Emily Writes Bad Poetry

 

Part 3 of “Alabaster Christ”. Read the whole novella here.

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Emily had no shortage of complaints about what L.A. had become.

“But what really gets me going,” she would tell anyone who would listen, which was usually bartenders, “What really pisses me off is anywhere you go in Southern California — well, I don’t know about South Central and East L.A. ’cause I don’t go there but I’m sure it’s no different — is the death, the absolute fucking death, of swanky little cocktail lounges and friendly neighborhood bars. I mean, what’s up with that? I’ll tell you what’s up with that. One word: Star-fucking-bucks. Starbucks! When I was a kid there were bars everywhere, all up and down the boulevards and kids could go in with their parents and sit at the bar and order a Shirley Temple or a Roy Rogers. Long gone, those days.”

Emily considered herself a serious reader. She liked to take a copy of the latest selection from Oprah’s Book Club and pass the hours away at the nice little bar in the Beverly Garland Hotel on Vineland. Emily loved living in Studio City. She rarely left the neighborhood for any reason.

“Everything is here,” she would say. “Vons, restaurants, Blockbuster, that chicken place I like on Ventura. Of course there’s not a book store anywhere in close proximity but these days I order everything online from Amazon anyway and usually only what Oprah’s top pick is. She chooses some long books, you know. Sometimes I don’t get any breathing room between the latest one and the next one.”

On an unusually chilly February afternoon, a Tuesday, Emily was found at the bar at the Beverly Garland after picking up her dry cleaning at “the place on Laurel Canyon” — she could never remember the name of the store — and grabbing a couple bags of Eukanuba at PetCo. Accompanying Emily at the bar this afternoon is a tattered paperback of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” She has consumed two Bloody Marys and she’s only 32 pages into the 631 page novel. She is, naturally, frustrated. These aren’t the same characters from the movie she loved all her life. Where’s Cal and Aaron?

This thing is so fucking long, she thinks, studying the cover while she sips the remains of her Bloody Mary through a red plastic straw.

“I’ll have a Heineken,” a voice at her shoulder says pleasantly.

The bartender moves off to get the beer and Emily glances at the man. A young one. Maybe 25. Smart eyes. Sharp dresser. An intelligent gaze. She guesses he’s a TV writer. They grow ‘em here, she always says.

The young man glances at the cover of the book in her hands.

“‘East of Eden’,” he says with a shy smile. “Great book, overrated movie.”

She didn’t have to feign interest. “You really think so? About the movie?”

“Well, sure, it helped to cement James Dean’s legend but as a Hollywood adaptation of a book it’s a travesty. They only used the last third of the book.”

“The last third?” Emily’s eyebrows arched and practically leaped off her forehead.

“Yep.”

She decided then and there not to finish the book, not if it was going to take 400-some pages to get to the only part she was interested in. After the young man took his beer and joined a table of friends, Emily was suddenly seized by inspiration. She fumbled for a pen in her oversized handbag, Emily always carried a Pilot Precise Rolling Ball, and grabbing a cocktail napkin, she wrote the words as they came to her:

Knowing stares

Glowing glares

Embers in the fire

Of desire

She examined what she wrote. Not bad, she thought, a good start. When she got home tonight she would whip it into shape and have something good enough to post on the website of one of the internet poetry groups she belonged to. She also made a mental note to rethink the value of Oprah Winfrey’s influence on her life.