L.A.’S WEATHER IN DECEMBER IS PARTICULARLY NUTS. THE night had brought in more dry Santa Ana winds from the desert. The last few years, at Christmas time, people drive to the canyons to start fires hoping to burn the city down and see the disaster they’ve caused reported on the TV news that night.
As I left the hospital parking lot, great waves of black dust splashed tree branches and brittle shards of paper bags against the windshield of the Ford. I found Santa Monica Boulevard and headed west in search of an open liquor store, while Rocco dozed on the seat next to me. I wanted only to be numb and buying two bottles of Mogen David Mad Dog 20-20, would make sure I got there.
For hours after the liquor store, I glided along the near empty side streets and dark avenues with my head sorting and clicking through impulses and conclusions. The more gulps of Mad Dog I consumed, the more reasonable my thoughts became. I wanted only the aloneness and the humming of the tires.
By the end of the first bottle I was okay. I’d made it to sundown.
I got to Ocean Avenue and the beach and turned left to Venice Boulevard, then left again heading back toward downtown, continuing to let the world blow by in silence. From time to time, great gusts of hot air like giant cotton balls thumped the car in the darkness.
At Sepulveda, I went north again toward the mountains, until I crossed Pico and felt the tires hit what still remained of the shiny tracks from where the old trains had run. The rails popped up in places through the worn asphalt. The moonlight would hit the exposed metal for a few yards at a time, then the tracks would disappear back under the pavement, like the backs of eels gliding beneath the surface.
I drove more. Another ten miles. Fifteen. This time taking Olympic Boulevard downtown and back, passing “Nickel Street,” City Hall and Chinatown.
Near Venice Boulevard and La Cienega was a mini-mart liquor store. Rocco was awake and antsy so I pulled into the parking lot assuming that he was hungry.
A young Mexican clerk behind the register watched me coming in. I speculated that he pegged me in the category of jerkoff or wino bum because his attitude was cocky and nasty when I asked where the dog food was. He spoke bad American, snarled something, and pointed to an aisle. As I walked away, at the end of his side of the long counter, I saw a woman sitting on a stool and almost hidden. His lady.
She was Asian and older than the kid. Vietnamese or Cambodian. And very sexy. Red-red lipstick and long black hair and a black doily see-through blouse. I saw her face fully as she glanced up from her magazine. Our eyes locked for a second. Hers were hard and beautiful. Freeway eyes. I knew that mine were empty. Then, when I looked too long, she turned away. I always looked too long.
In the canned goods aisle, I picked up a few tins of inexpensive dog food and was about to return to the counter, when I remembered that I had my wife’s credit card tucked in my pants’ pocket. I had the revelation that I could afford anything I wanted. I wasn’t just another shit-sucking loser off the boulevard.
I put the cheap dog food cans down and walked back to the register and picked up a plastic shopping basket while the clerk’s eyes followed me. He could tell that something was different as I started randomly choosing packages of potato chips and cheese puffs and throwing them into the basket.
I grabbed many cans of good dog food, and several bags of Fritos, and a new can opener—not the cheap-shit metal kind that hurts your fingers, but the $9.98 kind with the wide plastic handles. From there I moved on: a Genoa salami and ten kinds of frozen dinners and crackers and mayonnaise and salad dressing and a dozen brands of plastic-wrapped cold cuts were next.
Now I was having a shopping spree. Carried away by my good fortune and the Mad Dog 20-20, I returned to the counter to drop off my full plastic basket and pick up two more empties, piling my purchases next to the register.
The mean-spirited young storekeeper’s full concentration was on me, but I didn’t look up or stop to make eye contact.
As I proceeded to the hardware area, I felt his glare, while I loaded up a few packages of light bulbs, telephone cords, and plastic-wrapped flash lights. When I changed aisles, he moved too, along the back of the counter to where he could watch me. He was making it hard to concentrate. To retaliate, I decided to buy everything in the lane I was in. The cookie lane.
Oreos and Malomars went in and chocolate chips by the dozen. Bags and bags. Peanut butter and oatmeal and even twenty packages of coconut macaroons that I knew I’d never eat. I had a mission.
The Asian girl was watching now, looking from me to her boyfriend, to the growing mountain on the counter, fully involved in the exhibition. When he saw me smile at her, it was the last straw. He snapped, “Okay majn. Bum. Jou ga monee to pay?”
I had him and I knew it. I was in no hurry. An American citizen in possession of a gold Visa card with a $5,000 limit doesn’t have to rush. Purposely, I again glanced down the counter at the Asian girl to be sure I continued to hold her interest, then I smiled back at him. “Right in my pocket, amigo!” I shot back.
“Shjo me,” he sneered.
