There’s no trees, no sand, no sky
In this loser’s paradise
But it was cheap enough to buy
I guess you’d say I set the price
Lookin’ at the wild rough sea
Where souls like mine are grown
I’ve washed up on an island of my own
—“An Island of My Own” (Thornton/Andrew)
NOW, YOU GOT TO UNDERSTAND THAT TOM AND I WERE NOT EVEN living in Hollywood yet. We ran out of money. When we first got to L.A., we had $500 and Tom’s old beat-up Mustang. Remember when Mustangs were ugly? There were like three or four years in the late 1970s when Mustangs were ugly as shit.
Every night when we were looking for jobs, we stayed in a different motel. The first one we stayed at was in Inglewood near the airport, with airplanes taking off every night. Then we went to Westchester for three or four nights, then Santa Monica for a couple of nights. We stayed all over the place, until we had $20 left, not even enough to stay at a motel. Tom and I drove out to Santa Monica, and we were sitting on the Santa Monica pier with $20. We were officially street people that day in 1981.
We were there sitting on this bench where the telescopes are looking out over the ocean, and we had nothing. You know how sometimes when things are just over and you’re literally at the bottom of the barrel and then there’s a certain calm? People who have had a gun to their head and ended up living through it somehow have described that feeling, and they say, “Once the gun was to my head and it was cocked, I had this calm—it’s like, this is it, this is my last day.” Well, we had that.
We were sitting next to this old man, old even by our standards now. He was probably late eighties or something and looked like pictures you’ve seen of Karl Marx, with a long beard. He had a little hat on and was sketching with a pencil as he looked out at the ocean. He knew just enough English to communicate with us, and we got enough out of him to know that he was from Russia and lived out in the Wilshire District downtown with his sister. His visa was about to run out, and he was going to have to go back to Russia. He was very sad because he loved his sister and he loved this country. He didn’t want to leave America. So he ended up sketching pictures of me and Tom. Tom still has the one he drew of him. Me, I lose every fucking thing.
So the three of us were sitting on this bench looking out on the ocean. Tom and I were going to have to go away, the Russian guy was going to have to go away, we had twenty bucks, he had nothing. We didn’t have a way to get out of town and back to Arkansas. We had no idea what we were going to do.
I knew I had a $500 check coming from the Arkansas Highway Department from when I shoveled asphalt for them just before we came out to California. They owed me that much on my retirement fund, which you pay into when you start working for them. So that was going to come sometime, we just didn’t know when.
Part VI
It was my intention to follow in my dad’s footsteps and become a lawyer, but when I got to college, I changed my mind. I had a wonderful freshman English teacher named George Horneker, who thought I had talent as a writer. Late in my freshman year, I decided to change my major from political science to English. I felt it was my destiny to be a writer, and I’ve never looked back or had one second of self-doubt since then.
I got a BA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and an MA from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and then I applied to and was accepted by the PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin. My plan was to become a college professor. I’d taught freshman English as a grad student at Fayetteville and enjoyed teaching, and I loved the calm campuses and pretty coeds and hushed libraries of academia. It seemed like a good way to make a living until my writing started to pay off. But then I changed my mind again.
I’d lived my life almost exclusively in the world of books, and I realized that, both as a writer and a person, I needed to experience more of what some have called the “real” world. I wrote Texas and told them I wasn’t coming.
Exploring the world can be a daunting task, especially when you’re the shy, quiet type like I was. Fortunately, I found a partner.
But Los Angeles was gigantic. We didn’t know a soul. Used to Arkansas prices, we’d thought we had plenty of money to get us into an apartment. That assumption proved incorrect. We’d arrived in the middle of a scorching heat wave. Indeed, that June turned out to be the hottest in L.A.’s history. We drove around in my un-air-conditioned car sweating through our clothes and searching for an apartment and for jobs that didn’t seem to exist. We moved from cheap motel to cheaper motel and became increasingly desperate as we watched our money running out. Ten days after we’d got there, we were down to $20. Not enough for another night at the motel in Westchester near the airport we were staying at. We packed up our car and left.
We drove to the ocean. We went out on the Santa Monica Pier, sat down on a bench, and tried to figure out what to do. We didn’t have the money to get back home. We could call up our mothers (collect) and have them send us some money, but that thought was horrible. It would be New York all over again. Leaving with much fanfare to seek our fortunes in the big city, then sneaking back into town only a couple of weeks after we’d left. We sat there for hours. The sun began to go down in Santa Monica Bay.
“You know, Tom,” I said, “my cousin Jane lives out in Rialto. I haven’t seen her since I was a kid, but maybe we could go there and stay.”
So I make a collect call to my cousin Jane, who’s married to this guy Nick, a truck driver. They had been married forever. They’re my cousins, but they were, like, older cousins—more like an aunt and uncle to me. They had kids and everything, so I felt bad about calling people who I never call and imposing on them. But I didn’t know what else to do, they were the closest people I knew.
I said, “Can we come out and see you?” but not stay with you, and they say, “Yeah, we would be happy to see you.”
We went out there and slept in their garage. Tom slept on the pool table, and I slept under the pool table. Tom’s four years older than me, so he always got the best seat in the house.