How to Get Into the Twin Palms (8 page)

The air here was mild but not famous. The Santa Anas were
gone and now that thin layer of mist was covering things. Cheap geraniums were latched onto the metal fence surrounding the walkway above me. No sex sounds were starting. I tried to be extra quiet and looked at the pool. The water was still and there was a film over it. Small bugs and debris. Maybe other things mixed in. Sex things. The ladies had made me think about sex and how I would need it forever. How I’d never be able to escape it.

 

I got back into my car and headed home. I wanted to see Lev tonight. I wanted him and his smell. I drove down Hollywood under the 101 and down Vine, before hitting the Walk of Fame and watching tourists stop and shoot pictures of their feet on gum-covered stars.

 

When I pulled up to my apartment I was hoping he’d be sitting on the steps. Instead, there was a smoked mackerel wrapped in paper. I brought it inside but it made the apartment smell like an immigrant’s house. I didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in the refrigerator and went to take a bath.

I came out of the bathroom and I could smell the mackerel coming out of the refrigerator. It was seeping into the air and I knew by morning that it would be in the couch cushions, my chairs, and my bed. I locked myself in my room to try and get away from the smell and turned on the ceiling fan. At the highest speed the fan looked like it was going to launch off the ceiling and spin around the room, slicing and dicing. I always put it on the highest speed, hoping one day something exciting would happen.

My mattress was still barren. My unemployment check would come in a week but I hadn’t allocated any funds for new sheets. I needed to burn the mackerel smell out of the apartment.

 

The convenience store with the big glowing ATM sign was
closed so I had no choice but to go to the magazine stand on the corner of Fairfax and Rosewood. The man selling the magazines had sparrows tattooed on his neck and he was always strung out. He had a dog with him again. It had fur missing from his face and one eye was blue and the other was brown and it just sat there and glared at me like I did something to it. So this time I was smart. I brought dry Polish sausage and fed some to the beast while the man got my cigarettes for me.

I watched people zoom around and around looking for parking spaces, make U-turns, rub their bumpers against the cars in front and behind theirs as they tried to parallel park. People were getting out, congregating in front of the Silent Movie Theater. They had well-manicured haircuts and pegged pants. They didn’t live around here. The windows in the neighborhood stayed dark and uninviting, only alive during the day.

 

“Marlboro Lights, please.” I didn’t want anything fancy today. He grunted at me and leaned to get the pack. “Hard pack.”

I tossed the sausage to the dog. He ate it up without question while I perused the magazines. The lights from the magazine stand were bright. Bug-killer bright. I was all alone with the dog. The man with the sparrows on his neck scratched at his arm like there was something under his skin. He was really getting in there, really looking where he was scratching. The dog took a seat next to me and waited for more sausage. It wasn’t happening, but the dog didn’t get it so he just kept waiting.

“Are you going to pay for these?” The man was still scratching, breaking open the skin and letting the blood pool.

“In a minute,” I said.

“You’re going to crease the pages.”

I stared down at the magazine, holding it so I didn’t give my still-pink hands any papercuts. “I’m being careful.”

He looked at me, then at his dog at my leg. “Do you want a smoke?”

“I’ll pay for them in a second.” I purposely ripped the front page as I pushed it back in the rack.

I didn’t even put it back where it was supposed to go.

“No, I mean, I’ll give you one of mine.”

I walked over. He was opening a pack behind him. Newport Lights. I scowled.

“What’s your problem?” he asked me.

“Those have fiberglass in them.”

“That’s a
myth.
” He spent extra time saying
myth
. “I work at a cigarette stand. I should know what’s what,” he said.

“You work at a magazine stand. It just happens to sell cigarettes.”

He pulled back the cigarette he was offering me and looked at me like I smelled like shit. “No need to be a bitch.”

I shook my head. It was either apologize or walk back to my apartment empty-handed. “I’m sorry. You definitely should know what you’re talking about.”

“Thank you,” he said.

He shoved the Newport Light toward me and lit. “I see you here sometimes.”

