Chapter34: Nothing to do but wait

 


The first cockroach appeared after everyone else had gone, peering at me from an end table near the coach.

It eyed me like a predator, and I eyed it back.

The bug spray still sat in the kitchen cabinet, too far to go to retrieve it, knowing the little bastard would be gone by the time I got back.

So, we stared at each other until I crushed it with a folded-up magazine.

Even then, I knew others of its kind existed, most likely in the walls, likely to come out once dark came.

I had no intention of pulling out the Murphy Bed, let alone sleeping on it. Instead, I decided to defend the couch, which seemed a safer haven – if I had enough bug spray and power to create a barrier.

At some point, I knew I would have to go out and find more. But I was already weary and grateful to have found a safe place I could hide out until I made up my mind to go to Denver to meet up with Louise.

I pulled her letter out of my pocket, a tattered manuscript I had carried for weeks prior to leaving New Jersey. The folds had worn through in several places, leaving large gaps no longer legible, though committed to memory, especially the return address in Boulder.

This was not a love letter, no words of passion, no sense of longing, any more than the half dozen she had written me while I served in the Army.

The letter had come as a response to my showing up at her parent’s door after by discharge and my asking where she had gone, and when her parents refused to say, my asking them to pass on my address so she might contact me if she wished, and she had, explaining why she’d fled her forester parents house to be with her sister, and a letter that contained an invitation to come see her if I could afford the fare.

She did not go into detail about her former or later life, how unbearable her parents’ house had been, full of that righteous religiosity that made them constantly suspicious about her activities and the company she kept.

I was naive. I was in love. I didn't want to know the exact details. I just made up to find a way to reach her and wound up in an apartment in East L.A. instead.

I had an urge to call her and tell where I was and that I was on my way. But I knew I had to wait a few days or weeks, knowing if my uncles or the police contacted her, it would be sooner rather than later.

If I contacted her before they did, then she would have to lie about hearing from me, something she might not be willing to do.

But I already felt like a prisoner, condemned to wait out my sentence in a roach-filled apartment.

That’s when I decided to go out, to go get a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean before the world fell in on me.

I hid the briefcase full of money as best I could, vowing to install a second lock on the door to keep the landlady with her pass key from snooping around when I was not there.

A half block away near a bodega I found a public phone and called for another cab, which came within a few minutes, a different driver, a Chicano.

He asked me where I wanted to go. I told him.

“Which beach?” he asked.

“Pick one,” I said. “I just want to see the ocean.”

“Okay,” he said, and then steered off, weaving through the streets of East LA, and then into downtown again, until he found a street going west that he drove straight through places with unfamiliar names like Echo Lake, and more familiar names like Hollywood, until we arrived in a place called Santa Monica, where he let me out at the foot of a long pier, not quite the amusement piers I knew from the Jersey Shore, but with a few vendors and games, and crowded with people, voices and music too loud for me to hear the waves, so I avoided it and headed onto the beach itself, fulfilling a dream I’d had since I was very young.

The sun beat down, illuminating sand that seemed strangely different from the beaches back east, wider open as well, no beach tag people requiring a fee, no massive development poking out into the water. A few couples played volleyball, giggling at each other. Several surfers floated in the surf waiting for a wave big enough to carry them in. A number of other people strolled barefoot as the waves washed over their feet.

Barefoot. In November. I felt overdressed.

The air was cooler, but not cold, filled with moisture that hinted of oncoming rain. A stronger scent came with each incoming wave, filled with the salty smell of seaweed and fish, and I strolled out towards the stanchions of the pier took root in the sand, and sat down to stare at the incoming clouds, and the sun slowly sinking into them before reaching the sea, the sun bleaching the edges of the clouds crimson, before darkness fell and the lights of the pier and the mall at its foot rose, filled with the chatter of people, the clink of beer and wine glasses, and live music.

This only made me feel all the more along. I hailed a cab back to my new found apartment in East LA.

 

  On the lamb menu


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