The laughter of the world collapsing, the laughter of those who live beneath the streets. Jean Cocteau
Donald O'Donovan
The Autobiography of Joe Shit the Ragman
How to crush the Demon of Creativity? This is the problem I’m wrestling with now. Jacob wrestled with his angel and won. But Jacob came from a good family. My family was tainted with insanity. Don’t get me wrong. They were good eggs, at least for the most part. But some of them were a little bit cracked.
There was Uncle Augustus, for example, who played with paper dolls and spent a summer living in a tree.
I want to give up now, to admit defeat. I’m more than willing to give General Grant my sword. But I can’t stop writing. Even the Pompeii Press book. I can’t stay away from it. This desire for an ending may be the desire for death, the desire to flow back into the buttonmold, but it could also be seen as a wish for the annihilation of the ego.
To put it more simply, I want my life to be over. I want to make peace with it. And then I want to go on to simply live. But I don’t know how to crush the Demon of Creativity. I don’t know how to exorcise the Demon. I am in essence that Demon.
And so we come back to the ego.
I want to live a normal life.
But how can one live a normal life in Los Angeles?
Franz is just a little guy, but he’s a regular prickly pear of a man. Always up in arms over one thing or another. With the neighbors, not with me. Franz is a good roommate, except for the welding and hammering that goes on at all hours of the night. His colossal welded steel and cast bronze Triceratops stands in the center of the studio at Sixth and Rampart. We’re only a block away from Lafayette Park, a haven for the homeless. When I open the door in the morning and peer out the sidewalk is littered with sleeping corpses, like the Confederate dead at Gettysburg.
The artist, in the 21st Century, has completely outlived his usefulness. The world today has no need of artists. The world needs people who are not afraid to spill blood. Blood is the machine oil that lubricates the wheels of the world’s musical meat grinder. The hurdy gurdy man turns the crank, the monkey does his monkey-dance, and out comes the prime beef, the hamburguesa, gelt, moolah, money.
The world needs soldiers, dictators, warlords, industrialists, scientists, businessmen. The artist, formerly ensconced¸ even as late as the 19th Century, in his rightful place at the hub of the wheel, is now crushed beneath the wheel like a cockroach.
Most Americans, I think, and I imagine most people everywhere, regard the era in which they were children as a sort of Golden Age, a time when life was simple and good. Myself, I don’t look back to my childhood with this sort of nostalgia, back to a vanished Golden Age, because by the time I was born everything was already royally fucked up.
I look back instead to the 19th Century.
It must have been a beautiful world, America in the 19th Century. No television, no radio, no movies. The writer was respected, admired, sought after. People actually read books. Not trash, either. Dickens, Balzac, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, the Bronte Sisters. And they wrote, ordinary people, they wrote beautiful letters. Complete sentences, rounded paragraphs. I was looking at a collection of Civil War letters just the other day in the library. Letters written by common soldiers, the Blue and the Gray. Beautiful letters, and written, most of them, in an elegant hand.
A beautiful world, America in the 19th Century. Elegant, decorous, leisurely. But they killed you. They killed you at places like Shiloh and Cold Mountain and Gettysburg. 3,477 at Shiloh, for instance, in less than two days. And then there was child labor and cholera and slavery and genocide and tuberculosis.
Grant was a butcher, they say. But General Lee is the most admired figure in American history, next to Lincoln. And Lee lost the war. So maybe it’s not so bad after all, being squashed like a beetle. Maybe it’s all in the way you look at things.
And maybe not.
Fausto claims that he has lost his destiny. “Not only my destiny, but my soul, amigo. I feel like a snake that has shed its skin—except that I am the skin and not the snake.” He told me this yesterday morning at Clifton’s Silver Spoon.
