THREE

Los Angeles: Pounding the Pavement

Roy was a pleasant, avuncular man who loved dogs. He had a good income and no expensive habits except Rufus. I cannot think of our visit as anything but a great imposition on Roy, but at least it was no hardship.

I spent several days on Roy’s sofa, making reconnoiter of his refrigerator as Sherman made of Georgia.

Rufus had not yet been released from prison. He explained by telephone that he expected to be released at any time, but prisoners were not told much in advance of their precise release dates.

My friend Aaron Travis sent me some money as a loan against payment for some short stories I did before I left Austin, and I bought a pair of jeans and few shirts so that I could look for work. With only one complete change of clothes, I managed to get into Los Angeles only a couple of times a week, but it did not take me long to exhaust all the possibilities that had occurred to me.

I went to the office of the magazine that had advertised for editorial assistance. I was cordially received by the editor himself. He told me there was a glut of editorial workers in Los Angeles and he had not heard of an opening anywhere for years. I had not mentioned his own ad. Much later I learned that this magazine often advertised in its own pages and elsewhere for editorial help. Whatever the purpose of the advertisements, they never reflected a genuine vacancy.

I visited the offices of similar publications. The prospects were much the same. The publications had no openings and expected none. Several editors told me they had adopted a policy of reducing staff through attrition and would not fill any vacancy that might occur.

At the AIDS agencies things were different, but the prospects were no better. I was told they had many applicants, many of whom were better qualified than I. Yet they had money to fund many more positions and waiting lists of clients that might be served. The problem was facilities. City Councilmember Woo, at what was reckoned to be a great political risk, had just cut the ribbon on the first group home for people with AIDS to be opened in Los Angeles. Neighborhood groups opposed all such facilities. Several other projects had long been tied up in the process of obtaining the various approvals necessary. No one could say when another facility might begin operation.

I was surprised to learn this, for several Texas cities that I thought of as backward in comparison to Los Angeles had long had an assortment of hospices, group homes, and assisted-living apartments for people with AIDS.

I began to put in applications with other kinds of agencies. At the hospitals I discovered that California required licenses for many kinds of lower-level aides and attendants, and for that reason I was unqualified for positions like the mental-health worker and nurse’s aide jobs I had held for many years in Texas. The requirements for the licenses were not stringent, but they were beyond my means.

I had exhausted all the possibilities I could think of by the time Rufus was released from prison. He returned to Roy’s only to get his car and several thousand dollars. Roy had agreed to finance a vacation for Rufus. I believe Rufus was supposed to travel around the country to consider what he might do with the rest of his life, and then to return to Roy’s or not, depending upon what Rufus decided he wanted to do. The aspects of consideration, reflection, and decision seemed only to exist in Roy’s hopes for the trip. Rufus had in mind a cross-country party and urged me to accompany him on his junket. But he was afraid Lizbeth would damage the upholstery in his car. He wanted me to have her destroyed. That put the matter out of the question, though having recently spent a few days riding around Southern California with Dallas Matsen, I was not, in any event, eager to ride around the country with Rufus.

Roy remained perfectly gracious and never gave me the least sign that I was exhausting his hospitality. But once Rufus left, I could not justify continuing to impose on Roy. I had scheduled a couple of job interviews, and I resolved to leave Roy’s if nothing came of them, although I had no idea where I would go or what I would do.

The third day after Rufus departed I received a call from Aaron Travis. One of the magazines Travis worked with reviewed adult videos. For that reason Travis had received a call from Jack Frost. Jack Frost was producing an adult video and, although the taping of the picture was complete, Frost felt it needed a voice-over script. He asked Travis to suggest a writer. Travis suggested me.

I called Frost, who described the work he wanted as just a couple of paragraphs to set the scene for each of his sequences. Foolishly, I gave him a bid that was a fraction of what Travis had suggested. Frost was very pleased and gave me directions to his apartment in Hollywood.

I had just replaced the phone in its cradle when the phone rang again.

It was Rufus. He was very intoxicated. He was calling from a motel room, but he did not know which city he was in. All of the money Roy had given him was gone and so was his car. He said he would call back when Roy would be home from work.

