Innocents on the Lamb

    The apartment door’s slamming behind me sounded like a gun shot, making me briefly grimace, but this only hurried me down the steps to the driveway, then out to the street, the line of palm trees dripping with the steady rain on both sides of McCadden. I should have gone out to Highland and hailed a cab, to get to where she was headed first, but I needed the walk to calm me down, LA’s cool winter rain on my face to keep me from burning up. My step, however, quickened with the rapid beat of my heart and I soon found myself running up McCadden to the Crossroads of the World, the found front like a movie house, windows glistening with dripping and a tall ivory colored tower with a blue globe at the top, nearby light house miles from water, dulled by the gray day. I turned left, then up the slightly deviated McCadden in the direction of Hollywood Boulevard, the buzz of Sunset Boulevard already fading except for the swish of tires over its wet pavement, like the voice of ghosts.

    “You shouldn’t have gone there,” Louise told me later when we both arrived home, sharing the long cab ride first in chilly silence, as if she had to work up what she intended to say before she could confront me in the privacy of our home. “Why not?” I asked. “You just shouldn’t have, that’s all.” “Neither should you,” I said. “But now that I’ve gone, I’m going to keep going, until the photographers see us as a team.” Louise face turned deep red as she glared at me. “That’s mean,” she said. “If you want me to stop, then you have to stop as well.” “I won’t stop,” she said. “I like doing it, and I’m going to tell people we are not a team, and if they hire you, then I won’t work for them.” With that, she barged through the beaded curtain, slamming them back against the wall with the force of her advance. A grim satisfaction stirred in me; I had gotten a reaction from her that wasn’t smug and defiant, even though her rage seemed like defiance. I decided to press my

    Louise came through the beaded curtain into the main room looking a bit discombobulated, her hair strewn around her face and not just from how she had slept on the bed. She had apparently come home and gone straight to be exhausted. Her make up was smeared, especially her lipstick, giving her something of a ghoulish expression, made worse by her accusing stare that said without her having to say it, “Where the fuck were you all night?” Over the previous few days, I had said all I could say to her, made all of my arguments, and did not have energy after my night on the hill to start it all over again. I hoped the arguments I had already made would sink in and she would quit the job without further asking. She made coffee, then carried it back through the beaded curtain to the bathroom where I heard her start the shower, and after that the clinking of the bottles in the medicine cabinet that testified to her fixing herself up, reapplying her make up and such, then with the groa

    We were already in a far different world, even though we were within spitting distance of the Boulevard and The Strip, the hills rising above us, and the sound of living things with them, but also the sound of other things, voices, and music, rock music, Grateful Dead at first, and the Cream, and Jefferson Airplane, and then others I didn’t recognize. “Is there a concert going on?” I asked. “Na,” Dan laughed. “Just people blasting their stereos. It goes on day and night up here. Come on. I think I remember the way inside.” We had come a long way up from the city, and aside from the music and the strong scent of burning campfires – we seemed in a different world, the road itself framed on one side by a large continuing hill that had climbed as we had and on the other, by a perpetual hedge, a green wall three stories high with a few breaks for long drives that led into some buildings I could not see. There was a gate in front of us, but partly off its hinges from those wh

    Dan and I turned down Vine at the fountain, and took the long walk to Sunset Boulevard, where we stuck out our thumbs to hitch, and when nobody stopped, we walked, neither one of us thinking to climb aboard a bus, which came frequently, but always asked for exact change, and the generally nasty drivers usually claimed more zones than was the truth. I was concerned about the cops since they hassled people there, even when they weren’t doing anything wrong. If you blocked the sidewalk, they threatened you. If you stepped off the curb, they busted you for jaywalking, often they pushed people until people pushed back, and then busted them for assaulting an officer of the law. If they smelled booze on your breath, they took you in for being drunk and disorderly, and even if you didn’t look like a hippie, they busted you – often coming up with AWOL soldiers they turned over to the Shore Patrol to be escorted back to this or that military base for punishment. My hair was still sho