“When I’m done, senor, you’ll be the first to know. You need have no fear regarding full payment. American pesos for American products. Esta bien, amigo?”
I didn’t wait for a reply. I wheeled around and made a beeline back to the cookie section, a little out of control from the effects of fortified wine and giddy at my own dialogue.
I swept two more shelves full of Ring Dings, Twinkies and cup-cakes into my baskets. Each one weighed thirty to forty pounds, minimum. I had to drag them the last ten feet to the counter.
When I began to dump the stuff on the counter he grabbed my arm. “Hole it, majn,” he said. “No more.” He leered at me.
I shook him off, leering back. I was bigger. A coward, but bigger.
“Jou put heem all bak, majn,” he said. “Jou krazee. Jou done want disa chit! Jou too drunk to pay. Done make too much trubl in diza store or I goin’ to fuk you up!”
My wife’s Visa card slid easily from my pocket and skidded across the counter to him, the way a crap shooter throws a come-out seven. Leaning over, an inch from his face, I yelled, “Ring it up, Ace. Ring it all up! And keep your fucking hands off me. As far as you’re concerned I’m Donny-fuckin’-Trump.”
The kid couldn’t decide whether to fight or take the plastic. Finally, reluctantly, he picked up the card and made a kind of spitting, throat-clearing noise, then phoned the Visa number to see if my card was stolen. He even repeated the process a second time to make sure. Then he wanted to double check my driver’s license ID before adding up my purchases. I passed the license over with a smile. I had nothing to hide.
Totalling everything up took him twenty minutes. I watched the register tape get longer and longer until it touched the floor. While he did it, his sexy girlfriend went back to reading her magazine.
Then I remember making a cocky, stupid decision, one that always made me end up the same way. After the kid had added everything up, I told him to throw in two bottles of Mad Dog 20-20. Hitting the wine too hard is when I start having problems.
The bill came to $619.00 for everything. There were seven full cardboard boxes to be carried out to the car. I signed the credit card receipt with a flourish, big circles and loops, “E.E. Cummings.” The kid didn’t notice.
As I was starting the motor, I took a last, long look back through the window at the girl. She was still on her stool at the end of the counter. Still reading her magazine. I knew she knew I was watching her, but she wouldn’t look up. The complete ice queen.
Unscrewing the cap on the Mogen David, I toasted her holding my bottle up and taking a long, deep wallop. Her haughty attitude didn’t matter. Mad Dog takes all the bumps out of the road.
I’d forgotten that the “Dog” ride I was beginning was my first since getting out of the hospital. For me, a run on Mogen David was like starting to fuck a five hundred pound female gorilla. All choice is gone. The gorilla lets you know when it’s time to quit. Sweet wine is like that.
Rocco was licking the cap, so I emptied the contents of the Milkbone box on to the blacktop in the parking lot and tore down the container and used it for a bowl. I poured a finger’s width on the bottom and he licked it up.
I kept heading east on Venice Boulevard in the hot night wind, sipping wine and watching pieces of L.A. blow across the windshield. When I got to Western Avenue, I turned north and continued until I passed the Wiltern Theatre at Wilshire. I’d thought I was simply driving, cruising aimlessly as before; but when I saw the Wiltern, I knew I was only a few blocks from the Dante family’s first house in L.A., outside Hancock Park on Van Ness. It was the first home the old man had purchased on income from Hollywood. Movie money. Blood money. I found the house and stopped in front.
Seeing the place again in the darkness swarmed my mind with thoughts of another life. It had been thirty years or more since I’d lived in the place.
The old man had bought it because his agent, Harry Goldstone, had felt it would be a good address for a successful Hollywood screen-writer and because it was close to Paramount. Harry negotiated a great deal on the place.
The house was paid for entirely by Dante’s movie salary earnings. The old man had finally stopped turning down lucrative film assignments and had completely given up being a novelist. After years of writing straight fiction and nearly starving, it was an easy decision.
We moved to Malibu when I was still young, but I could vividly remember this house and his rages here. It was here that, day in and day out, he rewrote stacks of scripts and reworked scenes on shooting deadlines. Here he had begun to earn the big money. Success and rage stuck to every wall of the place like black jam.
In this house, I was to experience what happens when a passionate artist gives up what he loves and comes to detest himself. Here, I had witnessed my father’s drunkenness and seen him treat those closest to him with contempt and bitterness, while he’d watched his pay checks get bigger and bigger.
And now, sitting in the station wagon, it was Christmas time thirty years later. Looking at the house, I realized how Jonathan Dante might have spent summer nights pacing the master bedroom balcony, a glass of scotch on the rail, raising his rough laborer’s fists to the sky, and cursing himself and God for letting him piss away his talent for a Hollywood paycheck.