The City at Three PM

Lately I have been feeling even more discouraged than usual. The ancient bugaboo—‘Why write novels?’—is always before my mind.

—NATHANAEL WEST, FROM A 1940 LETTER AND JUST
BEFORE HIS DEATH AT AGE THIRTY-SEVEN IN
AN AUTOMOBILE CRASH

I’m in L.A. for a week or so, now that my semester of teaching back in Austin is over. It’s late May.

Set up at a motel downtown, I’m by myself and working on revising some rough sequences in a long fiction manuscript of my own here.

I figured that L.A. was as good a place as any to get away from everything (real sadness over the past few months involving the serious illness of a friend in Austin, which I won’t go into, and then the always crazy crunch at the end of a semester—grading looming stacks of short stories from students in my creative writing classes, along with a couple of unexpected faculty skirmishes, the petty, departmental-politics kind of stuff I usually manage to sidestep and the only truly bad part of a teaching job, where those students are by and large wonderful), yes, get away and concentrate on the manuscript.

I’ve already gone up to Hollywood on this trip. I walked around one afternoon, tracking down the actual settings of scenes in Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, heading there after I finished more work in the morning on the manuscript at the motel—a cheap but comfortable spot in Chinatown—then I ended the day with a drink on Hollywood Boulevard. This particular afternoon I plan to do the same.

It’s only about twenty minutes, one change involved, on the hissing train of the L.A. Metro.

And, three o’clock on a warm weekday, I’m soon stepping out of the car in the empty Hollywood station. There’s the dry smell of maybe dust and electricity, like vacuum cleaner innards, that could be any subway platform anywhere, though the station here is definitely not a standard one.

Clean to the point of gleaming, as is just about everything in the new L.A. Metro system, the station is actually somewhat over the top, with almost a forest of repeated support pillars that are made to look like palm trees—concrete trunks sprouting gold and green ceramic fronds—and the vaulted ceiling showing a pattern of empty movie reels; the red floor of the expanse spreads like a lake, it’s so freshly polished, and a wavy inlay through it mimics (what else?) the Yellow Brick Road. It takes two escalators, long ones, to proceed through the two levels of the station—which is to say, to go from far, far underground and then fully into the glaring sunlight again.

On the second escalator, I ride the continually folding steps, no passengers except for me, and eventually do see a blue swatch of sky above. I suppose I tell myself what I’ve told myself before: granting it is over the top, this gaudy, absurd station with its bright stainless-steel escalators slowly bringing you closer and closer is a perfect way to be, well, delivered smack into the acknowledged heart of the place, Hollywood and Vine.

Not paying any attention to the gathering of touts for guided tours and the few straggling and confused tourists in front of the station, I head for 1817 Ivar Street. I was there when in Hollywood a couple of days earlier, but I want to get a better look at it now, having reread some pages in my old, well-worn New Directions copy of The Day of the Locust in the motel the night before and decided that the apartment house on Ivar, called Pa-Va-Sed and mentioned by West’s biographers, most likely did provide the model for the apartment house where many of the cast of down-and-out characters in the novel live, called San Bernardino Arms.

Ivar isn’t far down the Boulevard, a cross street intersecting with that supposed Walk of Fame.

My progress is slowed some with the gradually increasing number of tourists—always thickest by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre much farther on—who are repeatedly stopping to look down. (For me, happening to notice one of those endlessly continuing bronze plaques set in red and black terrazzo on the sidewalk is never a matter being struck by the name of a real star, somebody you expect, Jack Lemon, let’s say, but the whole weirder exchange of seeing and thinking about a personage you haven’t thought about in years, somebody rather inconsequential in the bigger scheme of things—may-be Arthur Treacher, a name often associated with a fish and chips chain, or Forrest Tucker, a name usually only associated with—almost worse than fish and chips—the 1960s TV sitcom about a bunch of loopy cavalrymen in the Old West, F Troop). I turn at an old yellow brick office building, now a Scientology museum. Unlike the Boulevard, Ivar is all but deserted in the mid-afternoon sun that is genuinely hot now, and wearing black Levi’s and an open-collared dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the basic black-and-white nylon Reeboks I swear by and have repeatedly purchased for years, nicely bouncy under my feet, I’m glad I gunked up with sun block before setting out. I can see the low blond hills beyond Ivar—the distant HOLLYWOOD sign a faded and near ghostly white, the letters a bit lumpily angled like uneven teeth—and, steeply rising, the narrow open street gives way after a couple of blocks to welcome shade from big, spreading-limbed trees along the sidewalk on either side, the lovely jacarandas wispy with their dangling purple spring blossoms right now and certainly no shortage of the more than ubiquitous L.A. eucalyptus; everything is suddenly quite residential.

I stand across the street from the Pa-Va-Sed Apartments (the name apparently came from a reworking of the Latin phrase for “small but nice”). I look at the place, then scribble some observations in my pocket notebook, remarking that while West might have changed the façade of the apartment house in the novel, as he did the name (the Pa-Va-Sed is mock Tudor, all yellow stucco and crisscrossing chocolate-brown beams on the front gable, a roof shingled with slate the hue of pigeon feathers, and the San Bernardino Arms in the novel opts for a Moorish motif, complete with swirly pink front columns, though both are basically exercises in Hollywood’s typical architectural whimsy, hopefully exotic)—true, while the façade is different, the rest of it is the same: after the false front, the functional blank walls of the building’s sides stretch far back for the three floors of it, exactly as described in the novel, something I checked in the book the night before: “It was an oblong, three stories high, the back and sides of which were of plain, unpainted stucco, broken by even rows of unadorned windows.”

I cross the street, for a closer look. There’s trimmed shrubbery and a low brown brick wall, an open black wrought-iron gate. I decide I might enter the sidewalk courtyard and go up the stairs, peek into the lobby, where I see its oatmeal walls and a frosted central skylight and a single Mission-style easy chair upholstered in red beside the stairs, the long corridors of all three floors clearly visible and the Pa-Va-Sed unexpectedly neat within (I have my little notebook out again, am writing down with a Bic what I observe); I step aside when a young woman, a brunette in shorts carrying a big artist’s portfolio, comes out of the door and goes down the brown brick steps, and I do the same when a scruffy young guy, tall and wearing a ball cap, walks up the steps and through the door. Both nod to me, seemingly not surprised that there’s a gray-haired guy, me, standing on their front steps beside the panel of mailboxes and writing in a notebook (did they think I was leaving an important message for somebody?). I make a note that, as in West’s day, these kids who have apartments here are probably not unlike West’s characters, living in a cheap place and working—or at least trying to find work and make it—in Hollywood.

I head back down the hill of Ivar, toward the Boulevard but not directly, wandering through more of the leafy quiet side streets for a while. (There’s a corner place, white stucco, called the Playboy Liquor Store—I like the name; there’s another older apartment building not unlike the Pa-Va-Sed, with a drooping banner out front, red on white, saying furnished units are available for $185 a week.) I guess I feel good about having identified the real Pa-Va-Sed as being, essentially, the imaginary San Bernardino Arms, and, not to get too far ahead of myself, this is the start of it all, what will lead this afternoon to the crazy scene across from the Chinese Theatre.

But first maybe a little background—or “backstory” in movie parlance, which seems suitable here—is needed.

The Day of the Locust was West’s last novel, published in 1939 and a year before his death. It came out while he was living in Hollywood, by then reasonably successful in writing for the movies. Returning from a weekend hunting trip to Mexico, West failed to stop at a rural intersection outside El Centro, California. He and his wife of less than a year, Eileen McKenney (a very pretty if somewhat eccentric young woman, subject of a series of New Yorker pieces that became the basis of a long-running Broadway show, My Sister Eileen), were killed when a car smashed full force into their wood-paneled Ford station wagon.