Fausto’s not the only one who’s lost his soul. I’ve got the same problem. Or at least I did have until recently. Thanks to Doreen. It was the book that did it. Her autobiography. I wrote Doreen’s autobiography, and that was my undoing. For Doreen read Alma Delia Mortadella and for Alma Delia Mortadella read Lilith and for Lilith read Kali the Destroyer. I wrote her story, not mine. And that was a mistake. I became her—flesh of my flesh. Doreen was my world and the womb in which I gestated, a rutabaga with tube feet, a cauliflower drunk with words.
It has to do with the postpartum nightmare. In order to redeem my soul, I had to separate myself from Her. There was still some of the placenta clinging to my limbs, and that was what kept me a prisoner.
The title of the present work? The Glass Womb, or any of a thousand other titles I invented, none of them worth a rat’s ass.
The worst narcotic is hope, worse than heroin or cocaine. Once hope is gone, one is free, free to wander the streets alone, a leper among the wedding guests. Hope was the umbilical cord that bound me to Doreen. I wanted us to be one, forever. I wanted her blood to circulate through my veins. It’s hope, then, that one must discard in order to make a clean birth. Hope is the placenta that must be cut away with a sharp knife.
And after that, after the bloody mess is cut away? A passionate fetus, incredibly vital, fanatically observant, abnormally curious, ravenously hungry, savagely priapic.
My editor at Pompeii Press says I have an unfortunate tendency to inject humor into my work. For example:
“How did you enjoy your obedience training with Mr. Wickerstaff?” Von Richter asked as Tess stood stiffly at attention before him.
“He’s a career criminal,” Tess answered without hesitation. “A sadistic, perverted, bestial thug.”
“Yes, I agree,” the Master responded. “Mr. Wickerstaff is an excellent chap.”
The readers don’t want humor, she says, Bernice Horvath, my editor. Well, fuck the readers!
I don’t like writing BDSM. But I don’t like busing tables either. My friend Juan Tomás says I’m prostituting myself to the “plutocrat capitalist pigs.” But in my life, some of my best friends and lovers have been prostitutes, whores. Most of them, in fact. I prefer the word “whores,” incidentally, to “prostitutes.” It has a Biblical ring.
A jaunt to Clifton’s for the Spanish omelet. Back in my room I pick up a book I’ve been reading off and on. A terrific passage. I wish I’d written it, because it perfectly describes me: “The bumbling, wistful, satyr-like hero, a man utterly unsuited for practical life...”
But speaking of whores, I’m having lunch today with my main squeeze, Ashlee. We’re going to Phillipe’s, on the edge of Chinatown. She’s buying.
Ashlee is a woman who is positively riddled with problems. Psychological problems and other problems. It’s very common today. Here we come back to the ego again. If Ashlee didn’t have an ego she wouldn’t have any problems.
I met Ashlee at the Dreamland Dance Club, 8th and Spring, 4th floor. It’s one of those places where you pay by the minute. This was back in the days when I had a credit card.
I remember the night I met her. I was feeling more than a little nervous as I ducked inside the place and blinked my eyes to get them used to the darkness. I needed a drink badly, but there was a big sign, “No liquor allowed.” Fortunately I had a half pint of Jack Daniels stashed in my coat pocket.
Standing in the foyer, I surveyed the lineup of bored butterflies sprawled insolently in chairs with their backs to the wall. Scrumptious! A few of the love-dolls were whirling around the floor with their victims. I wasn’t at all sure how things worked at the Dreamland Dance Club. Should I buy a ticket at the desk or do I ask a girl to dance? Nervous, nervous. I ducked into the toilet and quickly chugged my half-pint of Jack Daniels. Nothing like a few belts of cheap strong hooch to grease the trolley.
It was Ashlee who came to my rescue. She took me by the hand and led me to the dance floor. A moment later we were locked in a close embrace, swaying clumsily to the strains of “Only You.”
They say the sun even shines on a dog’s ass once in a while.