Since Rufus could call Roy at work if need be, I hurried off to Hollywood as fast as the Rapid Transit District buses would take me. I spent most of the next two weeks at Jack Frost’s apartment, which was also his office. In describing it to me, Frost had very seriously understated the amount of work his script required. Nonetheless I completed the script in a couple of days. After that, Frost found various small office tasks for me to do. He said he would like me to do the script for his next picture, which, he said, would pay far better. We spent many hours discussing what he wanted for that picture.

The real reason Frost did not discharge me as soon as I had finished the voice-over script was he did not have the money to pay me. His picture was over budget and behind schedule. The distributors would not give him any more cash until he delivered the final cut of the video.

We dined at trendy restaurants that would accept Frost’s credit cards, but we did not have enough cash to buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. One morning at about 4:00 A.M. while we were at the postproduction studio, Frost decided he needed a particular sound-effects record. Much of the motion picture industry has moved out of Hollywood, but in Hollywood one can still find a record store that is open at 4:00 A.M. and that stocks bins of sound-effects records. Frost shook down me and his models for change to buy the record.

Only later in the morning did I realize I had given Frost the bus fare I needed to attend the job interviews I had scheduled. I was disconsolate, but there was nothing to be done for it.

I began to form a vague plan.

Jack’s assistant Eugene had mentioned to me that many people camped in a fire zone only a few yards north of Jack’s apartment. I did not know what a fire zone was, and I did not even bother to look at the one that was at hand. But I perceived that shelter was not a strict necessity of life in Los Angeles. Rain was rare and things dried out quickly when it did rain. Although the mornings could be very brisk, the cold would not be life-threatening. I thought I might obtain a mail drop, which I would need to collect what was owed me for work I had done and work I might do, buy a portable typewriter, and camp in the fire zone until I completed the script for Jack Frost’s next picture.

In the meantime I continued to pore over the want ads, and I found something promising in them.

A private mental-health agency in West Hollywood had bought a new offset press. As the manufacturer of the press included training in the price of the machine, the agency was willing to hire someone without experience to operate it. The address was within walking distance of Jack Frost’s apartment. I put in an application with the agency. I called my references in Austin and several of them sent letters to the agency. Evidently the letters were quite good, for the executive director described them as impressive when he interviewed me for the job. The aspect of my application that most appealed to him, I think, was that with my experience I could handle calls to the agency’s crisis hotline. The hotline had to be answered at all hours, but late at night there were few calls. The press was supposed to be run late at night and if I ran it I could answer the occasional crisis call, saving the expense of having a crisis counselor on duty to stare at the phone.

The position especially suited me because it would entail a small apartment in the attic of the building that housed the crisis center and Lizbeth would be welcome there. I would have to run errands in the agency’s van, so I would have to get a driver’s license and to do so I would have to obtain eyeglasses. But, the director said, if I could tell him at our next meeting how I planned to get a driver’s license, the job was as good as mine. Otherwise our next meeting would be a mere formality. I would be working with the art director—in West Hollywood a private mental-health agency can be expected to have an art director—and he would have to approve my appointment, but that could be taken for granted.

When I returned to Jack Frost’s apartment I told Eugene about the interview.

“They think you are a lush,” Eugene said.

I knew Jack Frost had that opinion of all writers and that Frost had been observing me carefully for the signs, but I did not know why Eugene would think the private mental-health agency would share Frost’s prejudice.

Eugene explained that in Southern California a driver’s license is considered such a necessity of life that the only believable explanation of an adult’s not having one is that it has been taken away for drunk driving. Like Sherlock Holmes, Eugene often made remarks that seemed at first astonishing but seemed less so once explained. I was far from convinced that the executive director of the mental-health agency had calculated as Eugene thought he had, but I was less certain he had not.

At last Frost delivered his video to the distributors. They paid him and he paid me with a tip that would have been generous if it had been timely. Before I left Hollywood for Roy’s I tried to secure a mail drop but discovered I could not do so without a California ID. I found this very irksome, for one cannot get an ID without a mailing address. But as I still expected to get the job with the mental-health agency, I did not think the mail drop was essential. Back in La Puente, I found Lizbeth in the yard with Roy’s dogs. She sprang vertically into the air from all fours in a way that seemed to me physically impossible. I had left her for so long only once before, and then she had been in her puppyhood home with familiar things all around her. In the weeks past she had reached an accommodation with Roy’s dogs, but upon my return she became so jealous I was afraid she would start a dog fight before I got in the house.