Of course, there has never been much critical argument that The Day of the Locust, which received little attention when published, is the very best of that specific genre commonly known as the Hollywood novel, yet to categorize it as such, I think, is surely not to give it the credit it deserves. (A while back I read—or in some cases reread—through probably the entire canon of said genre in a single stretch, from Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon to Budd Schulberg’s overrated What Makes Sammy Run? to Joan Didion’s still absolutely stunning Play It as It Lays, one book to at least be mentioned in the same breath as The Day of the Locust, I’d say, along with the British writer Gavin Lambert’s hauntingly moving cult favorites about Hollywood, The Slide Area and The Goodbye People) Actually, The Day of the Locust is not simply a Hollywood novel, and it’s one of the high points in twentieth-century American fiction itself, admittedly overshadowed by West’s earlier novel Miss Lonelyhearts. Miss Lonelyhearts was never recognized as it should have been during his lifetime either, though today there’s no limit, it seems, to the respect it’s afforded. According to critic Harold Bloom (and whether or not you like the man’s bluster, you can’t deny his aesthetic acumen and unshakable standards): “The greatest Faulkner, of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, is the only writer of prose fiction in this century who can be said to have surpassed Miss Lonelyhearts”; probably the whole tradition of modern American black humor, reflecting an anxious, ever-looming absurdity in life, traces back to the book, with Flannery O’Connor, John Hawkes, and Thomas Pynchon all greatly influenced by it.

It was a meandering road in life that brought West to the moment of his writing The Day of the Locust, one with many labels to define him along the way: privileged son of a well-to-do apartment house developer in New York City; high school dropout who managed to finagle admission to Brown University on the basis of a doctored grade transcript of somebody else who shared his name, Nathan Weinstein (which got changed to Nathanael West when he started publishing); desk clerk for two midtown Manhattan hotels after his father lost everything in the Crash, boring employment that turned out to be lucky, if only for the fact that while working in the hotels he sometimes had drinks with a reporter friend from the Brooklyn Eagle, who one night in a speakeasy showed him a bundle of painful letters to the paper’s personal-advice column and the letters became the basis for Miss Lonelyhearts; struggling Hollywood screenwriter, first brought there for a few brief months in 1933 when Columbia purchased film rights to Miss Lonelyhearts, as followed by a return to Hollywood in 1935 with no contract, West unemployed for a long stretch, broke, and living in a cubbyhole room in the Pa-Va-Sed, acute gonorrhea contracted from prostitutes not helping the situation; and finally established Hollywood screenwriter with steady and well-paid employment, first at Republic, a B-movie operation, then major studios, RKO and Paramount, before going back to Columbia. In his trademark Ivy League clothes and known for a quiet yet sarcastic manner, a wiry, military-mustached man, West did seem out of place in Hollywood, and he always frankly admitted that writing for the movies was inherently frivolous; nevertheless, turning out scripts came easy to him, plus the pay was extremely lucrative by Depression standards and the company was good (West spent considerable time with his old college pal S.J. Perelman, who wrote Marx Brothers films and married West’s sister, and he developed friendships with Fitzgerald and Faulkner, also working for studios during these years), but West still wanted to concentrate on his own fiction, reaching a point of total discouragement on that front when The Day of the Locust garnered few reviews and sold little more than a thousand copies. It was then that he wrote to an acquaintance back East, the poet and critic Malcolm Cowley, with that large question I affixed above as an epigraph, concerning the “ancient bugaboo,” all right: “Why write novels?”

Or why write serious ones that aspire to being art and bona fide literature, anyway.

At the time of his death, in fact, West wasn’t read much at all. One of the saddest things I came across in my own reading around in accounts of his life was an anecdote about how Jean-Paul Sartre, when he traveled to New York for the first time, after the War, kept asking anybody he ran into there if they knew anything about this magnificent American writer whose work Sartre had immersed himself in, Nathanael West. Nobody seemed to have heard of him, though Sartre got through by telephone to Random House, original publisher of The Day of the Locust, and an editorial employee thought the name sounded familiar; if I remember correctly, that prompted the employee to check and eventually tell Sartre they had been forwarding mail to West at a P.O. box that the writer apparently kept in New York City—in other words, there were people in West’s own publishing house who didn’t even realize he was dead.

And I suppose I think about something like that, too, while I keep walking around these neighborhoods in Hollywood this afternoon—not only residential but surprisingly sedate and everyday, considering they’re so close to the Boulevard—then I go back toward the Boulevard, with the mission to the Pa-Va-Sed—that confirmation, as said— accomplished.

As impressive as the newly developed Metro system for L.A. is, what can be more striking is the way the city appears to have gotten graffiti largely under control (even much that lingers in the outlying neighborhoods often looks old and faded, including in Watts, where I will go during this stay to see at last the wild triplicated exercise in wire and ceramic fragments, prophetically postmodern, that is Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers); also always really noticeable is the successful solution to the pedestrian-motorist battle in L.A., the result of hefty tickets and strict enforcement of the law wherever there’s a light at an intersection. With nobody jaywalking, it allows you to overhear things as the bunched people wait for the signal on the Boulevard. I hear an overweight young wannabe hipster with a ponytail excitedly telling another guy waiting with him for the red to turn to green: “I mean, it’s a killer song, and the wild thing about it is that I wrote it last week in only an hour. It’s called, ‘Hey, Lardass!’ which is what the cops said to me when they arrested me that time.” He emits a grunting sound for the thump of a guitar chord, also pantomimes an axing sweep of one arm to hit the imaginary Fender, à la Pete Townshend, adding, “The opening downbeat is totally killer.” And then, right before the buildup at another intersection, there’s an older guy standing on the sidewalk—short, lean, and gray-mustached, wearing a crisp white T-shirt and blue jeans—and he’s publicly chewing out three scruffy kids, in their late teens or early twenties and all in ragged black, who seem to have everything they own with them there on the sidewalk, backpacks and duffle bags; he shouts that he’s already given them a lot—a place to stay, food to eat—and the lanky washed-out girl with stringy honey hair who is with the two boys (all of them standing there and doing their best to simply look at each other, ignore the older guy) flatly and sardonically says: “Yeah, tell it to your girlfriends, Walt.”

Of course, I’ve already explored other spots that figure into the novel, on that other afternoon in Hollywood.

