As you cross Slauson and make your way to the cemetery, exercise caution. Otherwise you’ll end up flattened like those squirrels you see all over LA, so desiccated they resemble beef jerky with fur trimming. Continue to be alert once you’re inside the grounds. Cars speed through there, like the roads are an extension of the freeway, and the cemetery is a continuation of the city, life and death forming one unceasing . . . loop. Don’t let the headstones distract you; they’re merely identifying symbols, like license plates.
When I was in first grade, my cousin Paul tried to crack open my skull with a cricket bat. Paul was nine years older than me, with chalk white skin and black buttery hair. He’s gentle now, and his hair is gray, but his teenage years were difficult. He has this condition that I think I share, to a degree. Paul was staying over and my parents had gone out for the evening and we were having some dispute over the television. I got up and changed the channel, and he lost it. He grabbed a bat and chased me around the house, yelling that he was going to bash my brains in.
My brother Jamie and my sister Fiona eventually restrained Paul, but not before he broke a painting in the living room, a Parisian street scene. In the background, Sacre Coeur’s dome glowed white as a skull, just as my skull might have glowed, if Paul had been successful.
Everyone calmed down and I apologized to Paul for changing the channel. Dad took the painting to the framers the next day to be repaired.
When I was twenty or twenty-one, I had an awful stomachache. I stayed in bed for a day or two, taking bicarbonate of soda.
But one night I woke up and knew something was wrong; it was a form of pain I had not experienced before.
A couple of friends drove me to the emergency room. I remember pressing my face up against the car window, trying to get out of the car to escape the pain. At the hospital I blacked out on the gurney. Turns out I had appendicitis. They took my appendix out right away.
“You were fortunate,” the doctor said the next morning. It seems my useless organ was on the point of bursting and poisoning my bloodstream. “You almost went septic,” he told me. I thought of my parents’ septic tank, that underground apparatus in which sewage lingers and is processed for several days before the tank is drained. Still blissed out from the surgical drugs, I shared this thought with the doctor, who informed me that the human septic system is far less efficient.
This one happened here in LA, when I was living in that studio in Santa Monica.
One night I was a little lonely and I went out for a walk on Ocean Boulevard. Some old guy pulled up alongside me. He was driving one of those faux-wood station wagons from the 1970s, the kind that look like they’re made out of coffins that have been dismantled then soldered back together. He attempted to convince me to come home with him.
“I have a beautiful wife,” he said. “Blonde, big bosom.” That’s the word he used, bosom.
“I can pay you,” he said. “I won’t touch you. I’ll just stand outside and watch through the window.”
I’ve got good instincts, at least I like to think I have, and I sensed there was something dubious about this guy and his proposition. He never leaned out the window, stayed inside, but I could see he had one of those faces that are suspiciously unmemorable; if you pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses, you would tear off his features and his entire face would disappear.
“Thanks, I’m okay,” I said. “I’m just heading home.”
I kept walking, but he kept driving alongside me, repeating the offer, muttering, until he yelled “Get in” and opened the car door and grabbed the sleeve of my sweater with his manicured hand.
Spooked, I ran back to my dumpy studio and kept on looking back to make sure he hadn’t followed. Maybe I was being paranoid, but an inner voice told me that if I was dumb enough to get in his car I would have found a soft rag stuffed in my mouth, soaked in chloroform. They never actually caught the guy who killed the boy from UCLA—the killer continues to evade authorities—and I had this hunch, sort of a vision, that this might have been him. (Which reminds me, it wasn’t the boy’s skeleton they recovered, nothing that substantial, just ash and bone fragments, mixed up with the ashes of some other dead boys in the incinerator in that basement in Oregon.)
The ceiling of my basement apartment caved in, just a few months later; I slept right through this calamity and woke up unharmed with everything covered in white dust and plaster.
There was one more recently, not at night but during the day.
Last spring I went to see the California poppies. I read an article about them in the Los Angeles Times.
I don’t have my driver’s license, did I mention that? It’s just . . . well, I don’t like being left alone to my own devices inside a machine. Tim was away—his work takes him out of town—so I really had to make an effort. I took a bus downtown and then rode the train to Lancaster and another bus to the Poppy Reserve.
When I finally got there, it was practically time to go home. I was walking quickly, all the orange flowers were invading my field of vision, when someone came up behind me and touched me lightly on my shoulder.
“Look,” he said. Ahead of us on the dirt path was a snake, maybe six feet away. “It’s a rattlesnake,” he said, real quietly, as if he didn’t want it to hear him, didn’t want the snake to know he knew what it was.
The snake was still, lying flat on the ground. It was very pale, like it had just shed its skin and was between skins. I could see a faint diamond pattern.
“If the fucker was closer,” the guy whispered, “I would cut off its head with my knife, but they can inject you with their venom for an hour after they’ve been beheaded. Did you know that?”
Just as we began to step back, the snake shook its rattle: it was doing this for show; the snake knew it wasn’t in danger. The sound was artificial and unthreatening as a baby’s rattle.
I never got a good look at the stranger. Near the reserve’s entrance, I saw the rattlesnake warning sign, which I had overlooked: a yellow triangle with the word CAUTION below it in bold black caps, a curly snake inside the triangle, its tongue flickering, fangs bared, quivery lines around its tail to indicate rattling. Reasonable watchfulness should be sufficient to avoid snakebites, the sign read.
Those are a few times when I brushed up against death. I bet I could think of more, if I put my mind to it.