Inside, I hardly recognized Roy’s home. All the while I had been there, Roy’s house had a comfortable degree of bachelorly disorder. Grateful to be off the road, I had washed the dishes and ironed Roy’s shirts, picked up the newspapers and swept out a bit. But Rufus had made the place shine.

Roy had driven all night to some desert city to pick Rufus up from the motel. Rufus’s car was not misplaced; it had been stolen, flipped, and burned. Over dinner I told Rufus and Roy that I planned to leave in a few days, after my interview with the mental-health agency. I supposed that Rufus’s burst of domestic energy reflected some genuine effort at reform and I was eager to be out of his way. Such a change is difficult to effect in even the best of circumstances, and Rufus, who was supposed to be my friend, seemed not entirely reconciled to my presence.

After dinner Rufus asked Roy for money for beer. Roy made it obvious that he thought Rufus was drinking too much again. Nonetheless, Roy gave Rufus the money. I was very tired and I did not want to encourage Rufus’s drinking, but he insisted I walk with him to the beer store on the boulevard.

When we got to the beer store, Rufus walked past it. We were not going to the beer store but, as it turned out, to a crack house.

Actually it was not a house. This was the suburbs and the crack depot was an ordinary, or better than ordinary, apartment complex with a prominent location on the boulevard. The complex showed only a nine-foot red-brick wall to the street. There were two driveways with a sentry at each. The drives led to several rows of covered parking stalls and beyond these was another wall, this one with several door-shaped openings.

We passed the first sentry without a word, but we were challenged as soon as we reached the parking area. This was a drive-through operation and walk-up business was neither expected nor encouraged. Three cars in the parking area appeared to be occupied by customers waiting for their orders to be filled by runners.

I came to understand that Rufus had been here many times before, but no one on duty recognized him. Nonetheless, they seemed willing to deal with Rufus. Rufus looked like a drug addict. I, on the other hand, looked like a plainclothes cop. I was escorted through one of the door-shaped openings to a courtyard and was told to stay there. In fact I was told not to move.

After a long time my escort came back for me and I was returned to the parking area. My escort returned to working the cars, for the operation had fallen behind while accommodating Rufus. Rufus and I left.

The complex could not have contained less than thirty units in the four or five cubical buildings that surrounded the courtyards. The complex was not very old and was well maintained. The lawn and the plantings in the courtyard revealed an attention to detail that indicated regular professional care. Although the crack operation was as smooth and orderly as any such enterprise could be, I could not help wondering what life might be like for the other tenants of the complex and who the other tenants might be. As soon as we were off the well-lit main boulevard, Rufus pulled a small glass pipe out of the pocket of his jacket and showed me the five-dollar rock he had bought. He had told me we were going for dope, by which I first thought he meant marijuana. I knew we had not visited any neighborhood pot dealer, but until he pulled out the rock I was not sure what Rufus had got.

Rufus’s five-dollar rock was the size of a baby pea. I began to think that crack was not as cheap as television news stories had led me to believe. I knew five dollars’ worth of powder cocaine was hardly enough to be seen with the naked eye. But Rufus largely disposed of his rock in the time it took for us to walk the four or five blocks to Roy’s. As the euphoric effects on Rufus seemed especially short-lived, I estimated that one could easily spend as much on crack as on powder cocaine, and therefore the popularity of crack in the ghettoes was more a matter of availability than of price. Rufus admitted that he had spent most of his vacation money on crack: the better part of two thousand dollars in two days. He told me the gentlemen running the drive-through depot were Crips. I had noticed that they all wore the signal blue bandanna.

Rufus was not in fact drinking heavily again, but only let Roy think so. Indeed, as the euphoria of the crack wore off, Rufus became morose to the point of tearfulness, just as he did when he drank. I would have assumed he was drunk if I had not known otherwise. But Rufus got to this point in a matter of minutes with crack whereas it would have taken him several hours of hard drinking to reach the same state with alcohol, and there would have been plenty of empty bottles and cans around if Rufus had been drinking. So I do not know whether Roy was fooled.

I went for the interview at the private mental-health agency. The art director had no questions at all for me, which seemed either a very good sign or a very bad one. I explained that I had made enough money to buy eyeglasses and had arranged to borrow a car in which to take the driving test. But if I bought the eyeglasses I would be flat broke and so I dared not order them unless the agency was committed to hiring me.

