1995

In 1995 I longed to return to the fold.

So I took a Greyhound bus for a hundred dollars, a pack of Marlboro reds and a few backpacks stuffed with belongings. Leaving to make change. The radio station stuck on oldies since 1975. The neighborhood never cleaning up as they pour in. just a house on the hills – a simple wish list. It’s been two weeks of sleepless nights before the long bus ride. I left a typewriter on my grandmother’s spare bed in the “guest room”.

36 hours, mostly night, daytime desert and smoke breaks. 2 naps and 3 meals late I arrive around 10 p.m. to wigs and heels on the L.A. bus. It’s Halloween and the boulevard is blocked off. I hope I blend in and they never find me. After checking into a hotel a few blocks over from Sunset Blvd., the hotel room is dank and quiet. Helicopters scan the streets at 2 a.m. I am alone.

“Who do you talk to when you don’t have a god?”

“I write,” to no one in particular.

A strange guy my age lives there with his blind grandmother. He brings me in; we sit on the couch. He’s smoking crack and his mother is tapping her cane against the kitchen table.

“She’s blind,” he says.

“What about the smell?”

She’s sniffing. It’s sunny and breezy; the sunlight shines through the motel window. “What are you burning?” She asks.

Andore al inferno, I don’t even know. I took German with 2 exchange students from Norway. Frankie and Yan, Yan the cute one and Frankie obnoxious.

It’s November 1^st and the air is cool so we walk down to a corner café where we meet Jerry, the taxi driver. He goes on an anti-drug rant as he apparently knows this kid and doesn’t want me to get involved in anything “dark”.

“Like porn?” I say. As if I would.

The roots grow beneath the hot concrete, wind their way into a foot or two of soil atop the pipe, the tunnel system they built beneath downtown years ago. No one uses it. They erect billboards of smoking cowboys…. Jerry sits near the back and tells the waitress to keep an eye on me.

The bus to Nu Art Theatre winds through Beverly Hills. Fountains where homeless girls wash their face and feet. Someone is drying clothes on the hot cement. It’s quiet and no one makes eye contact.

Jeff, who’s about 6’4 is crammed in a tiny box office built for preteens at the front of the theatre. There is room for a fan and place to kick up his feet. They are breeding for perfection in the hills, prepping their kids for selection. An astronaut wives club, they send the men off to work, to war, into space – they are toasting champagne and curling the blonde curls of their lovely daughters. Fiona shows up at the theatre to take me around the corner for coffee, tells me AA would be good for me. After the late night Rocky Horror shows I head back to the motel, pack up and roll my luggage to a room closer to the beach. A 5-minute walk to Venice.

For Christmas Fiona invites me to an AA party in a church basement, then to her apartment after party for gifts where she gives me a carton of Marlboro reds. I’d rather have a pool, a little bungalow in the hills beyond the old suburbs, the glam, the progression falling backwards in time with a cleaner graphic.