AFTER WE HAD collected our Oscars and passed through several thick fields of journalists on Oscar night, Diana and Sara and I parted ways. They were off to the parties, and I was headed for Santa Monica and bed. Our publicist, the gracious Amanda Lundberg, walked me over to my limo and, as it were, tucked me in.
Only after Amanda had vanished into the mob did it dawn on me that this wasn’t my limo—it was for Diana and Sara, and was filled with stuff they might need in their partying.
Amanda had rushed back to her innumerable duties and I had not yet come to own a cell phone. The likelihood of there actually being a second limo waiting just for me seemed remote. The nice girls who kept up with limo flow consulted many lists, on none of which did they find my name.
I was dismayed for a minute or two, and then I ceased to be dismayed. After all, I was not lost—it was only a short stroll to my old haunts on Hollywood Boulevard, or Las Palmas or Wilcox, all places where there had once been bookshops galore and, furthermore, bookshops that had once been open almost all night, a literary feast for a Texas boy who once had been hard put to imagine that such wonders even existed.
I knew that, technically, Hollywood Boulevard was thought to be a risk at this hour, and probably was a risk. But I had known it a long time before and it was always a risk. Now it was a risk without bookshops, but, oh, the memories it held for me. Here had been the Heritage, when they moved in from Compton. Here had been the Pickwick, the great shop where Susan Sontag occasionally nipped Modern Library books, busing in from the Valley to find them.
I looked across the boulevard at the darkened form of Larry Edmunds Bookshop, whose general stock I had purchased in 1964. And, just off the boulevard was the storefront on Las Palmas where an irascible book scout known as Red had set up a little shop for a while.
Whatever it is now, Hollywood Boulevard is a fine street for a book scout to reminisce on.
I wandered down to the once fabulous intersection, Hollywood and Vine, where a nice cabbie took me in and drove me to the Casa del Mar, where I had a decent cheeseburger and slept to the sound of the sea.