I’ve been over to the location of the old Columbia Studios, just below Hollywood Boulevard on Sunset. Columbia moved elsewhere, but the walled-off few city blocks of offices and sound stages are painted a uniformly brilliant creamy hue, spindly mop-headed palms all around, for what is now the thriving, independent Sunset Gower Studios, used principally for TV. It was most likely here—an unidentified studio within walking distance of the Boulevard and the San Bernardino Arms Apartments—that the main character in The Day of the Locust works; he’s a recent Yale grad named Tod Hackett, a set designer living in the San Bernardino. Across from the studios, on the corner with Gower Street, is a small new strip mall with an Old West motif called Gower Gulch, built on the very site of that same name where cowboy extras looking for bit parts in Westerns—intimately known as “horse operas” in West’s day—used to gather, a spot also figuring prominently in The Day of the Locust. In the novel a cast of males are defined more or less in terms of their relationship to a central female presence, Faye Greener, who lives with her ex-vaudevillian father in the San Bernardino. Faye is a willowy, blond seventeen-year-old extra in the movies—and briefly a call girl—who dreams of being a star and, ever the flirting tease, already puts on the affected airs of a star, absurdly but alluringly so, too, to the degree that the male characters all move about her like minor planets in a slow, drugged orbit that can only lead to inevitable and dramatically explosive collision by the novel’s end. Among those enamored with her are both Tod, the sensitive Easterner who longs to paint seriously, and, of course, Homer Simpson (the popular prime-time cartoon show later slyly borrowed his name but certainly not his character) from Iowa and now in the sunshine of Southern California for his health, a nervously shy square of a retired middle-aged bookkeeper who beautiful Faye eventually goes to live with in his tiny rented bungalow—a Platonic deal, as she unabashedly takes complete advantage of his supporting her. And there’s also Faye’s occasional boyfriend Earle Shoop, a cowboy extra from Arizona—laconic and dumb and handsome—who daily stations himself there at Gower Gulch alongside his friends—other cowboy extras and a street-smart, wise-cracking Indian in full tribal dress peddling cheap souvenirs (he’s somebody known to fellow Gower Gulch habitués as—this is funny—“Chief Kiss-My-Towkus”). I’ve even been clear over to Western Avenue, and while there’s no locating today what might have been the Cinderella Bar, a campy nightclub built in the shape of a giant slipper and where several characters in The Day of the Locust go one evening to watch a gay drag show (Faye takes cruel satisfaction in embarrassing the awkward Homer there), I’ve seen how Western Avenue does still have some lively bars and clubs for the LGBT scene.

Actually, this day I’d planned on ending up at the Musso and Frank’s Grill. It’s an iconic Hollywood eatery, upscale and on the Boulevard, where toward the end of the novel a distraught Tod, alone, orders a steak he hardly touches and tries to sort out his life. Musso and Frank’s is now a bar/restaurant that basks in the fact it’s in an undeniable time warp, a bronze plaque bolted to the putty-color stucco exterior (is everything in Los Angeles stuccoed?) saying “Est. 1919.” Just the overpriced look of the place from outside now deters me from my original idea of having a drink there; on my other afternoon in Hollywood, I discovered a small bar called the Powerhouse right on Highland and a block up from the Boulevard with surprisingly cheap bottles of Budweiser, more my kind of venue and an agreeable watering hole that if it’s iconic of anything it could be the life and times of Charles Bukowski—I figure I’ll go there again this day.

Nevertheless, I want to see what Musso and Frank’s does look like inside, considering that it provides a setting in the novel.

So I decide to work a ruse. I head from the brightness of the day into the air-conditioned dimness of Musso and Frank’s in late afternoon, immediately to be greeted by a smiling, really old guy—skinny and stoop-shouldered and wearing a dark suit with a dated wide tie, the shirt collar much too big for his bony neck; his voice is faint, a bit shaky even. He holds a stack of large menus in front of him in both arms, the way high school girls used to carry their books, and he asks me if he can direct me to a table.

I look around, try to take it all in, and he looks at me again, saying: “Sir?”

I glance at my watch (a ridiculous thing of translucent lime-green plastic that I bought at a dollar store, which keeps perfect time); I try to project the air that I’m pretty busy, somebody of perhaps consequence who is invariably pretty busy—let’s say a movie-business kind of citizen, because deals surely still go down here.

“I was supposed to meet somebody here,” I say, looking around some more, “but I guess I’m early.”

The guy steps aside, ushering me past him, as he advises that I check this room and also the room next to it. Everything is dark-paneled wood, with the chairs and booths upholstered with red leatherette and the tablecloths bright white, the decor probably unchanged since when West himself reportedly was a regular customer. There are maybe only two or three parties eating, and making a loop through the shadowy place, I already feel a little crummy for giving the line I did to the old guy, who seemed sweet and without question fragile; the middle-aged (and beyond) waiters in their red jackets, unbusy, nod to me, and I walk past the long eating bar in this room—in an alley of sorts, behind a dividing wall—and then past the longer polished-mahogany bar for drinks in the other, nobody sitting at either one of them. Up front by the entrance, the old guy has already announced my plight to the cashier who’s fifty or so, a pudgily blond woman with a striking resemblance to the later Shelley Winters and validly part of the time warp herself. At her register she, too, is apparently concerned about my finding the person I’m supposed to meet; she asks me if I checked both rooms, to which I answer that I did, and the old guy suggests that maybe I would like to have a drink or a meal and wait.

I tell him no, and that I’m probably way too early and will be back later, adding another overdone concerned glance at the dollar-store plastic watch. Outside again, I stop on the sidewalk, lean against the wall of Musso and Frank’s to write, jotting down some details about the interior I just saw—more confirmation.

Which is when—slipping the notebook and pen into the black Levi’s back pocket, about to proceed to the Powerhouse Bar for that envisioned cold Budweiser—I notice something happening on the other side of the Boulevard, farther down and across from the Chinese Theatre, between the old Roosevelt Hotel there that formerly hosted the Oscars and the pillared, buff-stone façade, freshly sandblasted, of the so-called El Capitan Entertainment Center.

I decide to postpone the beer for the moment and head over to see what the commotion is all about.

The crowd on Hollywood Boulevard is always at its certifiably thickest right in front of the Chinese Theatre. People do all kinds of things with those imprints in the sidewalk’s cement—squatting low to lean over and try to place their own palms in the outlined palms, or standing beside a set of prints for a posed, and paid for, grinning photograph with one of the sizable bunch of twenty-somethings who work their own gig with the tourists, dressed up as Superman or Michael Jackson or—this outfit seems very popular, with at least three girls I see employing it—Catwoman, purring and pawing; however, now some of the crowd appears to have moved across the street, to see for themselves what’s going on.

Once Hollywood’s Masonic Lodge, the El Capitan Centre (adjoining another restored older building, the El Capitan movie theatre proper, both owned by Disney) is a stately affair, and it houses an auditorium used for TV shows. A young woman in khakis and a blue polo shirt bearing the ABC logo—mile-high cheekbones and full, glossed lips, attractive enough to be a starlet—sits at a small table set up on the sidewalk, trying to give out free tickets to the Jimmy Kimmel Live show taping within. There are presently no takers (which anybody who’s ever actually watched that decidedly not-funny guy can easily understand), but somebody must have bit for the offer, because apparently a member of the studio audience has had some sort of a medical emergency inside (I hate to say it, but that’s what you get for accepting a free Jimmy Kimmel ticket). Already the wailing siren of an EMS unit can be heard, off a ways; still more people drift toward the commotion, blocking the sidewalk, as a panicking bald guy in the very standard tourist’s getup of a sport shirt with the tails hanging out and cargo shorts keeps hurrying in and out of the auditorium building, to see if the EMS has, in fact, arrived.

All it takes is the sight of the gleaming scarlet rescue wagon coming this way through the traffic on the Boulevard to draw even more people. The truck swerves over to the curb, the siren ceases its atonal song in a truncated gulp, four muscular young guys in uniforms hop out; the one in charge holds a clipboard, and—the crowd large now—the three others yank from the back of the truck a collapsible stretcher with straps across its white sheet. I watch, stationing myself against a huge pillar of the El Capitan, again taking notes. I write down what those rugged EMS handsomes and their paraphernalia look like (their buzz cuts, their dark blue short-sleeved uniforms, the eerie rattling for the unfolding of the collapsible stretcher on wheels) and also a note to the effect that finally these people marching up and down the Boulevard have found a spectacle: for the crowd something is happening at last, even if it is at the expense of somebody else’s misfortune and certainly not what they were expecting in just a normal afternoon of sightseeing.