Ashlee said she was from Weehawken. Her accent was genuine, so I believed her. She’d come to California to make the movies. But who didn’t? She was pretty enough to make the movies, I thought. Long brown hair, bangs, blue eyes, great tits. She was wearing a purple mohair turtleneck. I was crazed, but I wanted to make a good impression so I tried to remember the Arthur Murray lessons I took back during my two years as a private in the Army. Foxtrot, foxtrot... How the hell do you do the foxtrot?
Pretty soon Ashlee suggested that we sit one out and talk things over. We waltzed our way into a dark little alcove where there were couches and easy chairs. You sensed that there were other couples present but you couldn’t see them. You could hear them breathing, but it was so godawful dark you couldn’t tell what was going on. Which was probably just as well.
We plopped down on a couch, close together. Ashlee stuck her tongue in my mouth and we began to paw each other frantically. I reached up under her sweater and unhooked her bra. I felt her fumbling with the tab of my zipper.
For a small extra charge, she explained, she would “make me happy.”
“How much?”
“Fifty bucks.” But it had to be cash. You couldn’t put it on the card.
“Fifty bucks?” I didn’t have that much on me. Not even close.
“Twenty-five,” she whispered. She already had her hand in my fly.
Fortunately I had 27 dollars in my pocket. I gave her a 20 and a five, and she brought me to orgasm skillfully with her hand. It was over in seconds. I spritzed all over the front of her sweater.
I was happy all right. But she wasn’t. She was pissed off because she couldn’t work anymore that night. Not with that goo all over her sweater. So I asked if I could take her home.
“Okay, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s the fucking least you can do. Jesus!”
We went up to the desk and cashed out. It came to 60 bucks on the card, and I wrote in a nice tip for her. I was feeling pretty good. It had been a banner night for a guy who couldn’t even do the foxtrot.
But things went off on a bum tangent when we got outside and she learned that I didn’t have a car. But I had an answer for that. A taxi, of course. We got in the back and mushed it up, and she took a pint of sloe gin out of her purse, and then another one. We were both looped now, laughing and kissing and feeling each other up.
It turns out that your taxis from downtown LA to Venice Beach are goddamn pricey. I put it on the credit card, which pretty well maxed it out. I never had any intention of paying it, of course. Chase Manhattan, I think, was the name of the bank that had been foolish enough to send me a credit card in the mail. I guess they thought I was a responsible person.
“The first thing an artist should learn is how to use a gun.”
I remember the day Byron Lovelace said these words to me. We were standing under the lavender-blossoming jacaranda trees in front of St. Basil’s Church, mid-Wilshire, near the old Coconut Grove. I heard the screech of a siren. The gut-wagon was careening around the corner of Western near the Wiltern Theater, heading for Koreatown. A funeral must have been in progress, too, because the tall bronze and glass doors of St. Basil’s suddenly swung open, releasing a flood of sonorous music and frowsty odors like mildewed prayer books, moldy incense and sour wine: the stink of Jesus.
We were on our way to La Strega, Byron and I. Byron was taking me to lunch, in fact. He’d just sold a painting, another copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Byron is an Abstract Expressionist but he makes a precarious living copying old masters.
As it happens La Strega is closed for remodeling, so Byron and I catch the RTD downtown and then the DASH bus to La Golondrina, a tourist trap on Olvera Street. Which is fine with me because La Golondrina is the sort of place where you meet the big bouncy blondes from Minneapolis who’ve come to Southern California to get their business fixed.
The restaurant is crowded but we’re seated immediately on the whitewashed brick patio. There’s a Minnesota blonde at the next table. Byron orders the house chenin blanc. After we’ve blurred the edges a little bit we both order the costillas en adobo, and Byron calls for more wine. The Minnesota blonde is giving me the eye over the rim of her margarita glass.
“Brother, there are four ways for an artist to survive in this world,” Byron says to me after the Minnesota blonde has departed and the costillas en adobo have arrived, garnished with pineapple rings, cilantro and pickled slices of red onion. “One, be born with a silver spoon in your mouth; two, marry a rich girl; three, get yourself a nice clean war wound.”