The executive director told me that I could consider the job mine and that I should get the glasses.

The next day I again took the RTD into Los Angeles. When I reached the office where I was to have my eyes examined, I felt uneasy. I decided to call the agency once more. I looked about for a pay phone. By this time I had learned to go into a bar when I wanted to use a phone. Unlike the phones on the streets, phones in bars usually had all of their parts and were in working order. And in even the noisiest bar it was easier to hear a telephone conversation than it was on the street.

The receptionist at the agency remembered me. I told him I was in Hollywood to have my spectacles made and had only called to check in. He told me to hold on. Sure enough, the executive director had something to tell me. The art director had vetoed my appointment.

“Well, it’s a lucky thing I discovered this before I expended the last of my resources,” I said. I was disappointed not to get the job. But I was angry that the executive director, who knew I was about to spend the rest of my money according to his assurances and who must have known the art director’s position very soon after the interview had been concluded, had not bothered to call me with this news. I strained to remain civil.

As the conversation closed, almost as an afterthought, he asked me where I was calling from. “A bar,” I said. Surely he had heard the pinball machines in the background anyway.

I supposed Eugene had been right. They had thought I was a lush. And now they would congratulate each other on not hiring me. “Told you so,” I imagined one would say to the other, “he called from a bar.” But what would the executive director have said to me if I had spent the last of my money for the glasses and the driver’s license and had shown up at the agency expecting to go to work?

I was reminded of a saying I had heard once: Little boys squash ants in fun, but the ants die in earnest. So the executive director had urged me to get the glasses, and once he knew the glasses would do me no good, he had not bothered to inform me, for the price of a pair of eyeglasses was nothing to him.

The only hope I had was to write the script for Jack Frost’s next picture. Frost had described what he wanted in great detail and had acted as if it were a given that I would write it. But I knew it suited his purpose at the time to hold out the promise of more work. Naïf though I was, I knew it was speculation to work on the script, but I had no better prospect.

I took the RTD back to La Puente and bought a rollbag and another pair of jeans.

*   *   *

LIZBETH AND I walked to California Highway 39 two blocks at a time. It was a warm weekday in late March.

The size of my new red rollbag had encouraged me to overpack. Although it would have saved me much pain on the road, I never learned to travel lightly enough.

I did not intend to return to Roy’s. I had packed everything, and as I packed, everything had not seemed like much: a couple of pairs of jeans, a few shirts and underwear, writing pads and pens, a copy of Syd Field’s Screenplay I had bought in West Hollywood, a couple of cans of Spam for myself, a large beach towel Rufus reluctantly let me have, and the ragged bedspread I had been given in Tucson.

In anticipation of buying a new wardrobe with his payment from the video distributors, Jack Frost weeded out his closet while I was at his apartment. I am very large, but Jack was even larger. He kept trying to give me his cast-off clothing, for it seemed especially to please him to patronize me in this way. Most of Jack’s clothes were enormous on me and too dressy for someone of my station, but I would have accepted more if I had any hope of keeping it.

I kept a pair of running shoes that Jack could not have worn more than once or twice and a down jacket that he discarded because of a very small rip at one of the pockets. I would wear the shoes until they fell apart, and for a long time I had nothing so valuable as the jacket.

Most of the weight I carried as we left Roy’s was dog food and water. I had learned my lesson and never again went in arid country with less than a gallon of water.

The rollbag was a new kind of mistake. All of its weight depended from its one shoulder strap. However well I padded the strap, it dug into my shoulder. I learned to shift the strap from shoulder to shoulder as I walked, a procedure complicated by Lizbeth’s utter ignorance of the heel command. Although I never traveled with an adequate frame backpack, I am now convinced that is what I always wanted.

Where private yards backed up to the noise-abatement walls along the boulevard, branches of orange trees spread over the walls and the walk was spotted with dropped, decaying fruit. I was told this fruit was too hard and bitter to be edible, but I did not verify this. The fruit on the trees looked as wholesome as any I had tried in the Rio Grande valley.

According to my map, California 39 ran north into the national forest. When we reached the highway, the intersection was occupied by a shopping center, but a few hundred yards north I found a place to stand on a broad grassy shoulder. I stuck out my thumb.

