Mailander, Shannon, and Markland

The Tam O’Shanter

Atwater Village

3:00 PM

Mailander, looking hale and hearty after all he’s been through with Lynn’s grueling and punishing chemotherapy cycles, in fact he’s downright jovial. I had forgotten what a calming, soothing voice he has and how his every response in conversational ebb and flow is well-considered and without pause.

Mailander enjoys meeting David Markland, online columnist for KNBC and Blogging L.A. and there is plenty of gossip about BLA contributors. Do you know what Ruth 666 once told Markland at a party? Were you aware that Jason Burns is actually a good writer and that Sean Bonner has a Beanie Baby collection? Sean also has all of the BLA contributors under some kind of mind control thing where they are left rendered helpless against an insatiable desire to point out assinine parking, backed up by photographic evidence. This is what Markland told us.

Mailander suggested that I was somehow in my milieu in North Beach, living among artists, writers, poets, musicians, painters, saloon keepers, book store clerks … and he is correct. I did so belong to that Bohemian scene — it still exists in North Beach, folks — but it’s also, as I pointed out to Joseph, a precarious Eugene O’Neill lifestyle that I opted out of.

So now I’m living a semi-tranquil lifestyle in Las Vegas, writing and caring for my ailing mother and doing this 8-day L.A. flyover and reconnecting with a city that I finally realize, after an absence of a year and a half,  I really and truly love. There’s a vibrancy here. A hum. A center.

John Shannon. John was there, of course, looking a little more gaunt than I last saw him but still with the beard and the booming, wisdom-laced voice and playful eyes and astute knowledge of contemporary literature. John speaks fondly and affectionately of his wife; they recently bought a house together in Topanga. John knocked back ten Dewars and waters and stumbled out of the bar screaming “Jack Liffey is a fucking asshole!”

That’s the last we saw of John. But we have it on good authority that he’s heading towards Bakersfield.

 Mailander’s Take: Pub Scrawl

Previously in Return to L.A., Briefly: San Fernando Road: In The Dismal Swamp

San Fernando Road: In The Dismal Swamp

Gliding past St. Joseph’s Hospital on Alameda. My daughter was born there during a dark-lidded week when L.A. was punished with heavy rain night and day, flooding surface streets and freeways; hydroplaning on the highway became a way of life after a time and the TV news carried live images to Angelenos of the latest idiot to be rescued from the swollen L.A. River by swift water rescue crews from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

“And it’s the same hospital,” I tell Miss L, “where John Ritter died.”

Only three days back and already I’m slipping into L.A. vacuity. I can’t help it. It’s viral and contagious. The utterance of meaningless things is the mother tongue here.

I instruct Miss L to make a right on San Fernando Road and keep rolling south until one block away from Los Feliz Boulevard. The A-1 Storage facility is on the right-hand side of the road.

The section of San Fernando Road that skirts the eastern edge of Burbank and the western edge of Glendale is a drab affair that is hemmed in on one side by the busy railroad tracks carrying freight and Amtrak passengers. Warehouses are everywhere. Tired and sagging buildings with hand-painted signs on the metal siding: BRONSKY IRON WORKS. Does anyone even twist metal at Bronsky Iron Works anymore? There’s never life to observe on the exterior of these warehouses as you drive by. There are cars in the parking lots, so these nondescript industrial mills must have people working inside of them, they just never come out to take a smoke break. Everything is old and cold and colorless, a factory-town in a silent-movie cartoon or an Orwellian landscape of invisible, faceless worker drones serving an omniscient industrial state.

There’s the tacky, 50s-kitsch Motel Glen Capri on San Fernando Road. There’s a German deli as well as a number of tacquerias and Mariscos Veracruz Mexican seafood restaurant. A Wonder Bread Thrift Store has been on the road for decades, day-old bread at three for a dollar. Hell of a neighborhood to travel to for day-old bread. There’s an Armenian butcher shop, a scary 7-11 pockmarked with gang graffiti next door to a payday advance joint (Se habla Espanol, naturally) and a Chinese take-out place.

Just past Doran Avenue in Glendale there’s a quaint handmade garden pottery business; then, traveling south, the majestic Home Depot looms on your left, a monolithic square, gray and orange brick, day laborers milling like union agitators outside the gates.

Dinah’s Fried Chicken is up ahead, too, as well as the Von’s Market at San Fernando and Los Feliz but our location is a block or two north of there.

Since September ‘06, I have been shelling out $87.00 a month for the only possessions I have remaining in the world (except for the books and furniture and other items I have acquired in San Francisco and currently in Las Vegas). Since Miss L and I have a rented mini-van at our disposal, it’s time to finally sift through the collected belongings and salvage what can be had without extending the van’s storage capacity.

The roughly 30 file-size boxes in the 10×10 storage locker are primarily filled with books. The first editions and signed editions were the first to make the cut for retrieval. All of the Nathanael West was snagged, as well as critical volumes on his work. Ditto Scott Fitzgerald. Modern Library editions of Kafka, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald. Almost forgot Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up but located it inside a box next to a hardback of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential; the latter most definitely did not make the cut.

My daughter’s baby albums were placed on the retrieval list, of course, but a biography of Malcolm Lowry was not. CDs by Ry Cooder, R.E.M., and Black-Eyed Peas jumped into the outgoing box but two boxes of movies on VHS are going to be left for history to deal with.