I wasn’t listening to him. I was staring at people walking in and out of Canter’s. I was salivating thinking about their carrot cake. Their cheesecake with the strawberries on it. The strawberries always looked stiff, always safely enrobed in red gelatin. The bear claws, the rugelach, poppy seed cake, black-and-white cookies, apple turnovers, cherry turnovers, five kinds of cheesecake, latticed cream cakes,
sharlotka
. Like my grandmother makes. I wanted to have one of each.

“How much are those cigarettes?”

“Eight dollars,” he said.

That’s a pound of carrot cake, I calculated.

“I’ll come back for these.”

I looked both ways and crossed Fairfax into the beaming spaceship of Canter’s. On the right were pickles in brine
and gravlox and layers of cream cheese in tins that looked like marshmallow whip. And pickled herring.

To the left was what I wanted. The smell of yeast was overwhelming. The carrot cake came in loaves, white cream cheese frosting in tufts on top.

“Whatever I can get of that for eight dollars,” I said.

The man behind the counter with the heavy black mustache pulled it out of the case, cut it, weighed it, made a face, put it in a pink box, wrapped it with string, and gave me a ticket. It said $8. I had to pay the woman stooped in the cubbyhole of a seat near the bakery counter. She had a sweater clipped around her shoulders and she was using a calculator and she was writing down the amount of each ticket and then she took mine and I got my carrot cake in its pink box and I was out of there.

The carrot cake had large pieces of walnuts. That’s why I liked it. The crunch. It was salty against the sweet of the frosting, so good that it made me want to cry. I ate it all, one mouthful after another like someone was going to take it away from me, as I sat and watched the fires on television.

They were coming closer. The acrid smell was faint, but already hitting this part of the city although the fires were still smoldering on the outskirts of the grid. The valley fires were moving to Angeles Crest. They said it might be a marijuana farm in the National Park. They said that they would probably never find out who did it.

 

I shoveled the cake in my mouth and watched the reporter on TV with a yellow rain slicker talk to the people in the studio.

“There’s ash positively everywhere, Chuck. Blinding.”

She was right. It was coming down all around her like snow. It was getting stuck in her hair, her lip-gloss. As she tried to free herself from it all they cut away to a commercial. When I stuck my head out the sliding glass door I could smell the smoke and the sky was a deep orange. Nuclear-style. I looked down at the
cake and saw that it was gone. Just the outline of the frosting, like crime scene paint. I had to leave the house; I was feeling sick and anxious. I got into the car and started to drive east, toward the 5, the way to the mountains. In Hollywood, I realized I didn’t know how to get to Angeles Crest and so I pulled into the Hollywood Downtowner motel again to see if they had some local attraction maps with directions.

 

It was still silent at the Downtowner. The pool lights were on and there was a shell of ash on the surface of the water. It wasn’t moving, just clinging. I brushed off a lawn chair and sat down and positioned myself to be facing the mountains. It was harder to breathe at the Downtowner. I hadn’t anticipated the choking and I wished that I had a gas mask or one of those surgical masks. An older couple rushed down the stairs. They were both wearing surgical masks. I wanted to ask them where they had gotten them but they ran past me too quickly.

I saw them talking to the front desk attendant through the glass and the old man was waving his hands around. The woman was trying to hold them down. He wasn’t having it and the attendant ran into another room and disappeared. They waited a while. Tapped on the “ring this bell for the attendant” bell. The husband started doing it over and over again. I could hear it outside, by the pool. His wife pulled him away and he dragged their suitcases out of the office and down the street. The attendant came back. He put the “ring this bell for the attendant” bell back in its place and started cleaning up the pamphlets the old man had strewn around. I walked up and into the glass room. He looked startled when I came in, like I was going to throw something at him, like I was the old man.

I walked over to the wooden case of Los Angeles attraction pamphlets and touched them all, slowly. I could feel him staring at me but he didn’t say anything. There were pamphlets for the
Griffith Park Zoo, the beautiful beaches of Malibu! Las Vegas, Sea World and the San Diego Zoo, Lake Havasu, and Reno.

