That Sort Of Courtyard

Peering down from the balcony of my seventh-floor hotel room, I spy a woman in the courtyard. It’s one of those California faux Hacienda-style courtyards, wistfully recalling the lost days of Spanish occupation and the large landed estates used for ranching or farming by the proud landholders, lots of land that would someday become the cities we recognize today as San Diego and Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Monterey, Carmel and Sacramento. A mosaic of brick and clay and mortar and limestone and warm earth colors. Soft brown clay pottery in the flower beds. Four columns of trees rising from circular concrete embattlements in the far corners of the courtyard, the tips towering above the roof of the hotel.

And on a warm night like this you can almost hear the mariachi music blaring and see the long and colorful Spanish skirts swaying to the vibrant, life-affirming music and smell the frijoles and char-broiled pollo on the wind. You can taste the tequila and the vain-glory in your throat. And the dust too; you choke on that.

It was that sort of courtyard. A California courtyard. A Los Angeles courtyard.

And there was a woman in that courtyard. She wore a solid black dress and clutched a red purse to her bosom with one hand. With the other hand, she gestured frantically in the air as she engaged in animated discussion with a squat white-haired elderly gentleman in a dark sportcoat and slacks. The woman in the black dress with the red purse, it appeared from my limited vantage point, was no one’s idea of youth either.

I smoked a cigarette, unwinding from another day on set, and spied upon their conversation, feeling like a silent movie-goer in the twenty-second balcony row at some grand old movie palace, unable to read the title cards from such nosebleed seats.

But the story went something like this: blah, blah, blah, I’m really pissed off about this and (wave of the hand in the air) blah, blah, blah, Goddamn those sonsofbitches.

Suddenly the white-haired gentleman in the sportcoat and slacks recalls that conversation is a two-way street. He now has a thing or two to offer to the dialogue; and as he delivers his aria he, too, gestures frantically in the air with his hands. And then she raises her voice an octave against his, drowning out his protests with eardrum-splitting intensity; her hands flail like butterflies with a language of their own. 

Abruptly the hand speech between the old woman in the black dress and the old man in the sportcoat unite in meaning. They speak loudly and gesture with great force and emphasis with their electrically-charged digits and limbs, at the same thing, in unified purpose, the topic that has brought their vicious, sustaining bile around to something they can both bitterly agree upon … 

… the sad and sagging leaves of the olive tree in the fake Spanish courtyard.

Previously in Return to L.A., Briefly: Combat Mission