Chapter51 -- Roachville

 

 

We arrived in LA in late afternoon.

 The sinking sun glinted off of everything window and windshield as we drove off the freeway and into the streets.

The bright bus station with its supermarket-like doors seemed brighter yet dingier than the stations we had seen in the other cities, encrusted with a different kind of poverty that had existed here seemingly from the beginning of time. These sad creatures that moved from bench to bench looked even more pathetic under full light, their faces scarred with their misery lacking even the dignity of darkness to shelter them.

Many now wandered the streets outside the station, moving along the wide sidewalk, panhandling change for meals, booze or some other imaginary necessity.

Downtown was a haven for the homeless, a place that so much resembled Times Square in New York that it caught my breath, the same tattoo parlors, the same dirty magazine stands, the same parade of gray people – not all of whom were homeless, although most were.

Some of these acted more aggressively than they had my first time off the bus, perhaps inspired by the fact that Louise was with me and they expected me to pay them their bribes to keep them away from her.

Their badgering, however, only made me feel better about myself, giving me a purpose for the first time in recent memory, and I shielded Louise as I hailed a cab, and then loaded our possessions into the trunk for the short ride to East L.A. where I resided.

Louise seemed startled by the amount of possessed we had dragged along.

“I didn’t realize,” she mumbled. “And we left so much back in that other motel.”

I closed the cab trunk and we both climbed into the back seat.

I kept thinking about the motel in Boulder and imagining the face of the manager when she came in to check on whether we had left or not only to find half of Louise’s old life stuffed into the space above the closet.

What would she make of all that? What could she read of Louise’s existence from such things?

Through the cab window, I saw the bums glaring at us like a pack of dusty wolves clustered on one of the street side benches, their toes sticking out from various holes in their shoes.

A police officer moved towards them, and like pigeons they rose in mass and hobbled on, looking for other places to settle the moment the police officer turned away again.

The cab pulled away from the curb, leaving them to memory. I lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke deep into my lungs as Louise stared out at the passing city.

“It’s just like New York,” she said.

“Not quite,” I said. “But close enough.”

The neighborhood changed. Latino music played from car radios. Downtown faded into strings of rundown two and three story houses, and after a moment, the cab stopped in front of the one in which I lived.

Louise squinted as I paid the driver, and he got out to help unload the trunk.

Then standing amid our combined suitcases, Louise stared up at the building.

“You live here?” she asked. “It looks a bit run down.”

“It is. But it was convenient when I first got here,” I said, grabbing as many of the suit cases as I could. She took the rest and followed me up the stairs towards the front door.

The outer door stood open, which was lucky for me since I had lost the front door key before I had left for Denver.

I did not want to have to ring the landlady’s bell or explain the details of Louise’s moving in with me.

My apartment door was the first on the right after the front door, and my key slid into the lock easily, something of a surprise since I secretly feared someone might have come and changed the locks while I was gone, or that the law might be waiting for me when I returned.

Both fears proved unfounded and the apartment was just as I had left it except perhaps for a layer of dust over nearly everything. Louise paused at the door, studying the interior, clearly aghast.

“This is more of a wreck than I expected,” she said. “And what’s that smell?”

I sniffed. “Roach spray, I think.”

“You have roaches?” she said in a voice so horrified, I paused to look at her.

I had seen girls from the suburbs in the Village with similar horrified looks, when first encounter the gruff and grime of the hippie scene, finally coming face to face with how uncouth hippies really were as compared with the characters TV and media portrayed.

Louise came from the heartland of Northern New Jersey, a protected child in the posh white-faced Wayne where the hardships of life were stopped by the police at the borders. If she ever traveled down the hill into downtown Paterson, it was always in the company of her parents, who shielded her from any harshness.

“This is East LA,” I said. “Of course there are roaches.”

Louise braced herself, then said, “We can’t stay here.”

“The roaches aren’t that bad,” I said. “Not anywhere near as bad as they were in Hank’s East Village apartment.”

I remembered spending a night asleep on the floor and feeling the rush of tiny feet flow across me. When I turned on the light, the mass of black bodies vanished under furniture and rugs.

 

“I don’t care. You might be able to endure roaches. But I won’t live with them. And if we’re going to live together, then we’re going to have to find some other place that doesn’t have roaches.”

My journal at the time claimed “her face was a mask of disgust.”

I felt hurt, yet I also understood.

Although I felt safe here, I knew this was hardly the most attractive apartment or in the most attractive neighborhood,  and I should have guessed Louise would not feel as comfortable here as I did.

“I suppose we could look for another place,” I said. “But we’ll have to stay here at least temporarily until we can find something else.”

Louise looked around as if expecting a roach a mile high to grab her from the dark bathroom doorway or from the kitchen behind me. She stepped over the threshold only with the greatest of courage, and then stopped.

“It also smells of cigarettes in here,” she said. “You smoke way to much. Why don’t you open the windows so we can get some fresh air in here.”

I moved across the room as if across the surface of the moon, the familiar landscape from my lonely days here now part of a world I was ready to abandon for the sake of love

I pulled up the window to the air shaft, that space an urban law from earlier in the century required large buildings like this to provide even if my window looked out onto a group of other similar windows. From high above, the LA sun slanted down into the shaft, and I could see the pale rectangular shape of my draft card down at the shaft’s bottom, my old life waiting for the sun to bleach it out of existence.

The urge to be away from this place struck me more strongly, but I moved on, opening more windows, both in the living room and then in the kitchen. This room stank from the dishes I had left unwashed before my leaving. A roach eyed me from the trash can where the open mouth of a can of black beans sat. Several bodies of dead roaches floated in the sink’s standing water, and I grit my teeth as I reached to unstop the sink, letting water and roaches gurgle down into the drain. I ran clean water and squirted some dish soap into the dirty dishes, washing them quickly as if covering up a crime. I dumped the former evidence into the dish rack, wiped my wet hands on a dirty dish towel and went back to the living room to join Louise.

“She perched on the coach like a nervous bird, though seem less angry,” my journal said. “She even smiled when I touched her arm. It had been a long drip west from Denver and we both felt weary. I sat beside her, put my arm around her, and within moments – roaches or not – we made love. Later, she pushed herself up onto her elbows and stared at me, saying we really did have to move.”

“We can’t stay in a place like this,” she said.

“Where do you want to move?” I asked.

“You know this town better than I do.”

Yes, I did; I had gone out a few times to explore, telling the taxi driver the first time to take me where the hippies were, and had him drop me off at Hollywood & Vine, where I found crowds of people on every corner and down every block, hippies panhandling, or selling dope or selling copies of the LA Free Press (Freep!). I remember how shocked I felt, how it all swirled around inside my head, images in color or black and white, first impressions, deeper impressions I knew I would not shake any time soon, feelings of connection because it seemed so much like The Village (east and west) I had left back on the other coast.

“I think I know where we can go,” I said.

“Where?”

“Hollywood.”

Then I saw something stir deep inside Louise’s eyes, too deep for me to precisely identify, but there nonetheless, glowing and growing, and something that stirred up alarm in me.

 

On the lamb menu

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