What you have to understand is that Byron Lovelace is forever talking about the plight of the artist. Byron thinks he’s an artist, but he’s not. He’s an intellectual. What Byron Lovelace needs in order to transform him into an artist is 15 or 16 years in a steel mill.
“And the fourth?”
“Use a gun. Walk into a bank with a piece of iron in your fist and demand the cash. It’s just like I’ve been trying to tell you. The first thing an artist should learn is how to use a gun. I read an article in the paper this morning. Some desperado held up a bank on La Cienega. Strolled out with half a million berries. Think of it! The robber blew a teller away in the process, the paper said. What the fuck! Is that so bad? Killing one person? A painter has to eat, doesn’t he? And a writer? A writer has to have a place to live. Maybe it’s right that some little liquor store clerk should die so that you can write your books without worrying about where your next meal is coming from. Let me ask you this: how do you ever expect to do your own work when you’re writing day and night for Pompeii Press? Maybe it’s time you took a good look at yourself. Do you realize what you are? You’re a pornographer!”
“Byron, your paintings are selling,” I interject. He’s in an expansive mood. I can see that. Maybe if I keep him going he’ll order some more wine. And then maybe another wave of Minnesota blondes will arrive, and things will start to happen. “Byron, listen to me. You got 200 bucks for this last job—”
“Right, right. You’re absolutely right. That’s the third sale this month, in fact.”
Byron pulls his tattered spiral notebook out of his shirt pocket. He thumbs through the greasy pages. Byron’s shirt is a seersucker number with green and white stripes. Byron Lovelace buys his clothes at Goodwill. His cracked glasses frames are bound together with grimy adhesive tape. Byron lives with his mother in Hollywood Hills. He seldom takes a bath. On a hot day the stink of the man is enough to knock a horse down.
“Yeah, here we are... I sold two in June, two in May, three in April... Let’s see, that’s 16 Last Suppers since March. And 11 Mona Lisas. My total for last year was 27 Last Suppers and 14 Mona Lisas. But what does that do for me, except keep me alive? It’s not my work, don’t you understand that? Look beyond your nose! Look beyond your stomach, if you can, for once in your life. It’s all copies of fucking Leonardo. I tell you, it’s time to bury Leonardo and Michelangelo and the rest of those shits. Botticelli, Verrocchio, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Paolo Uccello. Fuck those wops! Let them fade gracefully into the chiaroscuro where they belong. Let the dead bury their dead. They’ve had their day. Now it’s our day. It’s time, I’m telling you. It’s time for you and me.”
Byron is flapping his arms like a huge flightless bird. He wants me to listen. There’s always a price tag, one discovers. Byron sold a painting and he invited me to lunch. Wonderful, you say. But Byron is buying lunch and now he wants me to listen to him. That’s the price tag.
What Byron doesn’t understand is that I’m sick of listening. When I hear someone telling me to listen I think of those idiots who walk along Hollywood Boulevard with a radio glued to their ears. The reason they listen to the radio is because they’re empty. With me it’s the opposite. I’m filled to overflowing. I’m ripe and overripe; I’m bursting with words. Not a single extra word will fit inside my cranium, not even a pomegranate seed. What I want is a radio that will listen to me.
“Don, are you listening?”
All your life, it seems to me, you have to listen. You have to listen to people talking at you, people who don’t know shit when they’re standing in it. When you’re a kid, you have to listen to your parents, and you have to pretend that it means something to you, even though it backs up in your throat until you want to puke your guts out. Then the bastards pack you off to school, and the lousy teachers are standing over you—middle-aged failures, all of them, especially the young ones—shooting off their traps, blowing their stinking dandruff breath in your face. Next comes the army and it’s the goddamned sergeant who tells you what to do and what to say and what to think and what to believe. If you’re lucky enough to come away from your tour of duty with your arms and legs intact you go out and get yourself a job. Now it’s the boss who reads you your fucking rights while you stand on the carpet with your hat in your hand. By this time you’ve gotten pretty good at getting along in the world, which means you know how to kiss everybody’s ass and walk humble and say yes when you mean no. Then you get married and the wife starts in on you. She doesn’t want to hear this and she doesn’t want to hear that, and couldn’t you show a little respect, and on and on until one day you see in the paper where some timid little bookkeeper—a nobody, just like you—came home and chopped his old lady’s head off with a sushi knife, and you say, yes—yes, by Jesus, here’s a man who did the right thing.
