“It never is, Billy. You just stay careful.”
Early the next morning I was on the Hollywood Freeway again for the last time, I hoped.
I hadn’t slept much. I had a cold knot in my stomach and another in my throat. All night long I’d rolled around on the small, humpbacked bed, wondering what I could have done differently. I couldn’t think of anything.
I never should have come here. I’d known that all along, but I’d come anyway. It didn’t make me feel any better to know I’d been right.
I was out of the hotel before the coffee shop opened. I figured that was the only good thing to happen to me in a while. I wasn’t hungry anyway.
I took the turn-off downtown onto the Harbor, and then onto the Santa Monica. Traffic was still light. The sun was behind me, throwing gigantic shadows on the road.
I took the Sepulveda Boulevard exit and headed north. It wasn’t far. At this hour I even found a place to park.
I walked across the grass to the spot I was looking for. Two small granite markers stood side by side.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I tried to think of something else to say and couldn’t. That seemed to cover everything anyway. So I just stood.
In the movies, there is always rain falling in L.A. I guess the people who wrote the movies have never been here. Or maybe I was undervaluing them. It might have been wishful thinking. Maybe they felt like me. I could have used the rain, the cold and clean relief of it. But rain does not fall in L.A. Rainy season in Los Angeles is two days every three years.
So there was no rain falling on me, just the wind, the hard hot dry wind that pushes all the razor-sharp yellow air into one corner of the valley and leaves it.
There was no answer to any of my questions, either. There wasn’t even anything to say. Just the wind.
I went back to my car.
L.A. wouldn’t let go of me. I had to wait six hours in the airport before I got a flight. I sat in a cocktail lounge alternating between beer and coffee.
Everyone seemed to be happy about something. A lot of good-looking women seemed to be kissing men in expensive suits. There were more kids in the airport than I remembered seeing in a while.
I read the paper all the way through. It was hard work. Dan Hoffman had a story about a halfway house for battered wives. Darryl Strawberry was not expecting to play any ball this week. I didn’t laugh at any of the funnies.
It seemed like several days dragged by before they finally called my flight. I left the paper beside a half-full coffee cup and an empty beer glass. It made a very depressing still life.
I was herded onto a full plane and crushed in between a very large grandmother who smelled like gin and a Cuban businessman who kept elbowing my arm off the armrest.
I know it’s supposed to be a lot quicker flying west to east. But it seemed much longer. We made a stop in Dallas where we sat on the ground for over an hour. Nobody moved except the businessman. He elbowed me three times while we sat there.
The grandmother got up and went to the rest room. When she came back the gin smell was stronger. She smiled at me. Her false teeth were so white they looked as if they might glow in the dark.
The plane finally took off again. It was night when we landed in Miami. There were no flights to Key West until the next day. I could camp out in the terminal or take a bus.
It was a hard decision and I didn’t know if I had any more hard decisions in me. I sat on a chair, drained.
There were signs all over the airport forbidding smoking in several languages, but there was an ashtray attached to my chair. A man sat next to me and lit up a cigar. He was about five-six, bald, and weighed four hundred pounds. After a moment he was joined by a buddy, slightly taller but just as heavy. He lit up and sat down, too. The row of seats wobbled and tilted.
I decided to take the bus.
We pulled into Key West at 4:38 in the morning. I had dozed once or twice on the trip, each time jerking awake again, heart hammering, from dreams that were dark and full of pain.
When I got off the bus I felt like my skin was covered with a thick layer of grease. My eyes ached, my head felt large and dull, and that was all a lot better than I felt inside.
The parking lot behind City Hall, where the bus had dumped me, was deserted except for two or three of the citizens who had d
ecided to sleep there. I looked around and blinked for a few minutes, trying to remember where I lived. I felt like I had just landed from another world.
I could feel myself slipping back into that dark sea where nothing mattered. I wanted to fight it, to hang onto something positive. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something good. I couldn’t.