Finally, I located the most coveted item of all, a 1930s New Directions hardback (213 pages) of Nathanael West’s Miss Loneyhearts, complete with dust jacket in Brodart wraps. The cover illustration is of Christ in crucified repose set against a letter to Miss Lonelyhearts in newspaper print.

I pick up the book and thumb through its yellowing but still well-maintained pages. Randomly I stop at page 129, a chapter titled In The Dismal Swamp. Shrike, the editor of the newspaper’s advice to the lovelorn columnist, mocks Lonelyhearts’ ever-growing religious affliction:

“When the salt has lost its savour, who shall savor it again? Is the answer: None but the Saviour?”

A strange sentence for one’s eye to randomly land upon. I agree with the scholars that West was possessed of a sardonic wit but I also think a component of that — his masterful skill at wordplay — is often overlooked in critical analysis of the writer and his genius.

In the end I narrowed everything down to nine boxes of must-have books, movies, magazines, and music; a clip file of some of my older work and press releases; a printer/fax/scanner in excellent condition; a Bose stereo; and assorted personal memorabilia.

And we avoided San Fernando Road on the way back to the hotel.

(Mariscos Veracruz photo via edpadgett.com)

Previously in Return to L.A., Briefly: White Noise

White Noise

Last night, after making some last minute notes on a script for an industrial film whose production I am in town to oversee, I stood on the balcony of our seventh-floor hotel room in Studio City and breathed deep of the soothing white noise of L.A. that I have missed so much: the constant roar and hum and whoosh of cars on the 101 freeway just outside our door; the siren wails of police cruisers and parademic wagons that ocassionally race down Vineland Avenue where the hotel is situated; the scream of jetliners in descent toward Burbank Airport.

“There’s a poetry in the white noise of the freeway, and especially the sirens shouting, those what the hell is going on? moments that give L.A. a vibrancy, a pulse, a sense that you’re living in the middle of a thing, not just a city.”

I probably sounded pompous when I said it because Miss L disavowed my ponderings with one withering glance. To her, my white noise was just noise. Period.

The following evening, while I typed up even more last-minute notes, the balcony door open for penetration from the whoosh and the roar outside, Miss L sat up in bed, jolted awake from a dead sleep, and announced in a startled voice: “I heard that. The wind.”

“The what?”

“I heard that gush of wind outside just now.”

“There’s no wind, honey,” I reassured. “It’s what I was talking about: the white noise.”

She rolled her eyes in dismissal and laid her head back down on the pillow.

Previously in Return To L.A., Briefly: Leaving Las Vegas

Leaving Las Vegas

“9-1-1. State the nature of your emergency, please.”

“There’s been a horrible accident on I-15,” I reported calmly into the cell. “We’re traveling southbound on the I-15 just north of Barstow … we’re passing …. hold on, there’s an overcrossing ahead … it’s Coyote Lake Road overcrossing, the accident happened half-a-mile north of that location.”

Miss L did not stop the car to help the victims inside — and if they weren’t dead, they cashed in on some kind of special luck that afternoon — because when the boxy white Lincoln Navigator flew off the side of the road and into the Mojave Desert (landing on its right axis and tumbling at least three times that I could see), a choking and blinding sand and dust cloud was tossed into the sky. For a few moments we had the unwanted and nerve-wracking experience of driving through a sepia-toned fog with the bumper of the car ahead a distant memory.

We pulled off the road at a lone gas station — not a major pump bandit but a mom-and-pop operation with no corporate backing — to regain our composure. On the other side of the parking lot in this desert oasis of Joshua trees and jacaranda and rambling boulders and thicket and rattlesnakes and cactus was the hollow eyed skeleton of a once-thriving cafe. A squat white stone building. A long dead neon sign with the simple enticement: EAT - COFFEE SHOP.

Moments earlier, before the driver of the Lincoln Navigator flew all four tires into the sand after clipping the bumper of a vehicle in the number two lane, I had noted a waterpark at the side of the road, a watersports-themed activity park in the middle of the goddamn Mojave Desert. Look, I say to Miss L, there are no cars in the parking lot and the ferris wheel is idle. Whose genius marketing scheme was this?

Didn’t Huxley come to the Mojave Desert to die? Why? It’s a strange place. We passed a lonely lighthouse of a gas station in the Mojave, one hundred miles away from anything with a human pulse. Out front stood a giant sign blinking in loud red analog text: GAS  FOOD  BEER  LIQUOR  LOTTERY  TIRES  OPEN 24 HRS

This is the middle of nowhere, I remind you. Coyotes and critters and no cold beer or liquor for hours in either direction so they’re essentially looking at drunk drivers on the road to Vegas as their marketing demographic.

Right after coming upon the waterpark we saw a discreet roadside sign pointing the way to St. Antony’s Monastery.

“I suppose to serve in that monastery,” I said to Miss L, “one would have to be really committed to testing one’s faith, being a monk in a monastery out here with searing heat, scorpions, hot wind storms, air so thick it burns your throat … “

And that’s the last thing I said before the Linclon Navigator made its death plunge off the highway and into the scorching sand.

There’s always something on the road. We continued on to L.A.