Byron has hopped to his feet and has excused himself. He must leave, he informs me. He’s going to trade massages with Derek Delmonico, a young man who lives in West Hollywood. It’s not that Byron is gay. But a woman would be hoping for too much.
“Life is cheap on the steppes of Asia,” Herr Von Richter proclaimed, flicking at the prostrate Tess with his riding quirt. “And that is precisely where your friend Mala will spend the remainder of her days. The nomadic Mongol herdsmen and bandits to whom I have sold her will undoubtedly be pleased with so exquisite a sex toy. She will live in a tent made of rotting animal hides with fierce and merciless descendants of the Turco-Mongolian Empire. After she has cooked their evening meal of lizards, scorpions and other small vermin over a smoking fire of dried camel dung, they will ravish her in trains, reveling in the delicacy and freshness of her dewy young body.”
The above passage, from my current title, Teen Bride of the Tartar Warriors, is one that my editor at Pompeii Press, Bernice Horvath, takes exception to. It’s over the top, she says. I think she’s got her head up her ass. She took three of my titles off the Pompeii Press website, too. Virgin Bride of the Visigoths, Bartered Bride of the Barbarians and Nancy’s Night with Noriega. This is her way of punishing me, the bitch. For being innovative, for being creative, for thinking outside the box. But there’s the Demon again, the Demon of Creativity. A Dybukk is what he is.
I had a friend who killed himself recently. Étienne. We met at a Gangaji satsang. Étienne was in perfect health and rich. But he had a Dybukk. He was an intellectual, not creative. Still, he was possessed. He kept saying, “I just want to be with God.” In other words, he deeply desired the death of the ego. And he made it. But in so doing, he destroyed the organism itself. He threw the baby out with the bath.
Later, in a conversation, my writer friend Bort called Étienne’s suicide “a triumph of the ego.” Because the ego wanted results now. The ego said, “Being unenlightened is bullshit, and I’m not going to stand for it.”
Étienne was a good pal, and I miss him, but he did have some annoying habits. Almost daily he would ask me, “Well, Don, what do you hope to achieve in your life?” There’s something patronizing about a question like this. It sounded to me like a line he picked up in a Tony Robbins seminar. My answer was always the same: “Writer’s block! That’s what I’m hoping for.”
You see these timid souls today going to lectures about how to nurture their inner child. I want my inner child to get the hell away from me. He’s the Demon, isn’t he? He’s the Dybukk. He struts around the stage like a little Hitler, my inner child. Healthy as a horse. Today Germany, tomorrow the world! The only thing worse than his overweening ambition is his unstinting flow of words. And I’m his goddamn stenographer. I’ve been elected. Everything he says, I have to write down. I’m not the poet: I’m the pen.
Another of Étienne’s annoying Tony Robbins-isms: “Who is your favorite writer?” I consider this an insulting question, coming from a man who had known me for years. Who is my favorite writer? Who is General Patton’s favorite general? Who is Luciano Pavrotti’s favorite tenor? Who is Tony Gwynn’s favorite baseball player? If you’re a writer, you’ve got to believe that you’re the one. You have to believe it. And I do. I still do, in spite of all the defeats. I still believe it.
An interruption. The telephone. Ashlee. It’s time for lunch. Thank God for lunch! The world’s not such a bad place, as long as a person can still go out to lunch. I’m not homeless yet and I’m still healthy, still somewhat optimistic, and I can still go to lunch—as long as someone else is paying.