I don’t wait for the conclusion. Notebook and pen returned to the back pocket once more, I simply wedge my way out of the pedestrian buildup, repeatedly offering a perfunctory “Excuse me” and trying to smile.

But what transpired there seemed to say something—I find myself thinking about this while enjoying that cold, condensation-dripping brown bottle of Budweiser in the Powerhouse on Highland, where two friendly young guys sitting beside me at the bar and doing shots announce to me right off, for some reason, that they’re “Chicano,” proud of it and from East L.A., before casually talking about baseball with me as we watch together on ESPN highlights of the previous night’s Dodgers game—then I think about it more when I get back to work that evening on the manuscript at the glowing G4 Mac laptop on the desk fringed with cigarette burns in my motel in Chinatown; or, more exactly, it’s in the motel, the Royal Pagoda, that it really hits me, as I look up from the computer and right at me staring back from the framed mirror above the desk.

Set aside my taking notes in Hollywood, my busily scribbling what I observed regarding locales of scenes in The Day of the Locust. That was one thing, but this was another, beyond that, yet related, and for all intents and purposes I actually somehow found myself in the climactic scene of the novel, where on the Boulevard a crowd grows out of control in the course of a movie premiere one very frightening night in the 1930s, the big searchlight beams scanning the sky to announce the event (Tod is trampled; Homer kicks to death an obnoxious aspiring child actor who has been taunting him; star-struck, ever-daydreaming Faye maybe looks on at those walking the red carpet, wide-eyed, trying to get a glimpse of still another one of the glamorous actors and actresses stepping out of a limousine to enter the Chinese Theatre). Or, look at it this way: While my crowd scene wasn’t the wild and near apocalyptic one of the novel, I did end up in more or less a spookily identical scenario, complete with everyday and probably bored people, a throng in need of—and surely, for many of them, hoping very hard to find—some kind of event in their lives, as said. Why, when I was there the siren wailed loudly, and in the novel, yes, a deafening siren’s wail seems to express in that climactic scene—for a broken, half-hysterical Tod, anyway—the utter meaninglessness of just about everything in Hollywood, as encapsulated by the novel’s very last lines where Tod starts to madly howl along with it: “The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself…. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.”

I mean, I often try to locate the scenes of a novel I love, taking notes, and sometimes use it as a focus in travel, knowing I might write an essay about the book and the place of its setting like the one you’re reading now. But taking such notes could be deeper than that, I suspect, well beyond eventually writing any essay, and what is this need that any of us can have to affix to the unreality of literature a reality it doesn’t actually possess? And what does it mean—certainly more tellingly—to feel some ultimate satisfaction that in the reality of life (me in Hollywood, finding myself in a climactic crowd scene, one so similar to that in the novel) I proved the true power of the unreality of a novel, a product of the imagination and nothing more?

Maybe keep this in mind as I continue, because I think I could be onto something here.

Toward the end of the week, with most of what I feel is good work done on the long manuscript, I realize that I can ease off and do some other things while in the city, before I finish up the trip with a weekend spent by the ocean in Santa Monica. There are other spots to explore (the old downtown business-and-theater district with its main thoroughfare of South Broadway, rundown yet so wonderfully Latino now you could be in a large, teeming Mexican city, also the cluster of startling new glass-and-steel skyscrapers on the other side of Pershing Square, a textbook on ultra-hip American architecture in itself), and there’s an old pal from college, who twenty years earlier was an independent movie producer in L.A., for low-budget slasher and kung fu offerings, actually; following a few extended, laughing phone conversations with him from the motel (those after-all-these-years-and-whatever-happened-to kind of sessions), we’ve made plans to have dinner.

Plus, there is one more thing to do with respect to West, at the Huntington Library.

A couple of days before I left for L.A.—back in Austin and during my reading around about West—I noticed that there were holdings concerning him at the Huntington. It’s the rare books and manuscript library out at what had once been the rich railway magnate’s opulent estate in San Marino, a municipality next to Pasadena but even tonier. While I’ve sometimes flatly expressed my opinion before, in print, that I’ve never been a big fan of rare books and manuscript libraries, the way that the monetary value attached to their holdings can become more important to some than the literature itself, this time I found myself easing up a little. I thought that while on this quest of rereading and contemplating West as part of the trip, I might go out there and take a look at what they had on him.

But my attempt to obtain a pass for “reader’s privileges” to use the library turned complicated. On what should have been routine approval for me as a faculty member at a legitimate university, the person handling registration noticed on the downloaded application I faxed from Austin that I gave no indication of the institution where I received my Ph.D., for which there was a line provided. A series of email exchanges ensued. I explained I was a creative writer in my English department, sans Ph.D., and I got windy (uncharacteristically so, I hope) and informed him outright that I was both a full professor and also somebody holding an endowed named professorship (no big deal, really, but I was trying to get by this guy); strict to the point of being schoolmarmish, he told me that rules were rules, a Ph.D. was mandatory, yet he suggested I could solicit two letters of recommendation for an “independent scholar” pass, which is done in the case of somebody not associated with a university, working on the assumption that any university prof is always a Ph.D.— it’s also a procedure, I knew, that would take weeks, though I was leaving in a couple of days. I wanted to tell the guy that if he really thought a Ph.D. meant anything when it comes to literature, I might point out to him that historically the bulk of the comment on literature that has, in fact, lasted has been done by actual writers themselves and not scholars (T.S. Eliot on poetry, for instance, not to mention Keats and Shelley and Wallace Stevens; Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Albert Camus, Milan Kundera, etc., on the novel; more specifically, D.H. Lawrence on American literature, Chinua Achebe on The Heart of Darkness, or poet Charles Olson in his powerful meditation on Moby-Dick, the study Call Me Ishmael, which was abandoned as his dissertation for a Harvard Ph.D.—a degree he never finished—and then went on to possibly mark, in its sheer originality and uncanny insight, the most significant of all criticism ever written on that supreme American masterpiece). And I also wanted to tell him that academic criticism lately seldom progresses beyond—to borrow the apt phrasing of eminent University of Virginia scholar Douglas Day—the “earnest drudgery” it sadly is. It’s practically a given that with its priggish, soporifically jargonized, perpetual-grad-student prose (did I cover everything in that crabby adjectival list?), such criticism is usually unreadable despite how much extensive research it entails, and because it operates according to whatever trendy critical theory is fashionable at the time, it seems by definition to be programmed to quickly evanesce: just think about how adolescently silly, close to parody, stuff from the 1980s Deconstruction Boom looks today. I guess I really wanted to tell him, or simply invite him, to stop by the old campus building with its dull green linoleum floors and blank yellow plaster walls that houses my own Department of English and step into a classroom, listen in on what gets passed along in lit courses by profs—surely good people, for the most part, but too often nowadays far removed from what’s genuinely important in literature (for a lot of them “scholarship” is basically an exercise in asserting personal causes as rigid doctrine—conventional sociology and political science more than anything else— with the whole idea of the transport or even outright magic and mystery of books becoming a rather lost, if not forbidden, concept to espouse on campus today, seen as elitist, while the students themselves seem to long for the message of that). In short, I wanted to tell this guy at the library that, everything considered, maybe a Ph.D. was the last thing he should be wanting from me.