“Are there more Los Angeles attractions?”

“They’re all there,” he said.

I turned to look at him. He was trying to look extra official; he had interlocked his fingers and made his hands into a fist, smiled at me through thin lips. “There’s only two about Los Angeles. The rest are about Lake Havasu.”

I picked up the pamphlet. It was covered in pictures of girls in bikinis and speedboats and personal watercrafts.

“Where are you looking to go?” He was getting annoyed.

“Angeles Crest.”

“It’s on fire.”

“Well, I know.”

“Were you sitting by the pool earlier?”

I stared at him and tried to decide what the right answer would be. I wasn’t sure so I kept silent.

“I think you were. Are you a guest here?”

“No.”

“What were you doing out there, then?”

“The pool looked nice.”

“It’s covered in ash,” he said.

“Maybe you should clean it.” I narrowed my eyes at him and he didn’t like that at all. He disappeared into a back room. Like when the old people were yelling at him. He was waiting for me to leave too, so I walked back to the pool, to my seat, and wiped the ash off again and sat down. The wind had picked up so the water was rippling and moving the ash to one side, thick like mud. The desk boy came out and took the wand to clean the pool and started skimming it over the surface. The pool lights made him look blue and dead and he wouldn’t look at me. I stared at him to try and unnerve him, and finally it worked.

“I don’t think you can just sit here if you aren’t a guest of the motel.”

He kept skimming as he talked. I didn’t move. I just looked at him. The water rippled around the skimmer. He let it go and the basket of the wand floated to the bottom.

“Who says I can’t?”

“The sign says so.” He pointed to the red and white sign. It was yellowed with age, the face cracked and bubbling. Guests of The Hollywood Downtowner Only.

“I just want to stay a few more minutes. No one’s here anyway.”

He stared at me and thought about it for a moment. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“No one’s here.”

“My boss might call.”

“So what?”

“He’s going to ask me if anything’s going on.”

I thought for a moment. “Nothing is.”

He inhaled slowly, walked back in the office and left me alone. I went back to staring at the pool, ash floating down and coating it. The gate jangled and I sighed, thought he was coming back after me. I turned and saw a man, back turned, closing the gate behind him. The back of his shirt was wet with sweat. He turned toward the pool and I thought, he’s not bad, strong-looking. He didn’t look at me or the pool and just headed up the stairs, to room 214 and struggled to find his keys. I wondered if he could sense me watching him, if he did, he did not turn around. Instead, he closed the door behind him and walked inside. I turned to the office and the desk clerk was watching the door too. And then me. I closed my eyes and listened to the pool water hitting the tiles. It did make a sound if you listened closely.

“Is the water cold?”

He startled me. I opened my eyes and stared at the man from room 214. He was wearing shorts. Not swim trunks, just shorts. I told him I didn’t know. He put his things on a chaise lounge under a yellow and white metal umbrella covered in ash.

He was sandy-haired and brown-eyed. He didn’t look like he was from anywhere, just white, and he was what my mother liked to call a mutt. Someone who had been in America so long that they were completely washed of where they came from. He was probably 1/12 of everything and nothing at all. He was American.

When asked what he was, he would probably answer something like that, American. And what was that really? A place. A thing. He took off his shirt and jumped in before I could ask him what he was. So quickly that I wasn’t even sure he took off his shoes until I saw his pink feet fluttering in the light. He swam underwater for a long time, long enough for the ash to slide closed over his entry point. He kicked his legs out like frog legs and I wasn’t sure he’d ever come up for air. The desk clerk stood by the window and watched him. And I considered jumping in too, swimming after him and pulling him above the water line.

He finally surfaced and I tried not to watch. The desk clerk didn’t bother to hide his curiosity – this was a new alien element in our equation. The man took a big gulp of air and went back under, back and forth, back and forth. It was hypnotic and exciting to watch him disrupt the ash. He finally came out of the pool and walked to his chaise lounge, pulled the graying towel over his face and breathed deeply into it. He was so close that I could see the goosebumps raise on his skin. The air was cool and I was sure he was feeling it, wet.