Thursday, late September. A call from Grundar. “How are you doing as far as keeping away from…I mean, away from—?”
“The street? Fine, Grundar. Thanks for asking.”
He didn’t want to say the word, Grundar. He’s very considerate. This is a man with a heart. Grundar worries about me. He cares. I’m not going to go to the street as long as Grundar’s in the world. I can count on it. He’s got my back.
I met Grundar at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore on Melrose. We were both browsing in the Advaita section. I was buzzed on the free herbal tea. It was a propitious meeting. We both knew it. Grundar has often said, looking back to that meeting, that it was as if he recognized me from another lifetime.
Grundar embodies the part of me that’s missing. The practical part, the rational part. And I, for him, the creative, the intuitive, the imagination. Grundar collects starving artists, people like me. I’m one of his choicest finds, in fact. He loves showing me off to his friends. Donaldo, the Writer (he calls me Donaldo). Grundar is a great friend. In a sense, we’re soul mates. If we were gay we would have been—should have been—married by now.
Then there’s the Phantom. His overcoat, black with grime, is fused to his body. His hands are shiny with ground-in dirt. His face, his beard, his tattered sea captain’s cap, his cracked granny sunglasses—everything is black. He’s a real scarecrow, a shipwrecked human being, a tottering wreck of a man. Even his shopping cart is a wreck. It has only three wheels. I call him the Phantom because if Grundar, in my life, is the symbol of salvation, of safety, of hope, then he, the Phantom, is the Specter of Homelessness. He’s waiting for me every day on his bench in Lafayette Park, a block from Bullock’s Wilshire. He’s waiting to claim my soul, to pull me down with him into the Streets of Despair, to welcome me to the ragged fraternity of the nameless ones.
October 4. Lunch with Ashlee at Mon Kee. She paid. We ordered the Peking Duck. Ashlee was full of talk about her audition for the dog food commercial, but I barely listened. I couldn’t stop thinking about Leticia.
Ashlee is—well, she’s Ashlee, but Leticia is something else again. Le-ti-cia. Her name trips across my tongue like a mantra. But Leticia is no sannyasin. Leticia is a wildcat. She’s selfish, vicious, petulant. The cholos at La Pachanga are crazy for her. She’s not pretty. She’s skinny as a monkey and her nose is too big. At work she wears a simple, loose-fitting dress, and nothing else. The same dress every day. No bra, no pants. You can see everything. And yet she acts like she’s too good for us. Leticia doesn’t take any shit. But she can dish it out. Yesterday when she was making a stew an old Arab tried to feel her ass. She hit him in the face with a beef shank.
“Puto! Cabron! Go fuck your mother’s pussy!”
It was through Grundar that I met Leticia. Grundar hired me to teach English to his son Ayvar. Ayvar was a good student, when he wasn’t high on mushrooms. It was a wonderful period for me. I had the English lessons with Ayvar, and each day Grundar would fix lunch, Pönnukökur, Icelandic pancakes, smeared with strawberry jam and whipped cream. Occasionally Grundar served another Icelandic treat, wind-dried strips of hardfiskur, fragrant, pristine, tasting of the ocean. All this took place in Grundar’s house on Lindenhurst, near the Tar Pits, where he runs his Internet mail order herbal medicine business. Yolanda, who does the invoicing and packing, would join us for pancakes. Yolanda’s husband, Eubesio, is the owner of La Pachanga.
It turned out that Eubesio wanted English lessons too, so now I go three days a week to La Pachanga. Ayvar is visiting his mother in Reykjavik. La Pachanga is up past the park, west of Koreatown, a hole in the wall in the middle of Little Central America. The customers are local desperados.
Eubesio is a tyrant. He’s got his eye on Leticia. I don’t like him at all. He stopped paying me, too, for the English lessons. Now all I get is a bowl of soup, menudo or pozole. I keep hanging on because of Leticia. But she’s in love with Blackass. I’m sure of it now.