Nevertheless, up before dawn on the day I was to head out to the Austin airport for my morning flight on Southwest, I thought I might take a chance (i.e., attempt an end run) and email directly the person who was the library’s head curator for its literary collections. When I arrived in L.A. a few hours later, I was surprised to find in my inbox a message from that head curator; she informed me that everything had been taken care of—to some extent, anyway. I was being given a very temporary, two-hour access permit to use the library. The guy I originally dealt with emailed me to confirm it (I got the feeling he didn’t like me going above his head), and he instructed that I should go online, view the list of the library’s West holdings, and pick out specifically the documents I would like to see, then email him what they were; the requested materials would be “pulled” and be waiting for me on arrival.

To be honest, I’d started to lose interest in the errand. But seeing that I had a bit of time at the end of the week, and seeing that it had taken much effort to get the clearance, I gave it more consideration. Upon checking, I saw that the L.A. Metro system’s brand-new Gold Line—light rail above ground—does go out to Pasadena, so getting to the library wouldn’t be too difficult. But maybe what sealed the deal for me was that the schoolmarmish guy said in an email that he would be off work the day I did finally propose for my two-hour visit, and I knew that might make it easy, too, as I was starting to have qualms about my own somewhat noisy dealings with him and probably didn’t want to face him personally—after all, he was just doing his job, trying to keep things organized. And, yes, I was feeling good about what I had accomplished on my fiction manuscript, the windows wide open to the balcony walkway of my room at the two-story Royal Pagoda—it looked out to the hill Dodger Stadium sits on, the lights of the ballpark glowing up there like so many clustered little moons this game night—so I could put that aside now, granting I hadn’t gotten quite all done on it that I wanted.

So one evening at the motel I email the schoolmarmish guy, routinely thanking him for all his help. I confirm the proposed time of my visit and say I will have my selections to him pronto.

Actually, I have no real particular materials in mind, and those I eventually do select are offbeat in some cases, but each catches my eye. In the next email I explain that the several items I would like to look at are all in what is listed on the library’s Web site as a collection donated by West’s biographer Jay Martin—apparently documents he used in his own research. (And I might note here, emphatically, that Martin’s biography, the 1974 Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, is admirably thorough and engagingly written, a first-rate study. Really try to avoid the newer 2010 biography, Lonelyhearts by Marion Meade, which treats West’s life alongside that of his wife Eileen McKenney; with its glib tenor announced beforehand by the very subtitle, The Screw ball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, the book is thin in pages and large in font, a narrative that often seems cannibalized from other earlier published accounts, as can be the case in too many recent biographies—much of it here is based on Martin, I’d say—and the entire thing presented in a flippant, off-putting voice more fit for a gossipy personal blog than a consideration of a major American writer’s life.) Before hitting the send button on the email to the Hunting-ton, I check again that my notation is right: I know that the schoolmarmish guy doesn’t fool around and I’m extra careful to give the precise annotation that identifies each item in the online catalogue:

Coroner’s Report, Imperial County—Photocopy of Jury Inquest on the Death of Nathanael West

The next day, the Metro ride out to Pasadena is a pleasant half-hour trip—the profuse glass of the car providing large picture windows, the again immaculate train going slow as it first winds out of the old railway-yard tracks of creamy Union Station downtown and then picking up speed through the neighborhoods of houses often precariously tacked onto steep canyon walls (more palms and eucalyptus and blossoming trees of all variety in the honeyed sunshine, vines of red bougainvillea seemingly inundating in spots, swallowing everything whole, and a sky cloudless and blue)—but the two-mile walk from the station to the library in San Marino, in the direction away from the backdrop of the high San Gabriel Mountains in earnest here, isn’t so easy. Not caring that I might look goofy in this movie of me—because often when I travel, I somehow seem to be outside myself, watching myself as if in a film—I take from my daypack a mini black rain umbrella, for shade. I realize that the sun from the hours poking around Hollywood and elsewhere in the last few days, despite any promised SPF-50 blockage, has rendered me burnt; it’s my hottest day in L.A. yet, at least an even ninety, and for the half hour or so that the walk takes, a straight shot on the sidewalk of residential Allen Avenue, I move along under the impromptu parasol. I pass the groomed homes and apartment complexes of Pasadena, neat to the extreme, and I cross the wide main street of Colorado Boulevard with its restaurants and specialty shops, and I pass a small dignified sign on an iron post indicating the San Marino municipal boundary; up ahead, the impressive black gates of the grounds of the Huntington Library and Museum (a major art collection, of course) finally come into sight.

Nobody else is walking on the long, winding entry drive, bordered by flowers resplendent (the only word for it) in churned dark loam, also carefully sculpted shrubbery on either side. I approach the checkpoint and am met by a paunchy middle-aged guy wearing a security guard uniform of shorts and shirt; he steps out of his booth while putting on a white pith helmet, which assures me that though I’ve folded up the little umbrella and stuffed it back into the day-pack, the heat is serious and I wasn’t as goofy as I thought, to use it earlier. The Huntington estate comprises the original huge baroque mansion that’s now the art museum—opulent enough to rival anything in regal Europe, giving solid testament to what might be seen as the indulgence, and associated futile vanity, of having altogether too much money for one’s own good in this brief life—and the library building, as huge and itself probably more Georgian in architectural style, along with several assorted lesser structures (a domed ornamental temple and such); the entire enterprise is set in two hundred acres of a sprawling, park-like expanse of ponds and tufted lawns and extensive “botanical gardens.” Having found my name on his printout of an official visitors’ list for the day, the guard in the pith helmet smilingly decides that I’ve walked far enough in the heat already, and he says he will use his canopied golf cart to take me the rest of the way, deliver me right to the library’s steps. As we hum along the winding drive in the cart, there’s small talk about where I’m from—”Texas,” I tell him, then add, “but originally from Rhode Island,” something I always point out even if I have lived in Austin for thirty years, the guy liking the essential idea of a state being as altogether far away as Rhode Island— and he next asks me where I am staying in L.A.—“Chinatown,” I tell him, and he likes the idea of that, too, definitely: “Now that’s part of the real Los Angeles,” he assures me. I suppose I now appreciate the convoluted route it took to arrive here—through such vivid canyon terrain on the train, then walking alone down empty and oddly immaculate suburban streets in the heat under an umbrella, to be met by a stranger in a pith helmet who at last ushers me to my destination, an elongated, looming classical edifice maybe perfectly suited for a mysterious Paul Delvaux canvas—and there is the sense of a journey to it, something of a dream, maybe.

I find the office of the schoolmarmish guy’s assistant, named Juan and as friendly as the security guard. He has me sign some papers I don’t bother to read, then gives me a giant yellow Ticonderoga pencil with thick blunt lead and a virgin-pink eraser, what could be a parody of a pencil, and tells me only notes in pencil are allowed, which is common procedure in such libraries, I know. He escorts me to a small room with lockers, for storage of my daypack, and directs me toward the reading room. There, I am handed a printed sticky-back nametag by the serious, whispering woman staffing the counter, who tells me I must wear the tag at all times (it clearly states: “Non-Renewable”). I choose a table, getting down to making the most out of my two-hour window of opportunity.

I’ve been in rare books and manuscript libraries like this before—here little glowing lamps on the long light-mahogany tables, where the scattering of researchers read or click away on keyboards, green carpeting for the room in this case and tasteful beige walls. Along the shelves around the periphery are the usual busts of luminaries: the bronze casts in the Huntington offer a dramatis personae ranging from Aristotle to Shakespeare to, maybe not so predictably, John Paul Jones. Big toy-like pencil on the table, my pocket notebook open and ready, I start going through the folders, manila with gray ribbon ties, taking out the artifacts one by one and soon completely immersed in how interesting they are. I start with what should be the most routine of them, the map, telling myself I will work my way up to that one folder with some manuscript pages of the very novel I have been ruminating on—thinking and thinking about it here in L.A.—The Day of the Locust; actually, once I get going, I have no idea where I really am, the stuff is so damn interesting.

