Love in L.A
“Love in L.A.”
Page275
Jake slouched in a clot of near motionless traffic, in the peculiar gray of
concrete, smog, and early morning beneath the overpass of the Holly-
wood Freeway on Alvarado Street. He didn’t really mind because he knew
how much worse it could be trying to make a left onto the onramp. He
certainly didn’t do that every day of his life, and he’d assure anyone who’d
ask that he never would either. A steady occupation had its advantages
and he couldn’t deny thinking about that too. He needed an FM radio in
something better than this ’58 Buick he drove. It would have crushed vel-
vet interior with electric controls for the L.A. summer, a nice warm heater
and defroster for the winter drives at the beach, a cruise control for those
longer trips, mellow speakers front and rear of course, windows that hum
closed, snuffing out that nasty exterior noise of freeways. The fact was
that he’d probably have to change his whole style. Exotic colognes, plush,
dark nightclubs, maitais and daiquiris, necklaced ladies in satin gowns,
misty and sexy like in a tequila ad. Jake could imagine lots of possibili-
ties when he let himself, but none that ended up with him pressed onto a
stalled freeway.
Jake was thinking about this freedom of his so much that when he
glimpsed its green light he just went ahead and stared bye bye to the
steadily employed. When he turned his head the same direction his wind-
shield faced, it was maybe one second too late. He pounced the brake
pedal and steered the front wheels away from the tiny brake lights but
the smack was unavoidable. Just one second sooner and it would only
have been close. One second more and he’d be crawling up the Toyota’s
trunk. As it was, it seemed like only a harmless smack, much less solid
than the one against his back bumper.
Jake considered driving past the Toyota but was afraid the traffic
ahead would make it too difficult. As he pulled up against the curb a few
car lengths ahead, it occurred to him that the traffic might have helped
him get away too. He slammed the car door twice to make sure it was
closed fully and to give himself another second more, then toured front
and rear of his Buick for damage on or near the bumpers. Not an impres-
sionable scratch even in the chrome. He perked up. Though the car’s
beauty was secondary to its ability to start and move, the body and paint
were clean except for a few minor dings. This stood out as one of his few
clear-cut accomplishments over the years.
Before he spoke to the driver of the Toyota, whose looks he could
see might present him with an added complication, he signaled to the
driver of the car that hit him, still in his car and stopped behind the
Toyota, and waved his hands and shook his head to let the man know
there was no problem as far as he was concerned. The driver waved back
and started his engine.
“It didn’t even scratch my paint,” Jake told her in that way of his.
“So how you doin? Any damage to the car? I’m kinda hoping so, just so
it takes a little more time and we can talk some. Or else you can give me
your phone number now and I won’t have to lay my regular b.s. on you
to get it later.”
He took her smile as a good sign and relaxed. He inhaled her scent
like it was clean air and straightened out his less than new but not unhip
clothes.
“You’ve got Florida plates. You look like you must be Cuban.”
“My parents are from Venezuela.”
“My name’s Jake.” He held out his hand.
“Mariana.”
They shook hands like she’d never done it before in her life.
“I really am sorry about hitting you like that.” He sounded genu-
ine. He fondled the wide dimple near the cracked taillight. “It’s amazing
how easy it is to put a dent in these new cars. They’re so soft they might
replace waterbeds soon.” Jake was confused about how to proceed with
this. So much seemed so unlikely, but there was always possibility. “So
maybe we should go out to breakfast somewhere and talk it over.”
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
“Some coffee then.”
“Thanks, but I really can’t.”
“You’re not married, are you? Not that that would matter that much
to me. I’m an open-minded kind of guy.”
She was smiling. “I have to get to work.”
“That sounds boring.”
“I better get your driver’s license,” she said.
Jake nodded, disappointed. “One little problem,” he said. “I didn’t
bring it. I just forgot it this morning. I’m a musician,” he exaggerated
greatly, “and, well, I dunno, I left my wallet in the pants I was wearing last night. If you have some paper and a pen I’ll give you my address and
all that.”
He followed her to the glove compartment side of her car.
“What if we don’t report it to the insurance companies? I’ll just get
it xed for you.”
“I don’t think my dad would let me do that.”
“Your dad? It’s not your car?”
“He bought it for me. And I live at home.”
“Right.” She was slipping away from him. He went back around to
the back of her new Toyota and looked over the damage again. There was
the trunk lid, the bumper, a rear panel, a taillight.
“You do have insurance?” she asked, suspicious, as she came around
the back of the car.
“Oh yeah,” he lied.
“I guess you better write the name of that down too.”
He made up a last name and address and wrote down the name of
an insurance company an old girlfriend once belonged to. He considered
giving a real phone number but went against that idea and made one up.
“I act too,” he lied to enhance the effect more. “Been in a couple of
movies.”
She smiled like a fan.
“So how about your phone number?” He was rebounding maturely.
She gave it to him.
“Mariana, you are beautiful,” he said in his most sincere voice.
“Call me,” she said timidly.
Jake beamed. “We’ll see you, Mariana,” he said holding out his hand.
Her hand felt so warm and soft he felt like he’d been kissed.