We were there several hours. For once Lizbeth did exactly as I wanted and lay on the rollbag in front of me so that she was clearly visible to any driver who might consider stopping.

A young woman, alone in a beat-up yellow Datsun, stopped for us. She said she worked in a veterinarian’s office, so I attribute this ride to Lizbeth.

The driver wanted to proselytize on a text of not giving bones to dogs.

I had always avoided giving Lizbeth chicken. When in the press of necessity Lizbeth did have chicken, she never had any trouble with it, and she is not a dainty eater. I suspected the supposed dangers of chicken bones were more of the stuff of fable.

But no. My driver did not mean merely that a dog should not have chicken bones. She meant that dogs should not have any bones at all.

I pictured the many hours of pleasure that Lizbeth could derive from a beef rib. She would light into it with all the radiant enjoyment of doing what she was born to do. When the good had been had of it, she kept the bone and on occasion I found her going through her collection as an old woman goes through a family photo album. I nodded politely at our driver’s remarks. But, I thought, no one had been around to tell cavemen not to throw bones to their cavedogs, and Lizbeth herself was good evidence that the cavedogs survived. The driver asked if Lizbeth was spayed.

Yes, she was. I can hardly imagine how much more exciting our adventures might have been had I tried to travel with a bitch in heat.

I asked the driver about heartworms. By Texas standards the mosquito season was near at hand. I had been worried because Lizbeth’s heartworm prophylactic had been stolen with the rest of our gear in Tucson. I had asked Roy, but he had never heard anything about heartworms. Our driver said she had heard of a case or two of heartworms, but had never seen one. That gave me hope that heartworms were not endemic to the area.

That settled all the pending dog business.

I explained that I was planning to camp in the national forest while I wrote a script for an adult video. This my driver took in stride. To write adult videos in Southern California is rather analogous to being a bankruptcy lawyer in Austin or an undertaker elsewhere. It was an essential line of work, even if not everyone would desire it as an occupation.

She asked whether I had decided which foothill I would camp on. Only then did I realize that the massive rocks looming ahead of us were foothills. They were not the mountains. I was awestruck.

My driver warned that gangs of desperadoes of various kinds were holed up in the wilderness, quite beyond the reach of the law. The banditos would surely kill an intruder, and indeed the intruder would be lucky who was no worse than murdered.

The L.A. area was then fixated with the belief that satanic death cults from Mexico were rampant. From time to time juvenile delinquents in the suburbs would mutilate a house cat, or something of the sort, and would leave to be discovered with the remains such symbols and indications as seemed to them to be satanic. This sort of thing was easy pickings for the evening news.

Southern California is in reality queer, but as it is pictured by its own local evening-news programs, it is positively fantastic.

In Azusa, California 39 split into opposing one-way streets. Going out of her way, our driver took us to the north end of town where a convenience store was lodged in the triangle formed by the lanes rejoining.

I still had money in my pocket and I bought a very large fountain drink at the store. I had recharged our water bottles just before we got the ride and I did not want to break into them. Finding no other source of water, I scooped the ice out of the drink and gave it to Lizbeth. By my map, all to the north of where we stood was national forest. Yet up the road to the right was an extensive development of townhouse condos, both occupied and under construction. I had learned that the foothills would appear nearer than they were in fact, but I still estimated that they were within walking distance.

I drank slowly and watched the customers at the convenience store. To this day I have the impression that people throughout Southern California are especially attractive. I expected as much in Hollywood, where several generations of the most attractive people in the country have gathered in hopes of careers in the movies. But it seemed to me there were disproportionate numbers of beautiful people throughout the region. Late in the afternoon Lizbeth and I made our move.

We walked on the right, past the condos. The land on the left, too, seemed to be in private hands, for there was a defunct tourist trap with propped-up flats painted to resemble, vaguely, an Old West village, and there was a lodge: Odd Fellows, as I recall.

The road turned sharply to the right. There was a tourist information station of the forest service. The station was closed, but from its posted map, and for the fact of the station itself, I formed the opinion that we had entered the national forest. Yet as we walked on I found evidence to the contrary. On the right the road hugged a cliff, so closely in places that we had to cross the road and walk on the left. On the left, at regular intervals, were PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO PARKING, and NO TRESPASSING signs. Below the road was water that I call a creek, for so it seemed to me at the time, but as best I can determine now it was the San Gabriel River, or what was left of it, below a great reservoir.