I open the folder marked neatly on the tab label, Box 2, folder 29: Map of L.A., showing the locations of West’s various residences; it’s a 1967 common Mobil street map for the City of Los Angeles with the long-gone red Pegasus logo adorning the cover, the kind they used to give out for free at gas stations and once called “glove-compartment maps”; I spread it out; I know this is what Jay Martin must have used in his biographical research; there are ovals scrawled in ballpoint around several street names, a half dozen or more of them, and I locate Ivar Street, then write down a note about the other streets marked; a few are in the swank hills above Hollywood, as West (a bachelor with his hunting dogs) did go to live in rented houses there when his screenwriting career became solid; I fold up the map, concentrating and figuring which flap goes where, the way you do with an accordionized map, and slip it back in the manila folder, put it aside. I pick up the next folder in the stack, Box 2 A, folder 18: “Three Eskimos,” carefully remove the several sheets of yellowing loose-leaf, the lines of it black rather than the usual light blue; in West’s own handwriting, dark pencil, is the manuscript of a short story unpublished in his lifetime but later included in the Library of America definitive edition of his collected works; I like looking at West’s handwriting itself, oversized and boxy, for this satiric tale about a family of Eskimos brought to Hollywood from Alaska as extras for a movie, and I write in my notebook that this same family becomes the Gingo Eskimo Family, who in The Day of the Locust are friends of Faye Greener’s vaudevillian father and have decided they like Hollywood life, refusing to return to Alaska and surviving on raw fish bought from Jewish delicatessens; I am especially careful with these pages, dry and fragile, and after I skim through the story I put the sheets back in that folder, placing it on the folder with the map. I pick up the third folder, Box 2 A, folder 22: Coroner’s Report, Imperial County—Photocopy of Jury Inquest on the Death of Nathanael West, and I lift out the dozen or so elongated legal pages, beginning with preprinted boilerplate where blanks are filled in with the names of the judge and inquest jury involved in this investigation into West’s accident and then offering the typed transcript proper as recorded by a court reporter, like a play’s format, and quite frank and detailed when it comes to the question if West had been drinking (empty Mexicali Beer bottles were found in the wreckage, a state trooper testifies, though he concedes they could have been consumed at any time well before the accident, left bouncing around in the wood-paneled station wagon); that’s followed by even more uncomfortable exchanges indeed, such as one that’s indicative of a whole other sorry era in America, let’s hope—there’s the particularly awkward moment when the driver of the other car, a family man, testifies, and then one of the jurors (in what I hear as a slow, bigoted country voice) has an additional question for the trooper, with the Deputy D.A. coming in after that, regarding the matter of who exactly West was:

JUROR: Is West a Spanish or American boy?
OFFICER TILLMAN: Evidently American.

DEPUTY D.A. FREEMAN (perhaps exasperated with a question like that—my insert): He and his wife lived in North Hollywood, didn’t they?

I write down some notes, including the dialogue lines from the transcript that you’ve just read here in this movie of me, and I put the stapled-together photocopy of the report back into the folder and place it on top of the two others I’ve already been through.

I had only a roll and coffee for lunch, and all the walking, those couple of miles in the sun earlier, is starting to catch up with me. I’m getting tired in the library (I look around—a prim elderly woman working at her laptop next to me smiles; I see a young guy a few tables over examining manuscripts and wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a black knit cap that says “Berlin” on the side, and I like the fact he doesn’t seem, well, scholarly), as I do finally get to that last folder, the one I have in a way been saving, Box 1, folder 5: The Day of the Locust, novel fragment; before long I’m completely lost, and then some, in the less than a dozen pages of faint typescript on crisp onionskin, and, as it turns out, I go way beyond my 1:30-3:30 begrudgingly issued time slot (however, now here, I doubt anybody cares about any of that, and I suspect it wouldn’t even bother the schoolmarm-ish guy of the rules-are-rules mindset if he was around and this wasn’t his day off); for me, to actually see West at work, with his penciled-in word changes and in two cases complete typewritten rewrites of pages, proves the very best thing of all in the Huntington; sometimes it’s just a small alteration that results in large difference, and at one point I write in my notebook how it constitutes a master stroke, the way West in the manuscript originally introduces Tod Hackett as a personage who would become famous for his well-known painting “The Burning of Los Angeles” then changes that to Tod Hackett who is simply working on a painting of that title, as he is in the published novel (the former would have been trite, making Tod subsequently famous like that, not the right oblique touch whatsoever); at another point I write in my notebook that I am now seeing up close the composition of some of the earliest pages in the novel, where Tod, at the end of his work day, walks leisurely from his movie studio to where he lives at the San Bernardino Arms, and I also write down that I myself followed the same walk described in those pages the day I was first out in Hollywood, retracing his steps from the studio that used to be Columbia and then up the hill of Ivar Street to the Pa-Va-Sed Apartments (odd that the pages of this brief manuscript “fragment” should contain that exact scene—another mirror mirroring?); I linger over the manuscript pages, eventually finish.

I look around the room again before packing everything up for return to the front desk, the same serious woman there, nodding but not smiling. I tug on the light suit jacket I brought with me to wear with the black Levi’s and another open-collared dress shirt, perhaps to appear presentable in these surroundings. I’m really tired, and I tell myself that as very interesting as the afternoon has been, I do know what I’ve always known—that never mind the off-putting practice of collecting literary artifacts as pricey possessions, it’s true that the whole concept of a rare books and manuscript library, with so many scholars busily working away—the never-ending routine of research and by-the-numbers academic critical analysis, more often than not mere fuel for the promotion-and-tenure machine—really has little to do with the rhapsodic transport of the literature itself, read by the amazed reader himself or herself, ultimately excited; when all is said and done, a room like this undeniably is what it is: a place where literature goes to die.

After leaving the library, I make an attempt at wandering around the grounds of the Huntington beyond the library building, in back where the art museum and those touted, supposedly renowned botanical gardens are, but the project is pretty short-lived: I am suddenly absolutely tired at the end of this long day (the nametag still stuck on my shirt elicited a nod from an attendant and then her waving me through the turnstile, gratis, at the little colonnade concourse for tickets, twelve bucks otherwise), and I don’t even muster the energy to go into the museum to see any of the paintings.

I know that with my trip just about over I look forward to dinner with my old college pal that evening (truth of the matter is that I’m both tired and even a touch depressed, which can happen toward the end of a trip, the realization that “Now this is over, what the hell do I do next in my life?” and I am already thinking again of what I came here to get away from, the sadness of my friend’s illness back in Austin—because to have a debilitating stroke at just fifty is colossally unfair—and also the absurdity of the departmental politics I foolishly let myself get roped into at the end of the semester), yes, I look forward to meeting up with the pal from college, a guy with little interest in books—sometimes I have to take a break, I know, from literature and its trappings, wondering too much about books and letting that eat up my life.

But my afternoon in the Huntington Library does have something to do with what happened to me that other afternoon up in Hollywood, when I seemed to not only track down more of the settings of The Day of the Locust but also walk right into a scene from the novel, diligently taking notes about it all the while as well.

And if I’ve served up two short movies of me here, there’s still a transcendent—or maybe metaphysical—trailer of sorts to come, an attempt to bring everything here together, after a belated brief “intermission” with my college pal. (I really hope I’m not sounding altogether too hokey with this movie motif—and there is the excuse that I am in L.A.) I leave San Marino.

