Off the Road - 22

a jazz novel on a typewriter

2

All of this happened, more or less, in the order that I tell it though not the order that it may come out. We spent the early part of the afternoon looking for a flop to pack our bags in. We spent a mad afternoon in downtown Los Angeles walking around with stars in our eyes. Finally, we found one -no crying I made. The outside was run down, and the inside was worse with the cigarettes of the thousand wreaking from every curtain and couch. I didn’t know what I was doing but I took it without even a second thought or in fact even first because I had not seen anything even remotely as cheap as the Rosslyn Hotel. Dean tried to warn me that there was something wrong, and of course, I agreed with him, but we would probably be out of town when the wrongness happened on our floor. What could happen on Seventh Street near Main? At the very worst we could disappear to the airport or even to drink in the dirty river that flowed nearby. Yes, I was dumb and would admit it now but wouldn’t admitted at the time. It was the same sense that one used so after Dresden not knowing that it was made out of the fat of Jews - there are things that don’t occur to you because they are behind a wall whose drape dangles coyly. And you don’t grab it. But afterwards, you repeat like a confession: “I know. I know. I know.” And in the darkness in the bathroom, you take the detergent and scrub and scrub and scrub though you can still smell the foul odor of the soap. But up you could see the grid of what is laughingly known as downtown Los Angeles with the axial towers climbing up and up and up to the blue-esness trampoline. All in a row designed by clean designers and corrupt politicians in an explosion of money that had no place really to go. The windows reflected outward rather than brought the eye inward and the clean commercial buildings littered among the dirty old ones that still screamed of the noir aesthetic that commanded older high-rises. But outward held our attention because the bed was wired hard and the chairs were cold as an Arctic glacier with tables that had seen a great deal of drawing on them with numbers for services that defied imagination. And the colored girls sing: “Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo.”

So, we took it outside down the flights of stairs because the elevators worked only some of the time. Downstairs there was Spring Street, but no day of the year could actually be called spring just as there was Pershing Square which really was pushing the squares into line. Just as on the right coast the left coast put things bluntly because there was no time to ossify it into elegance. Dean was looking down because we had the top room which was small and cramped. He looked at the clutter of development and he nodded with that wisdom that came with controlling his own emotions and trying to control others. The sun was setting, and I thought that if there was any place for me to die it would be here and at this day but a few hours because it had to be night when the flashlight beams danced crazily to the rhythm of: so it goes. Then Dean went off to a rant about how he had met Camille and how she was going to tie in down when she could get herself pregnant and plead with him to marry. And this was the secret that Dean kept: if push came to shove and shove came to fall, he would fall in love with the first woman to get herself knocked up. And he had this dream about purchasing a small cottage and raising however many children he might have and that would be his life in a bottle. And again: so it goes.

Then after the sun had gone down but twilight still reigned, we went out for espresso and to plan our heist to get enough money to ride to San Francisco where there was another girl who wanted to be Dean’s girlfriend. The problem was that during the last few days of hard driving, the brakes had broken and it was clear that the next ride would be our last. And we’ve thought of this before and it never ends well or even begins with a verve of the bittersweet Symphony

The hardest part about getting was staying away from things like Probation Café which promised cocktails and assorted sins of the bottle for less than the price of worrying about where your evening went. I even took the door and almost went in where the smell of refined alcohol reeked in my nostrils, but Dean took me by the other hand and pulled me back onto the sidewalk and instead reminding me that first get to San Francisco then you can do what you need to do with the blue agave turned into Añejo with the organoleptic compounds enhance flavor and aroma. So, we went to Café Integral which had a dark sheen and lights overhead with tables made of oak. And we were drinking double espressos and planning out how to get the money to stash in the hood of the car so it would not go great splowm at the first cliff on Route 101. It was a long way down and you could probably listen to a full “Giant Steps” (with a double on the horn solo) as you hurled with the car to be very bottom.

But instead of having ideas we had more juice that was flowing freely almost from bean to handle to cup in an endless succession. By the end of our drinking spiel, we had more consciousness than ever before but still not a single frame with an idea that would get us on the road without so it goes.