We walked on.

The light was fading. I was weary of carrying the rollbag, and I had got as much mileage as I could expect of Lizbeth in one day. We were amid the foothills that I had estimated to be within walking distance, but I had not seen a possible campsite.

Then the road turned sharply to the right, but the cliff on the right turned more sharply. In the armpit of this curve was an abandoned tavern. That seemed promising enough, at least for the night, but beyond the tavern there seemed to be a fairly dense residential development.

On the left the road had a very wide gravel shoulder. Here were NO PARKING signs, but I had not seen a NO TRESPASSING sign for some time. A graded dirt road, wide enough for a vehicle on it to pass another, led downward and backward from the left shoulder. I was almost sure there were no dwellings between the road and the creek. I led Lizbeth down the graded road.

I found footpaths cutting off toward the creek, and we went down one of these until I found a wide spot. By then it was dark. I made our bed. The wide spot was relatively level, but not level enough. This was the first time we tried to sleep on an incline. We were not very good at it and we never got better at it. In the course of the night we slid, scattering our bedroll, gear, and things from my pockets.

The night turned chilly and again Lizbeth abandoned her more usual popliteal position and climbed up into the down jacket with me. Fortunately Jack Frost was precisely one dog stouter than me.

At first light I left the gear as it was and we went about exploring.

We had slept about halfway down a footpath that led to a convex-lens-shaped field of smooth rounded rocks, each about the size of a flattened tennis ball. Beneath the rocks, evidently, were more rocks of a similar kind with the result that trying to walk on the rocks was not very different from trying to walk on several layers of ball bearings. A little of this and Lizbeth insisted on being carried, or at least, on not moving voluntarily.

At the upstream point of the lens, the road we had walked the night before bridged the creek. I kept the bridge in mind in case of rain, though the area under the bridge was even steeper than the incline on which we had just spent a restless night.

Near the bridge, but not quite under it, was a large block of concrete, evidently poured on the site. I could never tell why it was there. It was no structural part of the bridge that I could determine. The top was square, about nine feet to the side, and roughly level. The top surface was ten feet above the ground on the downhill side, but the block could be mounted easily from the uphill side. Lizbeth and I sat on the block for a while.

That it was flat and above the ground seemed to recommend it as a campsite, or at least as a place to sleep. It was exposed to the sun. I thought I might work under the bridge in the daytime and that we could sleep on the block at night. I considered that an object thrown from the bridge might fall on the block. But I saw no broken glass or cans in the vicinity. I am not sure why I decided against our sleeping on the block, but I did so decide and thus I am here to tell the tale.

We found a very large rusty object that looked to me to be a sluice of some kind. I developed the romantic notion that it had something to do with panning for gold. Later I was told this notion was not so far-fetched.

Nearer the water the rounded rocks got smaller and supported several grassy patches, some shrubs, and two or three small trees. Here I found signs of picnickers and campers. The signs of the campers were not recent but, to judge by the many empty bean cans and the soot on the rocks of the fire circle, several of the campers had remained a long time. The small rocks gave way to gravel and, at the edge of the water, to coarse sand.

On the far side of the creek, a steep cliff rose from the water. A few boulders and a narrow ledge formed all there was of the far shore.

Whether we were on public land or not, I thought lying low Lizbeth and I might remain the week I figured would be required to finish Jack Frost’s script. One willowy tree among some shrubs seemed to offer good cover from every direction. I tied Lizbeth to this tree and went after our gear.

The rounded rocks under the tree were very discomforting. I gathered several large pieces of cardboard from abandoned camps and found these made a good base for my pallet. No doubt that was why I found them where I did.

I opened a can of Spam and gave Lizbeth all of the jelly. Eventually she also got most of the meat. I was prepared to be adult about the texture of Spam, but I had forgotten—or I had not realized when I had eaten Spam as a child—how very salty it is. I wonder whether I am not merely more sensitive to the salt now that so many other products contain less of it.

I set to work on Frost’s script.

Several groups of picnickers came along. Some went into the water and some just looked at it. One of these groups gave me the opportunity of observing the Valley girl—as I never visited a Southern California mall, this was as near her native habitat as I would get.