My college pal, despite the fact he currently lives in West-wood, knows Chinatown well. After finishing law school in Los Angeles years before, he worked for the city’s legal aid program, downtown, often going to one of the dozens of restaurants to choose from within those several self-contained blocks that make up Chinatown, the neighborhood’s trademark pagoda rooflines everywhere (like the roofline outlined in red neon at night of my funky Royal Pagoda Motel where I’ve been so comfortable, an establishment that proudly advertises, “Built in 1964 and a hotspot for Asian celebrities of the era,” among them, as boasted, “Apasra Hongsakula—Ms. [sic] Universe 1965”). On the phone he tells me he’ll be there by seven, his voice gentle and even-toned:

“No, you just wait for me at your motel, Pete, relax after your long day, rest for a while. And I’ll try to relax, too, in the traffic, get on the freeway with some music playing and be there in less than an hour. I’m really up for some awesome Chinese food.”

After he navigates me on the walk through the back streets of Chinatown, we sit wielding chopsticks at the restaurant—one he remembers as his favorite for seafood when working legal aid, an inexpensive place where I have possibly the best scallops in stir-fried crisp vegetables anybody could ever long for—and we are relaxed. We talk more about old friends, laugh, and we do an awful lot of filling in on what has happened to us in life, successes and failures, not only on what passes for the career front but also in experiences with women, both of us on our own again at this stage, admittedly rather old to be “dating”—but both of us do date, albeit awkwardly at our age, have a lot of fun with it, and we laugh about that. Athletically tall, buff from working out in the gym—something obvious, with him wearing a tight, bright yellow T-shirt, complete with a thin gold necklace, L.A.-ish—he’s a good-looking guy; his hair is still dark and cut short, and most of all it is his very white smile that shows that while both of us qualify for all that AARP stuff embarrassingly clogging the mailbox, he now and then seems entirely the same guy I knew in college. He was a great skier back then and on the university’s varsity team, after that a full-time member of a ski manufacturer’s sponsored promotional team before law school, an acknowledged innovator in “hot-dog skiing” when the sport was just being invented. He’s proud of his two grown children, whom he raised largely on his own after his marriage didn’t work out, balancing that with some law work conducted out of his office at home and, more so, business deals; he tells me that with a recently acquired degree in finance, his twenty-two-year-old daughter (“bright as all hell”) is living with him in the house in Westwood at the moment and working in L.A., while she waits to start a job she’s excited about on Wall Street in the fall.

Having not seen him in years, since right after graduation, to be exact, I’ve heard from other college friends that for a while his business ventures included movies, an independent producer with a small production company for low-budget films. I ask him about it now and he explains it was all modest and very low budget—the slasher and American kung fu movies—though there was opportunity with such in the late eighties and early nineties. With a cameo from a recognizable actor booked cheaply—Lee Marvin, one time—he could sell a package for good distribution and see a decent return on the investment, Sony involved at least once. Still, in the end he was glad he got out of it, noting: “The whole movie thing is all sleaze—not that I wasn’t doing my part.”

I laugh, and he asks me how I, a short story writer and novelist, never got caught up in the movie thing myself. I tell him I’ve probably always been too impractical, perhaps naive; also, I grew up in a house where books were what mattered (before marriage my mother was a school librarian) and I lived in a semi-rural area and didn’t even go to movies much as a kid, to develop any early hunger to get involved in them. But I go on to explain there was that one occasion, what I’ve told people about before to get a laugh.

After the appearance of a novel of mine years ago, I was approached by a producer who liked the book and my work overall; he asked me to write an original treatment for development, hopefully, into a full-fledged screenplay. The producer was Ronnie Shedlo (he died recently, not all that old), who had a reputation of being an honorable maverick in Hollywood and was involved in some good work (he did the film Back Roads with Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones, the latter at Harvard with my pal and me in the late sixties, Tommy Lee characteristically leathery and gravelly voiced even then as an undergrad, when I’d encounter him in the teacup of Sever Lecture Hall for the full year of Chaucer that was required of all honors English majors at the time; I also later learned—weird, too, in the context of what I’m writing here—that Shedlo was the original producer who put together the package for the fine 1975 film of The Day of the Locust directed by John Schlesinger, which had Karen Black with bleached golden hair set in a shimmering Marcel wave as a convincing Faye Greener and Donald Sutherland, hauntingly blank-faced, as a perfect Homer Simpson, yet accounts indicate that Shedlo withdrew from the final project when pressure from others who were part of it demanded certain casting or perhaps even asked for textual compromise, maybe on the script written by Waldo Salt of Midnight Cowboy notoriety). I tell my pal now that at first I didn’t take it seriously whatsoever, saw it as but a dreamy long shot that might mean some easy money, and when I sent Shedlo a fifteen-page treatment I whipped up quickly, replete with every cliché you’d find in any Clint Eastwood tough-guy-cop performance, Shedlo bluntly told me on the phone—calling from his own home in Beverly Hills, no less—that if he wanted crap like that he never would have approached me to begin with and could have found a million people there in L.A. to give it to him. Two things resulted: first, an amazement from literary-snooty me that a Hollywood producer had read so much, knew literature inside out, I soon learned, and, secondly, once we did move toward a screenplay, based on a subsequent, much better treatment I gave him, I realized that while a treatment was like a short story and easy for me, I was no good at delivering a finished working script—it’s hard to get dialogue in a script to both sound natural and carry the machinations of plot, taking a skill that I, for one, didn’t possess, am still sort of intimidated by, actually.

“No, it all got more absurd. As Shedlo started to talk about points, what my cut would be according to a contract if the thing ever were made and that kind of financial stuff, and with him about to fly to Texas to work on the script with me, well, at that stage my publisher—or maybe the film agent I had then, because there was a Hollywood agent who represented me through the publisher—in any case, somebody got word that there was big-time interest with real big-time money on another front for movie rights, coming from a group of secretive investors who were apparently crazy about my novel and its somewhat noir portrait of decadent life in the fast lane of booming urban Texas in the 1980s.”

I tell him I was advised to let the Ronnie Shedlo project go, which I did, and wait for the new people to make a move, as the secretive investors turned out to be a bunch of, indeed, pretty big-time drug dealers in Dallas, represented in their business ventures by a lawyer named—could it get any better?—Robin Hood, who had approached my publisher— nothing but nothing ever coming of that.

“Movies,” he says, the twin batons of bamboo chopsticks poised in his crossed fingers, smiling that white smile, shaking his head.

Walking back to my motel, where he has parked the sleek black BMW coupe that seems to embarrass him some, there is a full moon in the inky blue night sky over empty Chinatown, with its pull-down steel shutters on shop fronts padlocked tight, the silhouettes of those horned pagoda rooflines all around us, and we both agree how much we’d enjoyed ourselves and we shouldn’t let so much time slip away between get-togethers like this.

There in the parking lot, after more talk while we stand around—continued remembering of guys we knew from playing on sports teams and such back in college, wonderful old girlfriends back in college as well—he finally opens the BMW door there in the moonlight and is about to get into that beige-leather cockpit, the car new enough that the inside still smells like a luggage store. Soft-voiced, he tells me something along the lines of:

“You know, I look in the mirror, Pete, I see me, and I say to myself—who the hell is that guy? I mean, I don’t feel that old.”

OK, here goes, and let me see if I can at last put some of this together, because I have been thinking more and more about much of this, now that I am back in Austin.

