And I remember the mornings when I would be the first one up and I would watch the steam rise off the heated pool on the cold desert at dawn, my mother sitting in the sun all day when it was so quiet and still that I could see the shadows caused by the sun move and shift across the bottom of the still pool and my mother’s dark, tan back.
The week before I leave, one of my sister’s cats disappears. It’s a small brown kitten and my sister says that last night she could hear squealings and a yelp. There are pieces of matted fur and dried blood near the side door. A lot of cats in the neighborhood have had to be kept inside because, if they’re allowed out at night, there’s a chance that the coyotes will eat them. On some nights when the moon’s full and the sky’s clear, I look outside and I can see shapes moving through the streets, through the canyons. I used to mistake them for large, misshaped dogs. It was only later I realized they were coyotes. On some nights, late, I’ve been driving across Mulholland and have had to swerve and stop suddenly and in the glare of the headlights I’ve seen coyotes running slowly through the fog with red rags in their mouths and it’s only when I come home that I realize that the red rag is a cat. It’s something one must live with if you live in the hills.
Written on the bathroom wall at Pages, below where it says “Julian gives great head. And is dead.”: “Fuck you Mom and Dad. You suck cunt. You suck cock. You both can die because that’s what you did to me. You left me to die. You both are so f**king hopeless. Your daughter is an Iranian and your son is a faggot. You both can rot in f**king shitting ass**le hell. Burn, you f**king dumbshits. Burn, f**kers. Burn.”
The week before I leave, I listen to a song by an L.A. composer about the city. I would listen to the song over and over, ignoring the rest of the album. It wasn’t that I liked the song so much; it was more that it confused me and I would try to decipher it. For instance, I wanted to know why the bum in the song was on his knees. Someone told me that the bum was so grateful to be in the city instead of somewhere else. I told this person that I thought he missed the point and the person told me, in a tone I found slightly conspiratorial, “No, dude … I don’t think so.”
I sat in my room a lot, the week before I left, watching a television show that was on in the afternoons and that played videos while a DJ from a local rock station introduced the clips. There would be about a hundred teenagers dancing in front of a huge screen on which the videos were played; the images dwarfing the teenagers—and I would recognize people whom I had seen at clubs, dancing on the show, smiling for the cameras, and then turning and looking up to the lighted, monolithic screen that was flashing the images at them. Some of them would mouth the words to the song that was being played. But I’d concentrate on the teenagers who didn’t mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them.
Rip and I were driving on Mulholland one day before I left and Rip was chewing on a plastic eyeball and wearing a Billy Idol T-shirt and kept flashing the eyeball between his lips. I kept trying to smile and Rip mentioned something about going to Palm Springs one night before I left and I nodded, giving in to the heat. On one of Mulholland’s most treacherous turns, Rip slowed the car down and parked it on the edge of the road and got out and motioned for me to do so too. I followed him to where he stood. He pointed out the number of wrecked cars at the bottom of the hill. Some were rusted and burnt, some new and crushed, their bright colors almost obscene in the glittering sunshine. I tried to count the cars; there must have been twenty or thirty cars down there. Rip told me about friends of his who died on that curve; people who misunderstood the road. People who made a mistake late in the night and who sailed off into nothingness. Rip told me that, on some quiet nights, late, you can hear the screeching of tires and then a long silence; a whoosh and then, barely audible, an impact. And sometimes, if one listens very carefully, there are screams in the night that don’t last too long. Rip said he doubted that they’ll ever get the cars out of there, that they’ll probably wait until it gets full of cars and use it as an example and then bury it. And standing there on the hill, overlooking the smog-soaked, baking Valley and feeling the hot winds returning and the dust swirling at my feet and the sun, gigantic, a ball of fire, rising over it, I believed him. And later when we got into the car he took a turn down a street that I was pretty sure was a dead end.
“Where are we going?” I asked
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just driving.”
“But this road doesn’t go anywhere,” I told him.