Two girls and a boy, all of high school age, I would guess, arrived in the afternoon, dressed for bathing. I found it hard to believe her accent was not a conscious parody when one of the girls, having stalked the shore skeptically and stuck a toe in the water, exclaimed, “Ricky, we have got to talk. This water is gur-reen. Gur-reen water is not one of my favorite things!”

The water, of course, was quite clear, but the rocks and boulders were covered with algae.

No one spoke to us or bothered us in any way, and the variety of visitors seemed to confirm that this was some kind of public area.

A few of the men and boys went into the water nude or in their underwear, but not so many that I was convinced the practice was accepted. I had nothing to wear into the water, so I waited until sunset to bathe. By then the others had left the area and I let Lizbeth off her leash, confident she would not cross the field of rocks voluntarily. I hoped to coax her into the water.

Lizbeth is supposed to be half Labrador retriever and she has swimmer’s paws. As a puppy she would beg to get into the bathtub with me, and always seemed to enjoy splashing around when I hefted her in. But as an adult she refuses to go into the water, however still the water or gently sloping the shore. She watched me in the water but would no more than get her forepaws wet. She drank the water, with no apparent ill effect, and then wandered off out of my sight. I was concerned about her, but when I came out of the water I found her curled up on our bedroll.

The creek had a few deeper holes but mostly was less than waist deep. In several places anyone able to maintain footing on the slick boulders could wade across.

Despite the NO PARKING signs, the wide gravel shoulder up on the road across from the abandoned tavern turned out to be something of a lovers’ lane. After dark, cars came and parked and left at various intervals. But none of the cars came down the graded road to the field of rocks.

I did not sleep very well. I spent much of the night watching the stars. Although there were occasional headlights up on the road and a few distant security lights, this was by far the darkest sky I had seen since I had arrived in Southern California. There were two bright objects in Sagittarius where there is no fixed star of comparable magnitude, but it had been months since I had known the positions of the planets and I could not guess which two these were.

The following day was a Friday. Many more picnickers came, especially in the afternoon. I spent the day alternately working on Frost’s script and reading Field’s book. Field, of course, had no specific advice for the writer of an adult video. But I enjoyed the way he expressed himself and, as I had never given any thought to the structure of screenplays, it was all news to me. As an exercise I began to put Frost’s script into screenplay form. Frost would not have liked that, but as he had never learned to read I could prevent his knowing how I had formed his script.

At sunset I went in the water again. By the time I got out, a party was forming up on the road among the parkers, but I had not slept well in two nights and I soon fell into a dreamy sleep.

I believe I dreamt a whoosh. For a few moments I was neither asleep nor awake, but I do recall thinking how peculiar it was to have dreamt whoosh. I was soundly asleep again when Lizbeth began licking my face. Without opening my eyes, I tried to quiet her, but she was very insistent.

Then I supposed she had the runs—all the salt in the Spam would have had that effect on me. I had extended her leash with the shoulder strap from the rollbag. But no matter how much I ever extended her leash, Lizbeth would not relieve herself unless she was being walked. When she had to go urgently at night she would lick me awake, and I supposed that was why she was licking me then.

I sighed, sat up, and opened my eyes. I saw Lizbeth had a very different reason: fire.

Upstream, near the bridge, was a huge fireball that seemed to be growing larger every instant.

“Good dog, Lizbeth. Good dog,” I said. By the orange light reflected by the cliff on the opposite shore I could see Lizbeth’s face. I thought she was at once both worried by the fire and relieved that I was awake at last.

I led her from our willowy cover, taking the beach towel with me, thinking we might have to escape downstream with the wet towel over our heads. Indeed, the fireball had expanded until it seemed a wall of flame. The fire seemed to be upon us, but then I realized—from the silhouettes of the intervening shrubs and saplings—that the fire was no nearer than a hundred yards. Even so the fire was hot on my face and it stirred up strange air currents in the canyon. By watching the intervening objects I became convinced that the fire was coming no nearer, and then that it seemed slowly to recede. Without additional fuel I saw no way it could jump the field of rounded rocks. My theory was that a gas line under the bridge had ruptured. This I supposed accounted for my dream of whoosh, for the whoosh I had dreamt was the whoosh of lighting a gas oven with a match, only very much louder. I noticed the cars were gone from the shoulder of the road above and I deduced that either the hour was very late or the lovers had fled. I tried to reassure Lizbeth. We returned to the bedroll.

