequisite is that you are alive. I was broke and in need of cash fast, which meant I was in the studio audience up in Century City for one of the few shows which still used studio audiences. It was a sitcom I’d previously auditioned for. I’d come close to getting one of the leads, but they’d gone in “a different direction.” Now the character I would’ve played was declaiming brilliant life advice to his adopted daughter after she was booed off the stage at her student talent show. It was one of those heartfelt moments where the audience says Awww and claps, but I couldn’t contain myself: I was laughing, but it wasn’t funny. And I was causing my own scene because I was supposed to be clapping. I got up to leave. The man in the aisle seat glanced awkwardly at my crotch as I passed. “Excuse me,” I said. “Sorry.” They’d still mail me fifty bucks. I passed a line of extras waiting in the sun. Like most days, more had shown up than they needed.
Island Time
They filmed the television show Gilligan’s Island on a soundstage in Echo Park. Years later, I watched the entire series on DVD in my Echo Park apartment, a couple of blocks from where the soundstage had been. I wasn’t working much, aside from an occasional commercial spot. I had plenty of time to drink and not think and binge old TV. Gilligan’s Island was my favorite. I’d get deep into gin and watch a dozen episodes in a row. Island Time, I called it. What I admired most about the show was the total lack of continuity between episodes. Zero story memory. It was as if each day was the first day on the island for old Gilligan and company, which was precisely the way my life felt: purgatoried in some zany twilight zone. I also watched a lot of Twilight Zone.
Echo Parking Meters
Certain side stories were running concurrently: (1) Time had expired forever for the old Echo Park parking meters, and now they’d replaced the traditional meters with automated pay stations, which accepted credit cards and payment via cell phones. (2) It was May, which meant they were screening night movies at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Cool Hand Luke played on the side of Rudolph Valentino’s mausoleum, and Paul Newman was cutting the heads off parking meters with a pipe cutter in the opening scene. It was the ultimate act of idiotic defiance. But, by opposing nothing, I supposed, he opposed everything. Cinema is a form of immortality, sure, but it’s also a type of death: images flickering on the screen forever as we all edge closer to the grave. Later, I got drunk at the Gold Room and went looking for some parking meters to dismember, but I couldn’t find any in Echo Park. Instead, I cut up my credit cards and cried.
Game
The name of the game? Let’s call it Termite Control. It’s a game you—and by “you” I mean “I”—play at home and out of necessity. It requires intense concentration and fortitude: you stare for hours at the hardwood floor in your apartment’s living room, letting your eyes relax so you can see the floor—the whole floor—and you wait for any sudden movement, and once you’ve seen some, you find the hole in the hardwood where the termites are entering, and you cover it with a piece of clear packaging tape. Sometimes this prevents the termites from entering the room for months. Other times, like now, they’re back within minutes through another access point. You’ve played this game nine times tonight, and the night is still young. The only rule: learn to lose. Learn to love to lose. There’s no winning this game (a good life lesson). When you move out come summer, someone—your slumlord, or the slumlord’s assistant, or even the slumlord’s cleaning crew—is going to wander in here and wonder why two-thirds of the apartment’s surface area is covered in clear packaging tape. “What the fuck is with the tape?” they might wonder. “And why did this dude leave three boxes of Twilight Zone DVDs?” And you’ll have no answer to these questions, because by then you’ll be long, long gone.
Climate Change
California was behind me, more speck than spectacle. I’d sold everything except for my Triumph and a change of clothes. It was winter, but it felt like spring. The seasons had turned strange. Outside Houston, I was drinking with some old astronauts at the old astronaut bar. One guy had been to space. I asked him what he thought about climate change. He said, “I’ve been to space.” I said, “Yeah, what was that like?” He said, “It’s a lot like climate change. No one cares.”
Home
I’m standing in the stands of Dodger Stadium in the rain in a dream. It’s been raining so long they called the game on account of it, and now all the players and the fans have gone to wherever they go when they’re not playing or fanning. I am alone. It’s unusually foggy now. I lunge onto the field and into the fog and round the bases. First. Second. When I turn second, the fog begins to lift. Lifts some more. Altogether. When I turn third, that’s when I see her, the Virgin Mary, glowing beneath the major-league stadium lights. She reclines at the mouth of the visitor’s dugout, near the on-deck circle. She is naked, and her hair is dyed blonde but not down there. She is naked, and she is spreading her legs. She is spreading her legs, and she is calling me home. So, I go. I go home, and the fog returns. The fog returns and the fog returns. Home.
Unending
The market crashed, and so did I. On the Triumph on I-69. Leaving California and headed to Kentucky, hoping to get lucky. I was half-drunk and in Texas. It was totally raining. The wind picked up, and I dropped the bike and skidded into a guardrail. I lived—only minor injuries. But I lost my license and what was left of my pride. Now I’m in recovery. Sobering. And here’s the sobering thing about sobering: it never ends. Or, it doesn’t end until it ends. Or until I do.
Hey, It’s America
33.
I decide to have a festival. I invite Dave and Lisa and the guy I know with guns.
32.
Dave likes to dance. It helps him beat back the blues. Last year, he lost his job as a personal shopper for a coterie of reality show housewives after one of his high-profile clients leaked her own grocery list to TMZ and then blamed Dave when the stunt resulted in a network advertising boycott. Now he works at the Lullaby House on La Brea and hates it. It’s the family business. His parents opened the orp
hanage a year before he was born. A decade later, it crushed nine-year-old Dave to learn that he wasn’t an orphan like the rest of the kids. He’s felt like an outsider among outsiders ever since.
“I wouldn’t say I hate my job,” Dave says on the phone tonight. “I enjoy helping orphans. But my parents are unbearable.”
“At least they’re alive,” I say, feeling a sinking sadness and a sense of regret as I say it.
“Go ahead,” Dave says. “If you want to talk, I’ll listen.”
He means do I want to talk about my dead parents again? I don’t. “Not tonight,” I say.
“Right on,” Dave says. “Let’s probe to the positive. You’re throwing a festival, man!”
31.
My parents were rabid thrill ride enthusiasts, killed in the worst roller coaster accident of the 1980s. I was there that day, but, fortunately for me, I wasn’t tall enough to ride. Instead, I stood there, leaning against the guardrail next to my grandparents, gripping a bag of cherry-berry cotton candy as the worst-case scenario unfolded in front of us. I’ll skip the horrific details. If you’re into morbid stuff, google: “the worst roller coaster accident of the 1980s.” It’s the first result. But be warned: it is nightmare stuff. Even thirty years later, my savings account flush with the settlement money, I still can’t stomach cotton candy. Just the thought of a roller coaster fills me with fear, and when I’m filled with fear, I need a release, and when I need a release, I either get drunk or masturbate (sometimes both). Occasionally: simultaneously. Today, I overdid it, but at least now the fear has subsided for a bit before the guilt will kick in and start the whole tedious pattern over again.