Back in his car he took a moment or two to feel both proud and sad
about his performance. Then he watched the rear view mirror as Mari-
ana pulled up behind him. She was writing down the license plate num-
bers on his Buick, ones that he’d taken off a junk because the ones that
belonged to his had expired so long ago. He turned the ignition key and
revved the big engine and clicked into drive. His sense of freedom swelled
as he drove into the now moving street trafc, though he couldn’t stop
the thought about that FM stereo radio and crushed velvet interior and
the new car smell that would even make it better. I was unemployed when I wrote “Love in L.A.” I wasn’t happy about that.
I had two young sons and a wife and a landlord and utility companies I
supported and I drove an older car that needed, at the very least, springs
and shocks and often gas. When I’d come back to L.A. in the early ’80s after many years here and there but mostly El Paso, I did so with dreams
of good money as a construction worker with high-rise skills. I’d joined
the carpenter’s union, and I was a journeyman, and there were cranes in
the skyline everywhere. I was good at it. And work was great when I was
working, but a job ended, and it always ended too fast . . . . As I was say-
ing, I drove an old car, a 1962 Chevy II wagon. I used to joke around that
it was a vintage classic. It came with a red vinyl interior its previous owner
had done pretty in Juárez, and I kept the rest up. It roared with a rebuilt
six-cylinder, and I did the tune-ups myself. I’d gotten it super cheap and
the best you could say about it, years later, was that it still ran. I had no
money for anything else. And I was, again, unemployed, close to broke.
I’d been going like this for years by then, surviving. Only surviving.
Should I be trying to nd some better line of work? Not to say that I
hadn’t tried before. Physically able, I could do this if there were regu-
lar paychecks. The last time there were no checks for too long, we lost
our apartment. Could be this is nothing but the way life is. Lots of my
friends didn’t do much better. But with me there was also this: was it
really that I was trying to be a writer? If I stopped wanting that, maybe
even construction work would get easier for me to nd because I would
give in to it only. They were parallel dream worlds, one where I made
a good living as a carpenter, another where I made a living as a writer.
Most thought the writer one was fantasy. I didn’t, but then I didn’t know
any better. I did know that I was having a hard time.
Were mine dreams that you have to push forward to reach, or were
they fantasies that you get over?
Writing is like having a fever: your brain can’t shy away, won’t stop.
It’s a few lines of a lyric or melody that you can’t shut down, a word
or lover’s name that follows you, whether you’re talking to who you
know or overhearing strangers, an image that has superimposed itself so
equally on the familiar and not, that it can’t be “out there,” only in you.
It won’t quit you until you write it.
Her: I do not remember where I was driving from one day when I
was inching along in some ridiculous street traffic caused by a minor
accident. Except nothing in this part of Los Angeles, on Melrose Avenue,
is minor, right? And it wasn’t really so minor, as car-only damage goes.
It was an elderly man, nondescript, whose little car had been rear-ended.
He was standing there. A tall, leggy, too curvy woman in the bigger car
(her hood wouldn’t shut) was pacing and going on, upset as though it
weren’t her fault. She wore the highest heels and the slinkiest dress. It
wasn’t three in the morning, it was three in the afternoon. Like everyone
else crawling by, it didn’t seem like the man knew how to respond other
than to stare at her.
Him: many years earlier, I knew a creepy guy who pretended his
occupation was connected to Hollywood movies and that he had money.
Since he was dark, he saw himself in an ethnic category of an Anthony
Quinn or even a Charles Bronson, though more leading man — he would say that people thought he looked like Omar Sharif. Really only he saw
Dr. Zhivago in his mirror. He combed his hair with a quality mousse
once he began to share an apartment with an older dude who had done
some TV show westerns, who knows what else, and drove a red Cor-
vette convertible. Only slightly dangerous (low-level Tony Montana), he
scored his women with props — he might lay out a black book to a cer-
tain page, incidentally, where no one could miss the famous names he
had fake numbers for.
I worried I was as messed up as him, worse in a way, because I had a
family. No I wasn’t. Yes I was. No. Yes. Was I a construction worker pre-
tending to be a writer? Writing was this full of it dude who was getting
me. Or was I this man looking in a mirror, not seeing the screws tighten-
ing or falling out under my hardhat? Was I doing the right thing? Did I
know what the right thing was? I worried that writing was that woman
in the accident — excessive, spoiled, ashy, gaudy, not responsible for
the wreck. Writing was beautiful, and sexy, and dramatic. Writing was
fun even when there was a minor accident. Writing was L.A., cruising
Melrose, a neighborhood where rich people lived lives unlike mine, drove
Mercedes.
Then I wrote this story. I’d lived alone for a bit over by 3rd and
Alvarado, an older mexicano part of town. I made her Venezuelan because
I wanted her to be the fairy tale Latina beauty. I wanted her to be driv-
ing an economical Toyota. I wanted her to smile. I wanted her to have a
family and be getting an education. I didn’t want her to be a fool. Him,
surviving, I wanted in an old luxury car with dreams, or fantasies, of a
better one without dings, a little lost, a little scared, not in the system. I
wanted them both in a brief moment together. The writer, I didn’t know
which of the two characters I was. The carpenter, I got another job out of
the union hall soon after.