Then the screaming vehicles came.

One of the emergency vehicles up on the road shined a powerful spotlight. By watching the cliff on the far side of the creek I could see the shadows of the people and things up on the road. Some of the equipment I could not recognize in shadow form.

Suddenly Plato’s cave came to life for me as it never had before, proving—or so it seems to me—that one pertinent experience is worth more than a volume of commentary. I had read the cave passage dozens of times—the central analogy of idealism—and I had got no more than a tenuous grasp of the general drift of the argument. Now although I recognized the shadows of people as the shadows of people and the shadows of police cars as the shadows of police cars, I saw also the shadows of many things I could not identify and I would not recognize the things that cast the shadows if I saw the things themselves in daylight. I was wonderfully excited by this new light on an old text, but then too, the event was exciting in a grim way.

Several of the emergency vehicles had piped the radio traffic to their public address horns. Because of the echoes in the canyon and the various dispatchers speaking at the same time, I could only understand a little of it. The main question was whether there was one victim or two. The answer to that question I never discovered, but the gist of the situation was that a car had not made the turn onto the bridge and had plunged off the road.

The remains of one victim had been seen in the car, but evidently there were reports that the car had taken a pedestrian with it as it left the road.

Despite the excitement I dozed off and on and finally fell asleep again just before dawn. I slept late in the morning.

I heard the wrecker come down the graded path and cross the field of rounded rocks, sometimes spinning its wheels. It returned with a horrible scraping noise and I sat up to take a look. The wrecked vehicle was being dragged upside down across the rounded rocks. The roof was crushed. No one could have escaped.

*   *   *

LIFE GOES ON. Lizbeth and I needed to return to town to buy water—I still had some change. I also wanted to mail some letters and postcards. I stashed the gear except for the empty water bottles. I decided we would investigate the crash site as we went.

From the scorch marks and the broken glass I could see that the car had pancaked onto the flat concrete block I had considered sleeping on. This provided me with a vivid mental image, but I supposed we would never have known what hit us.

To judge by what I had seen of the fire I would have sworn anything remotely inflammable in the car would have been reduced to cinders. But as we followed the drag path I found a remarkable number of things intact and unmarked by the fire, shed from the wreck as it was towed away.

There were a couple of pairs of jeans that had been worn too long without underwear by a beer drinker, and several shirts that smelled strongly of alcoholic body odor. I found one unmarked Western boot, not custom-made but of the more expensive kind of ready-made. From the cut of the clothes I guessed the victim was a tall, slender young man.

He lived in his car.

Lizbeth and I had accepted a ride with a young man who lived in his car and drank too much. If we might have been sleeping on the flat rock, then we might have been pedestrians on that side of the road, or we might have been riding in the car.

I found a shaving kit: pomade and an Afro comb with coarse curly black hairs in its teeth. The driver had been black.

There were other things: the rear-view mirror, coat hangers, and an empty suitcase, evidently broken before the crash.

Then I found the railroad book. I thought at first it had been singed in the fire. I put the book in my pocket. When we had got the water and returned to camp, I read the book through.

It was a rule book for the staff of passenger trains. Much of it concerned keeping correct time, reading signals, and placing emergency signals in case a train is delayed on the tracks. A number of rules pertained to assisting passengers in various kinds of emergencies. In these, women were classed with the insane and feeble-minded.

It began to dawn on me that this book had not been issued to the victim of the wreck. Age, not the fire, had made the pages brittle and yellow.

I had an education in ethnic studies and for once it cast some light. There was a time when a literate young black man without a well-connected family or money of his own had but a very few chances to avoid a life of back-breaking labor and miserable poverty. One of those chances was to get on with the postal service. Another was to work for the railroad. There was a limit to how high he might rise in one of these positions, but he might live in relative comfort, educate his children well, and give them a base from which they might aspire to the professions.

This was not the victim’s book. It was his father’s or his grandfather’s. It had been that one and only ticket out of hard times. Treasured and handed down, here it was, the progenitor’s book.

Here it was.

And here, perhaps with only Lizbeth as a witness, this line whatever its aspirations and accomplishments had come to its fiery end.