53 - McCadden
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young would later sing about two
cats in the yard, defining a kind of domestic bliss. For Louise, having Bitzy
back should have done the same thing – allowing us to reshape our new location
from a mere apartment into a home.
It didn’t quite work.
Still we went on as if everything was all right.
Perhaps from too many trips to the Chinese restaurant on
Hollywood Boulevard, Louise envisioned an oriental theme from our new place of
residence.
So instead of chairs, we had large and small pillows
purchased from an oriental retail shop downtown and a very close to the floor
table we set up in that corner nearest the kitchen on which we dined.
We hung beaded curtains on doorways which rattled each time
we had to go from the living room to the bathroom or bedrooms beyond.
We were flush in deliveries, too.
Hollywood had nothing to service middle class hippies like
us, and we knew so little of LA county
that we were taking cabs downtown for everything, buying pots and pans, plates,
silverware, sheets and pillow cases and the like from stores there and either
bringing them back by cab or having them delivered.
This was particularly true for the big items such as the bed
which we also purchased in a downtown store and then waited with great impatience
for it to arrive, hardly closing the door on the delivery van before we made
love on it – even before she put sheets down.
This was December, 1969, and Christmas was approaching, and
so naturally, we had to get a Christmas tree.
My family lived and died by the concept of “real” trees. But
Louise, who had grown up in a much more upperly mobile section of Wayne
embraced artificial, and so we compromised by avoiding those fake trees that
most obviously looked fake and found one that looked remotely real, although
even when fully decorated with blinking lights, I could tell the difference.
Still, seeing it in our apartment only made me homesick, and
it did, Louise.
And she still hadn’t yet gotten over Tim, with whom until a
few weeks earlier, she had anticipated spending Christmas.
I remember her breaking out in tears while we did laundry –
at a cleaners on Highland Boulevard, two blocks west and a few blocks north of
our McCadden apartment.
People – a handful of elderly people, but mostly other
hippies – looked over puzzled at us, trying to figure how what I had done to
her to cause this fit of tears. They gave us space, moving towards the window
seats near the door – presuming we were having some kind of spat.
“We can’t go on like this,” I told Louise, even as I hugged
her, and rocked her gently as if I was comforting a child.
“I know,” she sobbed. “But I can’t help it. I miss him. I
know he’s hurting because of what I did.”
Of course, he was, and I knew I would be, too, if I was him.
But I wasn’t generous enough to ask her if she wanted to
call him. She had made a choice coming with me, and I did not intend to give
him any chance to lure her back.
I figured all she needed was time to get over him, and to
learn to be with me.
“Everything will turn out all right,” I told her.
She looked up at me through her tears.
“You really think so?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “Let’s say after this we go eat at the
Chinese place on Hollywood Boulevard?”
“Really?”
“Let’s finish folding so we can go eat.”
We packed up our bundled and make the trek back to the
apartment. But the sunlight only made the streaks of tears on Louise’s face
more obvious, dark lines that no words of comfort could easily erase.
When we got back, we found trouble, even though we did not
know it at the time.
A tall man with green eyes and blonde hair was ringing our
door bell. He wore a suit and tie, but neither seemed as appropriate as a surf
board might have.
I might even have mistaken him for an undercover cop, and I
stopped mid-stride on the stairs, poised to flee if he was.
Then I noticed the brief case at his feet, and the clip
board he had in one hand.
He smiled, especially at Louise, and she continued up the
stairs even when I did not. Then he looked at me.
“Mr. Calli?” he asked, referring to me by the name I had
invented in New York during one of my escapes from Fort Dix a few months
earlier.
“Yes,” I said cautiously, and then slowly continued up the
stairs till I stood next to Louise in front of our door.
The man extended his hand.
“My name is Dennis. I’m from Data International, a marketing
research group. I’d like to ask you and your wife…” he looked at Louise again.
“This is your wife, I assume?”
“Yes,” I said quickly before Louise could reply.
“Good, good,” he said as I pushed passed him with my key
extended to open the door. “Do you think I could come inside?”
I didn’t want him inside. I didn’t trust him. But I didn’t
want him hovering outside the door either. So I nodded, and pushed open the
door.
It was dark inside and the air was thick with the smell of
sandalwood incense.
Louise squeezed between the man and the door frame to get
into the apartment ahead of him, and then felt along the wall for the light
switch.
The room did not have overhead lighting, only the lamps we
had installed on two small square tables that were part of a set we had
purchased with the dining room, each with the same tiled top and oriental
pattern. The time light from the lamp seemed to emphasize the emptiness of the
room.
“Will this take long?” I asked Dennis, who stood in the
doorway surveying our world.
He was slightly taller than I was and a year or two older, a
product, I thought of some business school, his hair too short to be a
hippie’s, yet too long to have come out of the military the way I had.
“Oh no, not long at all,” he said, his attention focusing on
me again. “I’m just here to ask you a few questions about the products you use
or you see on TV.”
Again, his gaze wandered, searching out the corners for a TV
he would not find, unless he looked into the closest where I had stored the
miniature TV we had brought with us from Roachville. His gaze lingered on the
reel to reel tape recorder in the corner and on the Christmas tree. He also
eyed Louise in a way I didn’t find comfortable, but which appeared to flatter
Louise.
“I’m afraid we don’t have any chairs,” she said, sounding
embarrassed by the fact, even though she was the one who’d insisted on living
without them. “But you can sit down on one of the pillows if you like?”
She motioned in the direction of the dinning room table.
“No chairs?” Dennis said. He squatted on the pillows Native
American style. “This will be fine.”
He was not a comfortable gesture for a man with such long
legs.
We sat across the table from him with a bit more grace.
He started reading off questions and we gave our replies.
Almost everything we told him was a lie, and I think he knew
it, and he didn’t seem to care. He just needed to fill in the forms he had
brought with him, forms he could take back to some office downtown and exchange
for cash.
As promised, it did not take long, and once finished, he
became far less formal, agreeing to accept a cup of instant coffee Louise
offered him. He even loosened his tie when the cup of coffee was put down in
front of him.
“Boy, am I glad that’s over with,” he said.
“You don’t like doing it?” Louise asked, sitting down again
across the table from him.
“No way, in fact, I hate it,” he said and laughed, and we
laughed, too.
When he finished his coffee, he left, and I closed the door
on him retreat with relief, although I didn’t completely understand why I felt
that way.
Louise wanted to make love so we did, and then we went out
to go get the meal I had promised her.
She didn’t mention Tim again, and I hoped the survey and
love-making had driven those thought from her mind.
While it wasn’t a long walk to Hollywood Boulevard, it felt
long, as we crossed over Santa Monica and Selma to the circus-like setting that
made up the heart of the hip district, a ten or so block section of road
between Vine and Highland where the hippies gathered. The Chinese restaurant
was on the north side of the boulevard, nearer to Highland than to Vine, and a
few doors away from the wax museum.
The restaurant had a dark exterior with Chinese writing
scrawled across in it gold. The interior was a sprawling maze of black tables
surrounded by curved booth-like seating, holstered in red leather.
Louise insisted on chopsticks, even though she handled them
poorly. I handled them even less deftly which allowed us both to laugh a lot
and helped us to forget the previous painful hours – me presuming we had also
escaped Tim’s ghost and the lingering after effects of the blonde-haired
stranger.
Neither presumption was true.
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