Blackass is a white guy. They call him Blackass because his name is Black. Tom Black. His blond dreadlocks fan out peacock-like from the top of his skull. Dark fire-glint eyes, the sharp-featured face of a Gypsy. Always shirtless, showing off his segmented torso. He looks heroic as hell wielding an impact wrench. Or wrestling a huge truck tire, the striations in his biceps and deltoids popping and pinging like bundles of wires under the skin. Blackass is a wild man, a human impact wrench. He’s just what the doctor ordered for Leticia. They’re cut from the same cloth.
Blackass lives at Dennison’s Automotive, next door to La Pachanga. Out in back, he’s building a concrete boat. He plans to sail to Belize. You wouldn’t think a concrete boat would float, but Blackass say it will. He adds vermiculite, perlite and crushed corncobs to the mix to make the concrete lighter.
“It’s a matter of density,” he explains.
October 16. Beautiful rain! Endless rain pouring down, endless, savage, beautiful rain. At Arco Plaza I buy a black umbrella from a street vendor, $3.00, truly a bargain. 5th Street in the rain, the sleek, shimmering towers, the beggars in their peaked metallic raincoats poised like silver icons, the traffic sliding by. And on Sunset Boulevard whores with umbrellas. Somehow the umbrellas make them seem more human, less mercenary. On Wilshire a yellow-slickered worker dipping a tall white measuring stick into a manhole. Rain, rain, rain. The streets of LA washed clean after the rain, the air beautifully fresh and cold.
As I was brushing my teeth this morning I seemed to see Gangaji perched on a lily pad, garlanded with flowers, floating like a lotus in the Holy River. And I found myself thinking once more about Étienne.
Poor Étienne. He followed Gangaji around the world. Étienne was hot for realization. So hot that he couldn’t slow down even to enjoy a spot of recreational crucifixion. He was a dragon snuffing up the wind, Étienne, a bloodhound drunk with the odor of sanctity. His suicide was a nasty business, too. He tied a plastic bag around his head. This was at Motel 6. He wanted me to assist him. I refused. I would have been looking at Murder One. And why Motel 6? Étienne could easily have afforded to die at the Holiday Inn.
When I got to La Pachanga today half a dozen feral cats were prowling around outside. The rain must have washed them out of their lairs.
I gave Eubesio his English lesson but he was only half attentive. He’s becoming obsessed with Leticia. Leticia was hacking away at a piece of beef brisket with a French knife when I walked into the café. She’d gotten some blood on her dress. After she finished her work she sat on a stool at the counter staring dreamily at her lottery ticket and spiking her coffee with Jose Cuervo. She habitually sits with her dress hiked up and her legs flung carelessly apart. Or is it careless? She likes to entice the customers, show them everything she’s got. Then when they make a move she explodes in a storm of tearful violence. She slaps their faces, pulls their hair. The other day I saw her throw a cup of steaming hot coffee in some cholo’s face.
I asked Leticia what she wanted to do when she won the lottery. At first she was stuck for an answer, but finally she said, “I want to get the hell out of here!” She gave a jerk of her head toward the customers and her face clouded with anger. “Putos, cabrones, marijuanos!”
Victor was drunk, as usual. He had a bottle of Gallo Night Train tightly wrapped in a brown paper bag. Victor is homeless. He lost both legs at the Mekong Delta. Sells pencils from his wheelchair. Usually positions himself down by Bullock’s Wilshire, in order to catch the tourists. He leered at Leticia from his wheelchair, which pissed her off—or, if the truth were known, made her happy. She cursed him roundly and called him a freak in Spanish.
Before I left Victor gave me some change and asked me to bring him a beer. I went over to the little abarrotes on the corner. The change wasn’t nearly enough, but I filled in the rest and brought back a 40-ounce King Cobra.
Nothing stings like the King!
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