7

Two days later I sobered up enough to look for work. I don’t know what had gotten into me. I’d parked my car across from a church a couple blocks from the beach in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park, stepped into a bar on Main Street and didn’t stumble out until 2 a.m. closing time. From a homey with a pit-bull on the Venice Beach Boardwalk I’d bought a used Nikon F3 with a 28–85 mm zoom lens, no questions asked. After that I lost track of events, woke up on the sand thirty hours later with plum-sized bruises on my arm and knuckles scraped raw. I couldn’t remember hitting anybody. Under my leather jacket I still clutched the Nikon. The last of my Las Vegas money had been given away, spent or stolen except for a twenty-dollar bill hidden in my shoe. A cheap bathing suit took most of that and after I washed up in the open air showers at the beach I spent the last of it on breakfast and the paper.

I needed work but didn’t qualify for any of the jobs listed in the classifieds. My only work experience had been taking pictures of toddlers and infants and I didn’t think I could go back to that. I walked up and down Main Street looking for Help Wanted signs but didn’t see any. At a dozen stores I asked to fill out an application but when I admitted that I’d spent the last five years in prison they couldn’t get me out the door fast enough. Nobody wanted someone a little down on her luck. I was feeling pretty low about myself. I didn’t mind starting at the bottom. I would have felt happy being tall enough to reach up to the bottom.

My stomach began to eat its lining after sunset. Hunger is a problem solver. You can have a million troubles but if you don’t eat, hunger is the only one that matters.

Across the street a steady procession of Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches rolled up to a restaurant’s valet parking. White block letters spelled out a nouvelle cuisine name on the awning. Nobody stopped me when I walked through the glass doors and stood near the bar area to the right. I didn’t sit anywhere, just stood around like I was waiting for somebody. The faces at the bar and across the partition in the dining-room had that airbrushed quality of having emerged from a television set. Everybody was young or played themselves ten years younger. You could hear the jangle of platinum credit cards with each step. Even those who dressed informally – and LA is the informal dress capital of the world – wore their jeans, bomber jackets and baseball caps with the carefully studied intent of costume design. Most galling of all each of them drove cars worth more money than I’d ever made in my life.

When I worked up the courage I backed to a bar table vacated by a party of four and jammed bread sticks into my pockets a fistful at a time. I didn’t get more than two steps out the front door before I heard someone shouting at me from behind. I took off running. The bread sticks might have been worth less than a quarter but people have been arrested for less and theft was a violation of my parole. The shouts kept up for about fifty yards and stopped just before I veered onto a street that would take me over a parking fence and out to the beach. What stopped me from jumping the fence was my name. It had been the last word called out before whoever chased me pulled up lame. I eased an eye around the corner of the building to observe him. From the shabby look of his jeans, windbreaker and tennis shoes he didn’t work in the restaurant and didn’t have the money to patronize it. He walked with a winded gait, clutching his hand to his ribs to cover the stitch the run had given him. I didn’t recognize him at that distance but maybe I’d met him while I’d been drunk and just didn’t remember. He had some size to him but most of it was out front where he could see it hanging over his belt. I couldn’t see the gain in waiting to hear him out but curiosity wouldn’t let me do the smart thing and disappear.

The breath still wheezed heavy in his lungs when he passed the corner of the building and saw me munching on a bread stick. He swiped at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand, asked, ‘Why were you running so fast?’

‘None of your damn business.’ I didn’t mean to be vulgar, just firm.

‘That’s the way to answer.’ He turned his shoulder to cough up some lung. ‘Personally, I can’t understand why Californians are so nice all the time, have a nice day this and have a nice day that, I have a hard enough time not slapping the prissy bastards around to remember to be polite.’ He pulled a pack of Winstons from the pocket of his red and black windbreaker. ‘Name’s Frank. From Chicago originally. Smoke?’

‘What do you want, Frank?’

‘You mean other than a cold case of beer and a hot babe?’ He sucked a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with a silver Zippo. ‘Can’t say I want much of anything. I thought I recognized you in the bar, and now that we’re up close and personal, I’m sure I recognize you. Nina Zero, right? The babe who blew up LAX.’ He pronounced it ‘ellayex’. Los Angeles International Airport.

‘Not the whole airport. Just one terminal.’ I turned and walked. The past didn’t interest me.

‘Hey, hey, stop a minute,’ he called.

I didn’t even slow down.

‘Why don’t you lemme buy you a hamburger?’ He kept a respectable distance off my elbow, pluming smoke like an old Chevy burning oil. ‘Yeh, a hamburger and fries washed down by a cold beer would taste real good right now. That ritzy joint we just came outta, that’s business to me, I don’t actually eat there.’

‘What do you mean, business?’

He dug into his windbreaker and handed me a card that read staff writer for Scandal Times.

‘A tabloid writer.’ I said it like I wanted to spit. The regular papers had been sensational enough but the tabloids went wild at my arrest. One of the scribes had been inspired to pen a poem: Mary had a little gun / Whose sight would take your breath, / Because wherever Mary went / She shot a man to death.

‘You’ve got nerve chasing me after all that crap you wrote.’

‘I’m from Chicago. People from Chicago got a lot of nerve. But I didn’t cover your story then. I just read about it.’

‘The story’s over. Now I just want to live like everybody else.’

‘You get hungry like everybody else too. C’mon, lemme buy you a hamburger. If you’ve gone Californian, the same place serves rabbit sprouts on whole wheat bread so damn whole you’ll be picking the husks out of your teeth.’