I am wondering about what seemed to be at the heart of those two movies of me there in L.A. during that week or so and if it does reveal that something bigger I’ve been trying to get at for a long time now, including well before this trip, something essentially metaphysical. I would like to say that it all fell whisperingly into place when I was confronted with those near symbols of the metaphysical, locales that in themselves cause you to just gaze and gaze and feel that crucial insight is imminent, you are about to finally understand (for instance, looking out at, mesmerizingly so and alone, the immense blue Pacific early one morning while walking on deserted Santa Monica Beach, with its bright white sands and clusters of palms, during the trip’s last couple of days I spend out there; or looking down at, equally mesmerizingly so and alone, the vast American desert from a plane, and there are the erosion-clawed chocolate mountains, the ongoing, seemingly endless orange sand flats, as seen from 30,000 feet up on my afternoon Southwest return flight, where the cabin is close to empty and I have the row of seats to myself, the engines droning on and on), sure, it would be somehow perfect if I could say it all came together for me at a moment such as one of those. But it didn’t. And even now as I sit writing this on a July morning in the back bedroom of my apartment at 1407 West 39th 1/2 Street and with the air conditioning laboring away here in Austin, where I’ve signed on again to teach every afternoon in a five-week summer session because of some hefty bills that really have to be taken care of, I can only try—but I will try—to piece it together. And if it is to be approached in terms of the transcendent, I might go right to the top and summon a quote from the literary master of matters transcendent and metaphysical, of course, Borges himself, who once pronounced: “We accept reality so readily perhaps because we suspect that nothing is real.”

True, in the past dozen years I have been doing a lot of exactly what I did out in L.A., traveling to a place where a document of literature I love is set and rereading the book there, to see what happens. (Other trips have taken me to Buenos Aires and rereading Borges there, to Paris and rereading the French surrealists there, to Oxford, Mississippi, and rereading Faulkner there, to Cuernavaca and rereading Malcolm Lowry there, to Tunis and rereading Flaubert— specifically his Salammbô, about ancient Carthage—there.) While the time in Los Angeles was really about an attempt to clear my head out for a bit, get away from problems that had been closing in on me in my own shaky life in Austin and work on revising the long fiction manuscript, no distractions, I think that in the end there was an equal measure of this ongoing pursuit, too, the rereading of West there, contemplating The Day of the Locust. Still, what does taking all those notes mean, as I seek out the places in a writer’s work, this obsession I have—or any of us has—to do that sort of thing? And what does going to a library to look at an author’s actual manuscripts mean, touch what he or she has touched, see firsthand the machinations of the airy imagination as it composes and rephrases with cross-outs and inserts right there on the page? And does it indicate that in the consummate Borgesian inversion, paradox within paradox, we suspect the unreality of reality, while we also have a strong desire to affix some reality to unreality, as I suggested earlier? Which is to say, I confirmed in the world the place—that apartment house—where West’s conjured-up characters lived, and I confirmed in the world the supposed fictional happenings in the book with my somehow walking along Hollywood Boulevard and finding myself in that screwed-up scene of a pantingly blank crowd hungry for some definition of themselves in their own lives—either by proximity to celebrity or in this case the outright calamity of somebody else—something to give a measure of meaning, in fact, to themselves and their own presence on Hollywood Boulevard right then that sunny afternoon…and I…and…

(…and…and I…and I embarked on what seems like some dream journey out to a millionaire’s residence in a vast verdant park, evidence in itself of the fleetingness of the materialistic, to sit in a lamp-lit reading room and examine the yellowing few pages of fading type on onionskin for those revisions of The Day of the Locust—a guy at another table with a knit cap that said “Berlin” staring back at me every once in a while, now that I think of it, strangely dreamlike, too—and there was my folding up so carefully, so silently, a map, one flap over another over another of the thing, trying not to make any noise that might disturb anybody else working at the light-mahogany tables in the quiet library, that old 1967 Mobil map with the spots circled where West had once actually lived, Nathanael West whose work was painfully neglected during his own lifetime and who was killed much too young, and…and…)

(…and West was somebody who did conjure up with the magic of words, simple little black marks on a white pulp page, such beautifully crafted documents, two lasting novels that tell us of some of the biggest secrets of all in our lives, probe the essence of the underlying concept of a forever-dreaming America, too, and add to that the fact that The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood, where unreality is the defining reality of the place, because throughout the novel West plays with this premise, his main character Tod walks through the studio back lot with its false-front sets for Wild West towns and Manhattan neighborhoods, and there’s one scene where the re-creation of the Battle of Waterloo for a big-budget movie results in a flimsy back-lot set, constructed to resemble a hill, collapsing under the marching boots and pounding horse hooves of Wellington’s troops, and with that disaster the battle that determined a large part of the history of the Western World turns out altogether differently, altered by the imagination and somehow almost changing the entire course of history itself as facilely as that, as whimsically as that, while during the whole episode a somewhat crazed God-like director futilely keeps giving stage directions through his megaphone amid the hopeless total confusion—sure, add that, a note about history itself, which is time, even add what that in turn suggests, the element of the central elusive spookiness of time, above all, and there is my college pal forever standing in the moonlight of the little courtyard parking lot of the Royal Pagoda Motel beside his sleek black BMW wondering how he got so old, having no sense of it, he softly confesses, time as unreal yet real as anything else, and I…and I…and…)

No, admittedly I’m getting nowhere, even as I find myself slipping into pseudo-Faulknerian parenthetical riffs on my Mac keyboard, almost a vaguely subconscious level and sort of a rapid, imagistic free-falling that’s pleasant enough (man, did you just see that happening? and what’s there above is pretty much undoctored, honestly, except to insert the italics, plus the numbers and evasive headings), but if nothing else, I have brought up what could be the telling conundrum, and when it comes to the purpose of a trailer (here’s a good dodge, and again excuse my running the risk of wearing very thin with use of these movie metaphors), it’s always supplied to give you just a glimpse, I’d say. There’s never the whole thing—a trailer merely gets you interested, and thinking.

Thinking the way you do when you look down while flying at a never-ending desert in the stillness of a sun-struck afternoon, thinking the way you also do when on a beach alone and you silently gaze at the wide blueness of the ocean itself, tucked in by distant mountains on either side, with the level line of the horizon marred only by a white cruise ship, its cabins stacked high, heading to a destination surely un-known—that sense of your experiencing a major realization, but, on the brink of it, never quite there with that something you seem to already know.

Or, look at it another way, and here is at least one thing I definitely know, a final point that’s hopefully trumping, for a solution: Why be crazy enough to write novels or embark on any work that aspires to be—and it takes a measure of daring to say this, seeing that it’s all but forbidden in English departments as well as plenty of other places nowadays—serious art?

I’ll tell you why, and maybe this is it—because art itself, in any of its many variations and permutations, is one way of at least attempting to repeatedly convince ourselves that the illusory stay on this planet is something, that life is worthily and ultimately, though often heartbreakingly, wonderful, granting it does slip away altogether too fast—writing a novel does, in the end, let the novelist and readers believe at last the most absurd proposition and craziest premise of all: We are here.

You know, even the schoolmarmish, rules-are-rules guy at the Huntington, who I never as much as saw or actually spoke to in our exchange of emails, never heard his voice, is here in this world, bless him, and I’ve proved it beyond any doubt he or anybody else might have just by my own writing about him. Also, don’t forget that wannabe songwriter, the overweight guy with a ponytail there on Hollywood Boulevard one very hot day in late May of 2010 dreaming of his “Hey, Lardass!” number being recorded, becoming a monster hit, and I’ve surely proved it when it comes to him, too, the lovable poor bastard.