My hunger was greater than my pride. I let him lead me across the street to the back table of a restaurant where the smell of frying beef fat was thick enough to clog an artery. He had to be looking for a ‘Whatever happened to…’ kind of story but I didn’t have to tell him anything. Like every other casual dining joint in Santa Monica the menu included a list of salads and sandwiches with Italian-sounding names but most of the customers we passed were there for the red meat. Frank didn’t bother to crack the menu and the waitress didn’t need to listen to his order to know it wouldn’t be the Dolphin Safe Tuna Sandwich. She took the order down by memory and wrote times two when I ordered the same. ‘This is the only honest restaurant for miles around but even here you’ve got to put up with a bunch of crap on the menu,’ Frank complained. ‘Personally, I don’t understand this obsession with dietary health. Don’t these people know when the next big one comes we’re all going to the bottom of the sea? What difference will it make then what your cholesterol level is?’

I slipped my camera out of its case and looked it over. The colour film had advanced a dozen frames but I couldn’t remember shooting anything. The camera was so hot homey had worn gloves when he’d sold it to me.

‘Yeh, yeh, you were some kinda photo nut, weren’t you?’

‘Still am.’ I put the viewfinder to my eye and took a good look at the guy across the table from me. His face was pale and fleshy and I would have thought him soft if not for his eyes, which inhabited his flesh like a stranger. The sag to his cheeks and the dull droop of his mouth belied the bright aggression of eyes that did not so much look at something as slash it. The shabby clothing and unfashionable shape were undoubtedly useful to his work. Nobody would pay much attention to him or believe him capable of writing the stories he did. He could hang around at will and if they didn’t get a good look at his eyes they’d probably feel a little sorry for him. Just another fat-boy loser. Then he’d write something sharp enough to cut their throats. When he glanced at me out the corner of his eyes and tipped the beer to his lips I wanted to burn that look into the emulsion but the restaurant was too dark and the film too slow. I needed a fast black-and-white film stock with diamond-sized grain to match the feeling I had about the things I saw through the lens. Colour didn’t express my emotions the way a grey scale did. I opened the camera back and tossed the film.

‘That what you’re doing now?’ He tried to sound guy-to-guy casual. ‘Trying to make it as a photographer?’

I didn’t see any advantage in answering a direct question from a tabloid writer. If I answered one question, he’d just ask another and a day or two later I’d see my name in the newspaper. I capped the lens and dug into the basket of bread the waitress slid onto the table to go with our beers.

‘You can make good money with that camera if you’re aggressive enough and know where to use it.’

‘How’s that?’ My mouth was full of bread. The words came out gummed together, like ‘howzat’.

‘Take the publication I work for, it pays good money for certain kinds of pictures.’

‘You mean like the ones taken of me when I was arrested?’

‘Yeh, but someone like you only comes around once a year. Celebrities, that’s the bread-and-butter work. Preferably drunk or stoned or humping the maid in the back of a convertible, but that’s just the bias of our publication. The star can be picking his nose if he’s hot enough.’

‘Lack of aggression isn’t one of my problems,’ I said.

‘Yeh, but you gotta know where, that’s the key. Like tonight, a tip came in that Spielberg had a table at that place down the street. Turned out it was Sidney Spielburg, the Marina Del Rey orthodontist, but you get the point. Contacts are vital to the business. It’s important to know people.’

The way he was looking at me, he meant to be one of those people important for me to know. I had thought he wanted to write about me but his eyes suggested I was date material. I didn’t want to tell him I was married to somebody in the business. Right then, Gabe was the last person I’d contact for a favour. But his advice got me to thinking about people I did know who might help set me up. Then the cheeseburgers arrived accompanied by a golden nest of fries and I didn’t think about anything else except the taste of the food going down.

Frank was one of those guys who could take a bite at the beginning of a sentence, chew through the middle and lunge for another bite without so much as a comma to separate mouthfuls. He said he’d moved out to the West Coast six years earlier and after a short stint with a local alternative paper moved on to the tabloid press, which he thought contained the most radical writing in America. The alternative newspapers had sold out to a radical chic consumerism as bourgeois as mainstream culture but the tabloid press he thought a great medium for ridiculing the American obsessions with wealth and fame. Sure, nobody took the tabloids seriously but that was the point; no matter how many magazines and newspapers representing the so-called ‘serious’ press ran elevated profiles of this or that snot-nosed actor or brat musician the tabloids drove them back to the gutter by exposing how trivial and ugly their lives really were. Being from Chicago gave him an edge in the business because the culture there was clear-eyed and tough. People from Chicago had a lot of attitude. If Chicago ever declared war on Los Angeles it would be like a battle between hog butchers and beauticians. A meat cleaver versus a blow dryer. Wholesale slaughter.

‘Got a pen?’ I asked.

He’d been talking so long my voice startled him. He unclipped the ball-point from the neck ring of his T-shirt. On a clean napkin I wrote ‘IOU $20’, signed and shot it across the table.

‘Hey, you don’t have to pay me back for dinner, my treat.’ He flicked the note back to me.

‘I hadn’t planned to. That’s for the twenty bucks you’re going to loan me.’ I folded the napkin and pinned the corner beneath his bottle of Rolling Rock. ‘I’m good for it. And I wouldn’t ask you except I’m a little short of friends right now.’

‘Yeh, OK, I understand.’ He dipped his fingers into a dun-coloured wallet and gave me this piece-of-pie-left-out-on-the-counter-so-he - might-as-well-grab-it-while-no-one-was-looking look. He asked, ‘You available?’

‘You mean for work?’

‘I mean for dating.’

‘You don’t need the trouble. Trust me.’

I thought that might create some bad feelings between us but just the opposite, when we said goodbye on the street he said the way I acted I could be from Chicago, which I think was his idea of a compliment.